An adaptive casteship mechanism for developing multi-agent systems

In this paper, we propose an adaptive casteship mechanism for modelling and designing adaptive Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). In our approach, caste is the modular unit and abstraction that specify agents’ behaviour. Adaptive behaviours of agents are captured as the change of castes during their lifecycles by executing ‘join’, ‘quit’, ‘activate’ and ‘deactivate’ operations on castes. The formal semantics of caste operations are rigorously defined. The properties of agent’s adaptive behaviours are formally specified and proved. A graphical notation of caste transition diagrams and a number of rules for check consistency are designed. An example is also presented throughout the paper.