Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems: A Declarative Approach using Coordination Spaces

Coordination is an important aspect of multi-agent systems (MAS). Although being decisive for many MAS applications, it is rarely modelled and implemented explicitly. Instead, coordination is realized implicitly and hard wired among other agent functionalities. Therefore, this work aims at providing an approach towards explicit coordination in MAS in which developers can focus more on what and not so much on how to coordinate. More specifically, this paper presents both a declarative approach to modelling coordination in MAS and a reference implementation for an agent framework. In this implementation, so-called coordination spaces that are part of the agent environment, process the declarative description of the coordination and thus release the developer from programming coordination manually. Consequently, this approach to declarative coordination offers benefits like reusability and interoperability of coordination aspects of MAS as well as the possibility to coordinate agents with heterogeneous architectures.