Dynamic ad hoc coordination of distributed tasks using micro-agents

Abstract

The notion of μ-agents to develop complex software applications has been under active research interest for some time. Through improved organisational modelling μ-agents provide stronger support for decomposition and abstraction in decentralized applications. With the advent of the mobile application platform Android - which exhibits strong analogies to multi-agent system principles - we strongly believe that μ-agent-based modelling has become an increasingly attractive alternative. It can combine decentralized application development with the wide-ranging set of sensors and communication channels to foster both context-sensitivity and flexibility of applications. By integrating Android with the μ-agent concept mobile applications can put stronger emphasis on coordination of task-oriented agent organisations. As an example how this can facilitate the development of distributed applications, we describe an application for the field of "Unconferences" to dynamically schedule informal talks in an ad hoc manner. We model the central aspects of the application and show the advantages of our μ-agent-based approach. Finally, we contrast our approach to existing work in this field and suggest the consideration of μ-agents as an alternative to conventional object-oriented software development. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.