Using a two-level multi-agent system architecture

Abstract

Existing organisational centred multi-agent systems (MAS) regulate agents' activities. Nevertheless, population and/or environmental changes may lead to a poor fulfilment of the system's purposes, and therefore, adapting the whole organisation becomes key. This is even more needed in open MAS, where participants are unknown beforehand, they may change over time, and there are no guarantees about their behaviours nor capabilities. Hence, in this paper we focus on endowing an organisation with self-adaptation capabilities instead of expecting agents to increase their behaviour complexity. We regard this organisational adaptation as an assisting service provided by what we call the Assistance Layer. Our abstract Two Level Assisted MAS Architecture (2-LAMA) incorporates such a layer. We empirically evaluate our adaptation mechanism in a P2P scenario by comparing it with the standard BitTorrent protocol. Results provide a performance improvement and show that the cost of introducing an additional layer in charge of system's adaptation is lower than its benefits. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.