Higher Level Integration by Multi-Agent Architectures

. Agents are software components that support the construction of distributed information systems as collections of autonomousentities that interact according to complex and dynamic patterns of behavior. A major problem of multiagent structured information systems is the coordination of these interactions and behaviors to achieve the goals of the participants and coherence of the system as a whole. This paper articulates a precise conceptual model of coordination based ona representation of coordination knowledgeas plans describedin a special planninglanguageenhancedwith communicativeactions. The executionof these plans by agents results in multiple structured `conversations'taking place among agents. The model is extended to a complete language design that provides objects and control structures that substantiate its concepts and allow the construction of real multi-agent systems in industrial domains. To support incremental, in context acquisition and debugging of coordination knowle..