Beliefs, desires and intentions through the environment. AAMAS’06

BDI-based agent architectures have proven their usefulness in building MASs for complex systems- their explicit atten-tion for coping with dynamic environments is one obvious explanation for this. One large and quite interesting fam-ily of MAS applications is characterized (1) by their large scale in terms of number of agents and physical distribution, (2) by their very dynamic nature and (3) by their complex functional and non-functional requirements. This family in-cludes a.o. manufacturing control, traffic control and web service coordination. In this paper, we present an inno-vative approach to BDI agents which alleviates agent com-plexity through “delegate MASs”. Delegate MASs consist of light-weight agents, which are issued either by resources for building and maintaining information on the environment, or by task agents in order to explore the options on behalf of the agents and to coordinate their intentions. 1