Theory and Practice of Field-based Motion Coordination in Multiagent Systems

Enabling and managing coordination activities between autonomous, possibly mobile, com-puting entities in dynamic computing scenarios challenges traditional approaches to distributed application development and software engineering. This paper specically focuses on the prob-lem of motion coordination, and proposes eld-based coordination as a general framework to model and engineer such coordinated behaviors. The key idea in eld-based coordination is to have agents ' movements driven by computational force elds, generated by the agents them-selves and/or by some infrastructure, and propagated across the environment. This paper shows that eld-based approaches enable the denition of adaptive and effective motion coordination schemes, which can be modeled and tested by making use of a dynamical systems formalism, and which can be easily implemented either above existing middleware infrastructures or by making use of novel middleware specically conceived for eld-based coordination.