The BDIP software architecture and running mechanism for self-organizing MAS

Abstract

As there are huge gaps between the local micro interactions among agents and the global macro emergence of self-organizing system, it is a great challenge to design self-organizing mechanism and develop self-organizing multi-agent system to obtain expected emergence. Policy-based self-organization approach is helpful to deal with the issue, in which policy is the abstraction of self-organizing mechanism and acts as the bridge between the local micro interactions and global macro emergence. This paper focuses on how to develop software agents in policy-based self-organizing multi-agent system and proposes a BDIP architecture of software agent. In our approach, policy is an internal component that encapsulates the self-organizing information and integrates with BDI components. BDIP agent decides its behaviors by complying with the policies and respecting BDI specifications. An implementation model and the running mechanism as well as corresponding decision algorithms for BDIP agents are studied. A case of self-organizing system is studied to illustrate our proposed approach and show its effectiveness. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.