A PROCESS-CALCULUS-BASED ABSTRACTION FOR COORDINATING MULTIAGENT GROUPS

Coordination, the act of imposing a desired behavior on a group of aut onomous, independently conceived agents,(2) has been an important issu e in the design and development of software systems, both process-base d and object-based. In this paper, the Calculus of Coordinating Enviro nments (CCE) is proposed to study coordination as the behavioral union of coordinated and coordinating agents. In CCE, the behavior of coord inated components is expressed as agents in the Calculus of Communicat ing Systems (CCS) and the behavior of coordinators is expressed as age nts (called CE agents) of an extension of CCS. Two composition rules t hat capture the interaction among CE agents and CCS agents are provide d. The applicability of the new formalism is shown by specifying two s imple coordination problems in CCE.