Self-organization in multi agent systems: A middleware approach

Abstract

Self-organization in multi agent systems requires two main building blocks: adaptive and uncoupled interaction mechanisms and context-awareness. Here we show how the middleware TOTA (Tuples On The Air) supports self-organization by providing effective abstractions for the above two building-blocks. TOTA relies on spatially distributed tuples for both supporting adaptive and uncoupled interactions between agents, and context-awareness. Agents can inject these tuples in the network, to make available some kind of contextual information and to interact with other agents. Tuples are propagated by the middleware, on the basis of application specific patterns, defining sorts of "computational fields", and their intended shape is maintained despite network dynamics, such as topological reconfigurations. Agents can locally "sense" these fields and rely on them for both acquiring contextual information and carrying on distributed self-organizing coordination activities. Several application examples in different scenarios show the effectiveness of our approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.