Coordination support in multi-agent systems

We propose the term Coordination Support to denote the services offered by the infrastructure used to deploy MultiAgent Systems (MAS). In fact, these services provide a means to enact the coordination model defined in MAS design. We detail Coordination Support’s functionalities and group them into different layers. Furthermore we extend them and propose an additional Assistance layer devoted to assist coordination rather than to enable it. Assistance’s functionalities range from providing information –about the coordination model and its state– to adapting agents’ organisation.