Service-oriented computing can benefit from multi-agent system technologies by adopting the coordination mechanisms, interaction protocols, and decision-making tools designed for multi-agent systems. We demonstrate here the use of a fully decentralised multi-agent system supporting the discovery, selection, and negotiation of services.

Coordination is an important aspect of multi-agent systems (MAS). Although being decisive for many MAS applications, it is rarely modelled and implemented explicitly. Instead, coordination is realized implicitly and hard wired among other agent functionalities. Therefore, this work aims at providing an approach towards explicit coordination in MAS in which developers can focus more on what and ...

Coordination theory introduced by Malone [6] is concerned with the management of dependencies between di erent activities. Tenets developed in this theory encompass conceptual and methodological aspects that enable a distributed application to have a better expressiveness and to be much more easily implemented, through a clear separation between coordination and computation [3]. In computer sci...

Task-based planning problems for multi-agent systems require multiple agents to find a joint plan for a constrained set of tasks. Typically, each agent receives a subset of tasks to complete. Due to task interdependencies, such task allocations induce interdependencies between agents as well. These interdependencies will prevent the agents from making a plan for their subset of tasks independen...

In order to describe the technological problems of the coordination of groups of mobile minirobots, a biologically-inspired control framework for multi-agent tasks that is based on cellular automata models is discussed. This framework allow to study the behaviour of the robot platforms as collaborative agents in a multi-agent system. The case study proves that the CA model is an useful tool tha...

The coordination in open multi-agent systems is difficult to achieve, mainly because agents are autonomous. Social commitments have been proposed as a new coordination paradigm, suitable to describe agent communications or interactions. As some authors have pointed out, commitment enforcement is necessary, i.e., autonomous agents that violate commitments must be punished. In related work this i...