MAPS (Multi-Agent Planning System) is a system for multi-agent coordination that has been developed in the robot soccer domain. It uses potential Ž elds to model the environment and provide directives for the robots. The key feature that enables successful coordination is the use of a shared world model. This paper describes MAPS and demonstrates it as a viable coordination system for use in mu...

The exponential convergence problem is studied for coordination learning control of multi-agent formation under the switching network topology. A necessary and sufficient condition on exponential convergence is presented for coordination learning control algorithms of multi-agent formation tasks without any reference as prior knowledge. Moreover, it is shown that the developed results are effec...

The coordination in open multi-agent systems is difficult to achieve, mainly because agents are autonomous. Social commitments have been proposed as a new coordination paradigm, suitable to describe agent communications or interactions. As some authors have pointed out, commitment enforcement is necessary, i.e., autonomous agents that violate commitments must be punished. In related work this i...

The purpose of this paper is to study how a multi-agent-based coordination mechanism can resolve con¯icts among functional units in an enterprise. In the era of information technology, characterized by web technology, intelligent agents demonstrate the best interests of a functional unit when engaged in the highly delicate coordination process of an enterprise. Thus, behavioral problems that oc...

Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are considered a suitable paradigm for engineering complex systems. Interaction is a primary source of this complexity and coordination plays a key role for its management, providing the means for modelling and shaping the agent interaction space so as to engineer the global behaviour of the system as a whole. Feature-based systems are certainly complex syst...

A conflict resolution architecture for multi-agent hybrid systems with emphasis on Air Traffic Management Systems (ATMS) is presented. In such systems, conflicts arise in the form of potential collisions which are resolved locally by inter-agent coordination. This results in a decentralized architecture in which safety issues are resolved locally and central agencies, such as Air Traffic Contro...

Distributed agent systems derive much of their power to solve complex, large-scale and open-ended problems because the agents within the system can communicate in highly flexible ways and patterns. However, before these systems can be widely deployed it is necessary to be able to precisely understand how different agent communication architectures perform in practice. This paper presents a meth...

The paradigm of self-optimization introduces flexible systems of objectives to the area of mechatronics. From this flexiblity new coordination problems arise. Such a problem is the coordination of function modules in such a way that the overall system of objectives is met as good as possible. Multi-agent planning offers mechanisms to provide this coordination. In this paper we introduce the app...

Internet applications can take advantage of a new design paradigm based on mobile agents. However, the presence of mobile active computational entities introduces peculiar problems in the coordination of the application components. The paper surveys the possible coordination models for mobile agent applications and evaluates them in the context of a widely distributed application in the area of...

Agents and multiagent systems (MAS) have already proved suitable for dealing with the complexity of today B2B application scenarios. Application environments such as virtual enterprises (VE) and inter-organizational workflow management systems (WfMS) specially call for the integration of heterogeneous resources, services, and processes. In this article, we first recognize VE and workflow manage...