Incorporating communication monitoring and control facility in multi-agent systems

In multiple agent computing environments, the communication issue for negotiation, task allocation, etc. is vital for agents to do their tasks. It has been shown that agent systems with many intercommunicating agents can be very difficult to develop without appropriate tools to monitor and mediate communications. Moreover, without agent communication management, the performance of agent systems with large participants may suffer from communication livelocks, deadlock and inconsistency. The objective of this paper is to explore how to improve the multiagent system development process by incorporating a high-level monitoring and control facility into agent communication and distribution environments. A Petri net-based modeling approach is adopted in constructing task-oriented conversation schemata. Conversation managers are deployed into agent daemons throughout the network to provide an environment at network nodes to which agents may be dispatched. An example in an agent-based shop floor is briefly introduced