Using QoS-adaptive coordination artifacts to increase scalability of communication in distributed multi-agent systems

Coordination artifacts in multi-agent systems (MAS) offer a coherent abstraction of communication among agents. Coordination artifacts are first-class entities that encapsulate the coordination activity outside of the agents themselves. The separation of domain knowledge into agents, and communications knowledge into coordination artifacts, allows the decoupling of processing from coordination. Pulling out coordination allows for adaptation to systemic constraints and changing quality of service (QoS) requirements. Tailoring the QoS-adaptation to the kind of coordination and to the availability of underlying communication resources increases the scale of inter-agent communication, both in terms of the range of communication bandwidths supported and the propagation delays. In this paper, we extend the notion of coordination artifacts to include adaptation to QoS requirements. We illustrate how to construct QoS-adaptive coordination artifacts in an existing MAS infrastructure (Cougaar). Finally we show how coordination artifacts can be used to increase scalability in an agent-based distributed control application.