In Distributed Problem-solving (DPS) systems a group of purposefully designed computational agents interact and co-ordinate their activities so as to jointly achieve a global goal. Soical co-ordination is a decentralised mechanism, that sets out from non-benevolent agents that interact primarily to improve the degree of attainment of their local goals. One way of ensuring the effectivity of social co-ordination with respect to global problem-solving is to rely on self-interested agens and to coerce their behaviour in a desired direction. In this paper we describe the decentralised co-ordination mechanism of structural co-operation that follows this approach, and present its formalisation within bargaining theory. We then show how this theoretical model is transferred to a practical real-world application: within the experimental TRYSA_2 system autonomous traffic control agents co-ordinate their activities by means of structural co-operation, so as to jointly perform road traffic management in an urban motorway network.
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