Engineering Coordination: Selection of Coordination Mechanisms

摘要

The reuse of code and concepts is an important aspect developing a multiagent system (MAS) and it is a driving force of agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE). In particular, the reuse of mechanisms like coordination is fundamental to support developers of MASs. We will detail research done in the field of AOSE concerning the reuse of concepts and focus on the selection of suitable coordination mechanisms. The selection process for coordination mechanisms is, up to now, not covered in AOSE sufficiently. Therefore, we present the ECo-CoPS approach that defines a structured process for the selection of coordination mechanisms for plan's of autonomous agents, where the local autonomy, as well as, the existing planning systems can be preserved. We present a case study to detail how the ECo-CoPS approach can foster the selection process.