General-Purpose Coordination Abstractions for Managing Interaction in MAS

Interaction represents one of the main sources of complexity in Multi-agent Systems (MAS). As a consequence, coordination – as the management of the space of system interaction – plays a key role in the engineering of MAS. In this context, the tuple centre coordination abstraction have been experimented in MAS to manage interaction among agents and between agents and MAS environment. Along this line, the aim of this paper is to test the expressive power of tuple centres as the unifying abstractions to model and govern the whole range of admissible interactions within a MAS. For this purpose, we take the notion of Agent Coordination Context (ACC) – aimed at supporting interaction between an individual agent and the MAS as a whole – and show how it can be implemented in terms of a tuple centre in a MAS infrastructure. In particular, we adopt ReSpecT tuple centres as the coordination abstractions and TuCSoN as the coordination infrastructure managing the space of interaction in a MAS, and provide an example of how the TuCSoN ACC can be implemented by means of a suitably-programmed ReSpecT tuple centre.