Many multi-agent coordination problems can be understood as autonomous local choices between a finite set of options, with each local choice undertaken simultaneously without explicit coordination between decision-makers, and with a shared goal of achieving a desired global state or states. Examples of such problems include classic consensus problems between nodes in a distributed computer netw...

The paper addresses the issue of coordination in distributed applications based on mobile agents. The presence of mobile active computational entities makes traditional coordination models based on message-passing, such as the client-server one, not effective, from both the performance and the usability points of view. Indirect coordination models suit better the mobile scenario: interactions o...

A minor change to the standard epistemic logical language, replacing Ki with K〈i,t〉 where t is a time instance, gives rise to a generalized and more expressive form of knowledge and common knowledge operators. We investigate the communication structures that are necessary for such generalized epistemic states to arise, and the inter-agent coordination tasks that require such knowledge. Previous...

July 2001 39 dinate its own actions with those of other agents. Coordination does not imply cooperation: An effective competitor will coordinate decisions to maximize its advantage against an opponent, such as a company timing a product promotion to undercut a rival. Nor does it imply reciprocation: An agent can coordinate its actions with another agent unaware of its presence, as when an autom...

Sequential single-item auctions can be used for the distributed allocation of tasks to cooperating agents. We study how to improve the team performance of sequential singleitem auctions while still controlling the agents in real time. Our idea is to assign that task to agents during the current round whose regret is large, where the regret of a task is defined as the difference of the second-sm...

Coordination theory introduced by Malone [6] is concerned with the management of dependencies between di erent activities. Tenets developed in this theory encompass conceptual and methodological aspects that enable a distributed application to have a better expressiveness and to be much more easily implemented, through a clear separation between coordination and computation [3]. In computer sci...

The embedding of self-organizing inter-agent processes in distributed software applications enables the decentralized coordination system elements, solely based on concerted, localized interactions. The separation and encapsulation of the activities that are conceptually related to the coordination, is a crucial concern for systematic development practices in order to prepare the reuse and syst...

We propose a social coordination mechanism that is realized in architecture for physically-grounding agents and supports mass-users' decision making in daily lives. By social coordination, we mean mutual concession by automatic negotiation of software agents, rather than verbal and explicit communication directly done by human users. One of prerequisite infrastructures for such electronic negot...