Abstract

As multi-agent systems evolve, coordination among agents becomes crucial in the execution of tasks to ensure the correctness of such system. Much effort is spent in ensuring the correctness in the interaction of the agents. Such efforts usually result in very complex designs which increase the maintenance cost or the cost for further development. In this thesis we propose a model to leverage the effort spent in maintenance and extension by promoting modularity of the system for improved understandability and reusability to save effort. The model, called ECUMAC, is based on the concept that a set of coordination requirements can be realized by a set of "small coordination achievement" called the coordination units. A coordination unit is a skeleton description of a coordination pattern which the application developer can further refine to suit the specific nature of the application. ECUMAC defines a model of these coordination units so that they are extendable and composable to support modularity and code reuse. Two types of coordination units have been identified: static coordination unit and dynamic coordination unit. The static coordination unit allows the definition of coordination structures which require a fixed pattern of interaction. On the other hand, the dynamic coordination unit relies on the spontaneous reaction of the agents to occurrence of certain state of the system.