Property based coordination

Abstract

For a multiagent system (MAS), coordination is the assumption that agents are able to adapt their behavior according to those of the other agents. The principle of Property Based Coordination (PBC) is to represent each entity composing the MAS by its observable properties, and to organize their perception by the agents. The main result is to enable the agents to have contextual behaviors. In this paper, we instantiate the PBC principle by a model, called EASI -Environment as Active Support of Interaction-, which is inspired from the Symbolic Data Analysis theory. It enables to build up an interaction as a connection point between the needs of the initiator, those of the receptor(s) and a given context. We demonstrate that thanks to PBC, EASI is expressive enough to instantiate other solutions to the connection problem. Our proposition has been used in the traveler information domain to develop an Agent Information Server dynamically parameterized by its users. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.