Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems: a Mentalistic View

In practice, coordination in MASs is conceived as the management of agent's activities to enable overall system act in a coherent way. So, more or less, the spirit of behaviorism may be found in the empirical researches of MAS coordination. In contrast, the theoretical frameworks of MAS are often mentalistic, which derive from the well known BDI model. This paper proposes a view consistent with these theoretical frameworks, namely mentalistic view. From this view, coordination is regarded as a mental process; and, to coordinate smoothly, several requirements for mental attitudes must be fulfilled. Further, techniques for coordination are explained as the means satisfying these requirements. Lastly, the issue of measuring coordination is addressed by relating MAS coordination potential to the entropy of agentspsila collective beliefs.