Coordinating Distributed Decision Making Using Reusable Interaction Specifications

The organization structure of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) constrains the mechanisms that may be used for coordinating the agents’ decision-making process. As researchers develop MAS that allow agents to dynamically re-organize how to interact with each other, the design of the agents must provide the ability to operate under different organizations. This paper investigates the issues involved in increasing the flexibility of agents’ coordination capabilities. Applying the concepts of encapsulation and polymorphism, a representation of coordination strategies is presented as an abstraction that allows agents to easily switch coordination mechanisms and that allows coordination mechanisms to be applied to different domains.