Towards next generation coordination infrastructures

Abstract

AbstractCoordination infrastructures play a central role in the engineering of multiagent systems. Since the advent of agent technology, research on coordination infrastructures has produced a significant number of infrastructures with varying features. In this paper, we review the the state-of-the-art coordination infrastructures with the purpose of identifying open research challenges that next generation coordination infrastructures should address. Our analysis concludes that next generation coordination infrastructures must address a number of challenges: (i) to becomesocially aware, by facilitating human interaction within a MAS; (ii) to assist agents in their decision making by providingdecision supportthat helps them reduce the scope of reasoning and facilitates the achievement of their goals; and (iii) to increaseopennessto support on-line, fully decentralised design and execution. Furthermore, we identify some promising approaches in the literature, together with the research issues worth investigating, to cope with such challenges.