The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

The engineering of heterogeneous distributed systems is a complex task. Traditional software engineering methods fail to account for new demands of flexibility and adaptability in the construction of software systems. On the other hand, concepts of Virtual Organizations and Electronic Institutions cater for the need of open, heterogeneous software environments, where agents may dynamically organize themselves into organizational structures, determined by roles, norms and contracts. Our work aims to facilitate the engineering of heterogeneous and distributed systems by providing only a specification of the desired overall system behavior, expressed as a set of norms, and rely on capabilities and properties of individual agents that allow them to dynamically form the desired complete software system. In particular, we present a framework, called Requirement-driven Contracting (RdC), for automatically deriving executable norms from requirements and associated relevant information. RdC facilitates the governance of MAS by ensuring that all requirements, along with runtime changes of requirements are appropriately and automatically reflected in the norms regulating the behavior of MAS.

Keywords

agents, agent-based software engineering, Requirement-driven Contracting

Notes

Sponsor: Army Research Labs

Grant ID: Aberdeen, Scotland, U.K.

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Center for Integrated Manfacturing Decision Systems

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Advanced Agent - Robotics Technology Lab

Associated Project(s): IBM ITA: Human-Agent Teamwork Models

Number of pages: 6

Text Reference

Martin Kollingbaum, Ivan J. Jureta, Wamberto Vasconcelos, and Katia Sycara, "Automated Requirements-Driven Definition of Norms for the Regulation of Behavior in Multi-Agent Systems," Proceedings of the AISB 2008 Workshop on Behaviour Regulation in Multi-Agent Systems, April, 2008.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Kollingbaum_2008_6132,
   author = "Martin Kollingbaum and Ivan J. Jureta and Wamberto Vasconcelos and Katia Sycara",
   title = "Automated Requirements-Driven Definition of Norms for the Regulation of Behavior in Multi-Agent Systems",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the AISB 2008 Workshop on Behaviour Regulation in Multi-Agent Systems",
   address = "Aberdeen, Scotland, U.K.",
   month = "April",
   year = "2008",
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu