Establishing global properties of multi-agent systems via local laws

Abstract

This paper is part of a long term research program on multiagent systems (MASs), based on the proposition that the interactions among the members of a large and heterogeneous system of autonomous agents need to be governed by a global and strictly enforced law; and that such laws need to be local, so that they can be complied with at the locus of each agent-without having any direct information of the coincidental state of other members of the MAS. Such concept of law has been realized under our LGI coordination and control mechanism. This paper shows how local laws over a MAS can be used to establish global and aggregate system properties in a scalable manner; where by "aggregate properties" we mean properties defined over the coincidental interactions among several, possibly many, members of a given multiagent system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.