Modelling Cooperative Behaviour for Resource Access in a Compositional Multi-Agent Framework*

Modelling and formally specifying agent knowledge required to deal with limited access to resources in a multi-agent situation, is the focus of this paper. Not only the static elements involved but also the dynamic elements, namely the behaviour of the system, is explicitly modelled and specified. It will be shown how this results in a flexible, compositional specification that is applicable to real-world domains. DESIRE, a formal framework for the design and specification of compositional architectures, is employed for this purpose. A task model of an arbitrary participating competitive agent is presented, together with a model of interaction between agents, the formal specifications and a comparison of this knowledge-based approach and other approaches.