Designing Criteria-Driven Scheduling as Integrated Service for IEEE-FIPA Compliant Multi-Agent Infrastructures

The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) provides a rich set of standards for implementing industrial scale multi-agent infrastructures. Despite its manifold possibilities for achieving coordinated action execution based on interaction protocols, it still lacks direct support of multi-agent planning and scheduling for goal directed action execution. In this paper, we discuss a design strategy to integrate Design-to-Criteria (DTC) scheduling using the Framework for Task Analysis, Environment Modeling and Simulation (TÆMS) for explicit partial modelling of coordination issues into FIPA infrastructures, as represented by the Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE). Following the notion of “coordination as a service”, we exploit the infrastructural facilities of the FIPA multi-agent platform, and re-use FIPA interaction protocols for exchange of partial TÆMS structures, as well as for committing to action execution.