Coordination of many agents

Abstract

This paper presents a reactive programming and triggering framework for the coordination of a large number of distributed 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 a reactive programming framework 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. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.