Coordination of Many Agents

Joxan Jaffar, Roland H.C. Yap, Kenny Q. Zhu

Abstract

This paper presents a reactive programming and triggering framework for the coordination of large number of distributed program agents with shared knowledge. At the heart of this framework is a highly structured shared store in the form of a constraint logic program (CLP), which is used as a knowledge base and being reacted to by agents through the use of ``reactors''. The biggest challenge arising from such reactivity using CLP is to develop a trigger mechanism that allows efficient ``wakeup'' of blocked reactors. This paper addresses the architecture of this open framework, and discusses a general methodology for doing triggering of logic conditions using views and abstractions.