Polymorphic agent clusters: the concept to design multi-agent environments supporting business activities

  • Authors:

  • Waldemar Wieczerzycki

  • Affiliations:

  • The Poznan University of Economics

  • Venue:
  • HoloMAS'05 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

There are two main contributions of the work reported in the paper. First, a new model of software agents is proposed that are polymorphic and highly mobile. The former feature of agents results from the existence of potentially many agent versions. The latter feature is implied by the fact that only the necessary agent code is transmitted through the network, while the rest is transmitted only on demand.. Second, in the paper a particular approach to develop and manage multi-agent environments is proposed. It is based on so called agent clusters which group agents that mutually cooperate to perform a particular mission, e.g. to build and manage supply chains, to negotiate details of orders, to sign business contract. The approach seems to be straightforward, on one hand, and allows practically unrestricted collaboration among agents of the same business party, and safe cooperation among different business parties, on the other hand. The concept of agent cluster is inspired to some extent by the database technology, in particular by database transaction management.