Meta-level Control of Coordination Protocols

Second International Conference on Multiagent Systems

Volume

Second International Conference on Multiagent Systems

Contents

This paper proposes a meta-level control mechanism of coordination protocols in a multi-agent system. In an open environment, an agent needs to respond to unexpected situations (exceptions). By introducing a meta-level control mechanism in the coordination protocol execution, an agent can have flexible control over the coordination with other agents. As a meta-level control mechanism, methods to detect and handle exceptions are presented. For example, the proposed mechanism allows an agent to dynamically switch a coordination protocol to use when an exception occurs. In this paper, AgenTalk, a coordination protocol description language, is extended to include primitives for the meta-level control. In this extension, the meta-level control is described using the same mechanism for describing an agent’s behavior in a coordination protocol.