Enhancing the Environment with a Law-Governed Service for Monitoring and Enforcing Behavior in Open Multi-Agent Systems

Environment is an essential part of any multi-agent system (MAS), since it provides the surrounding conditions for agents to exist. For some sort of systems, the environment can be viewed as providing a set of services, in which some of them, such as directory facilities, are used explicitly by the agents to perform their tasks, and other such as monitoring, behavioral enforcement and security can be done transparently by the environment. We join the idea that the specification of environments of open multi-agent systems should include laws that define what and when something can happen in an open system. Laws are restrictions imposed by the environment to tame uncertainty and to promote open system dependability. This paper proposes a design approach and application of a middleware based on laws in multi-agent systems. The approach can be viewed as a set of services provided by the environment.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: E4MAS
• Authors: Rodrigo B. de Paes, Gustavo R. de Carvalho, Maíra A. de C. Gatti, Carlos José Pereira de Lucena, Jean-Pierre Briot, Ricardo Choren
• Keywords: E4MAS 2006, Intelligent Agents, Multi-agent Systems, Open Multi-agent Systems, Open System