Programming large-scale multi-agent systems based on organization metaphor

Abstract

Modern software systems show some characteristics (e.g., adaptation, self-organization, etc.) as the human organizations and society. In the literature of agent-oriented software engineering, organization metaphor is adopted to manage the complexity of large-scale multi-agent systems (MAS), but the potential is not entirely exploited due to a lack of explicit organizational concepts in programming languages and execution infrastructure. This paper investigates the properties and requirements to develop large-scale MAS, and proposes a new programming model by integrating organization theory into agent technology. The approach takes both organizations and roles as first-class programming entities. An enactment mechanism based on roles is proposed to compose the system, which postpones the software composition from design time to runtime to provide flexibility and dynamic. The implementation issues are discussed and a case is studied lastly. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.