Gossip and ostracism in modelling automorphosis of multi-agent systems

Abstract

Automorphosis viewed in terms of IT systems requires that these systems have a range of features related to autonomy, dispersion of their components, and communication between their elements. Examples of IT systems in which the issue of automorphosis is an important modelling aspect include software agent societies where individual agent units create structures that specialise in performance of assigned tasks in a dynamic manner, depending on changing conditions. The use of automorphosis mechanisms in such groups of agents enables control of their behaviour and monitoring of their actions. The concept of using the mechanisms of gossip and ostracism in a society of agents employing trust and reputation as elements of control and monitoring of its activity, as proposed in the paper, has a range of advantages: possibility of using individual agents' knowledge about the operation of other units, shortening the time during which an agent will negatively affect a specific society and its operations, speeding up the moment when an agent ceases being part of a given multi-agent platform, exclusion of the agent from the performance of the task by the society using the mechanism of ostracism, elimination of the agent from the platform as a result of ostracism towards its actions. To achieve that, the extension of JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment Framework) was developed.