Multi-agent system interaction protocols in a dynamically changing environment

Abstract

An area where multi-agent systems can be put to effective use is for the case of an open collection of autonomous problem solvers in a dynamically changing environment. One example of such a situation is that of environmental management and emergency response, which can require the joint cooperation of a distributed set of components, each one of which may be specialised for a specific task or problem domain. The various stakeholders in the process can all be represented and interfaced by software agents which collaborate with each other toward achieving a particular goal. For such situations new agents that arrive on the scene must be apprised of the group interaction protocols so that they can cooperate effectively with the existing agents. In this paper we show how this can be done by using coloured Petri net representations for each role in an interaction protocol and passing these nets dynamically to new agents that wish to participate in a group interaction. We argue that multi-agent systems are particularly suited for such dynamically changing environments, but their effectiveness depends on the their ability to use adaptive interaction protocols.