Synthesizing Coordination Requirements for Heterogeneous Autonomous Agents

Abstract. As agents move into ever more important applications, there is a natural growth in interest in techniques for synthesizing multiagent systems. We describe an approach for engineering the coordination requirements of a multiagent system based on an analysis of conversation instances extracted from usage scenarios. This approach exploits the notion of Dooley graphs that were recently introduced to the multiagent systems community from the linguistics and discourse analysis literature. We show how, with a few key modifications, Dooley graphs can be used to generate coordination requirements and constraints on the behavior models of the agents participating in a multiagent system. Our present approach is embodied in the context of our recent work on a distributed coordination service for heterogeneous, autonomous agents. This approach takes as input (a) agent skeletons, giving compact descriptions of the given agents in terms of their events that are significant for coordination,...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2000
• Where: AAMAS
• Authors: Munindar P. Singh
• Keywords: AAMAS 2000, Coordination Requirements, Dooley Graphs, Intelligent Agents, Multiagent Systems