Coordinating Heterogeneous Autonomous Agents

We address the problem of constructing multiagent systems by coordinating heterogeneous , autonomous agents, whose internal designs may not be fully known. We develop a customizable coordination service that (a) takes declarative speciications of the desired interactions, and (b) automatically enacts them. Our approach is based on temporal logic, and has a rigorous semantics and a naturally distributed implementation. We show how this approach provides a general unifying framework in which to formalize the coordination components of some recent approaches to multiagent system construction.