Multi-Tier Communication Abstractions for Distributed Mult-Agent Systems

Most Multi-Agent System (MAS) architectures use a single communication model for sharing of data, propagation of tasking, and negotiation for services. We describe the Cougaar distributed multi-tiered MAS infrastructure which uses different communication techniques at each tier to gain large-scale parallelization, scalability and asynchronous operation without sacrificing the ability to support efficient, tightly coupled businesslogic components. We illustrate the architecture with results gathered from a set of small to medium-sized Cougaar applications.