Synthesizing Coordination Requirements for Heterogeneous Autonomous Agents

As agents move into ever more important applications, there is a natural growth in interest in techniques for synthesizing multiagent systems. We describe an approach for engineering the coordination requirements of a multiagent system based on an analysis of conversation instances extracted from usage scenarios. This approach exploits the notion of Dooley graphs that were recently introduced to the multiagent systems community from the linguistics and discourse analysis literature. We show how, with a few key modifications, Dooley graphs can be used to generate coordination requirements and constraints on the behavior models of the agents participating in a multiagent system. Our present approach is embodied in the context of our recent work on a distributed coordination service for heterogeneous, autonomous agents. This approach takes as input (a) agent skeletons, giving compact descriptions of the given agents in terms of their events that are significant for coordination, as well as (b) relationships among the events occurring in these skeletons. A natural question is how may the skeletons and relationships be produced in the first place. It turns out that a methodology that begins with Dooley graphs can readily yield the skeletons and relationships needed to achieve the desired coordination. Consequently, our approach combines the benefits of an intuitive methodology with a formal and distributed framework for developing multiagent systems from autonomous agents.