Developing formal specifications to coordinate heterogeneous autonomous agents

Abstract

We have been developing an approach for the distributed coordination of heterogeneous, autonomous agents. This approach takes as input (a) agent skeletons, giving compact descriptions of the given agents in terms of their events that are significant for coordination, as well as (b) relationships among the events occurring in these skeletons. A natural question is how may the skeletons and relationships be produced in the first place. Parunak (1996) proposed a methodology for designing multiagent systems based on Dooley graphs (1976) from discourse analysis. We show how with a few key modifications, Dooley graphs can also be used to generate the skeletons and relationships required for coordination. This combines the benefits of an intuitive methodology with a formal and distributed framework for developing multiagent systems from autonomous agents.