Applications of Self-Organising Multi-Agent Systems: An Initial Framework for Comparison

Carole Bernon (1, 2) , Vincent Chevrier (3, 4) , Vincent Hilaire (5) , Paul Marrow (6)

1 UT3 - Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier
2 IRIT - Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse
3 LORIA - Laboratoire Lorrain de Recherche en Informatique et ses Applications
4 MAIA - Autonomous intelligent machine
5 UTBM - Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbeliard
6 BT Group [London]

A lot of work is devoted to formalizing and devising architectures for agents' cooperative behaviour, for coordinating the behaviour of individual agents within groups, as well as to designing agent societies using social laws. However, providing agents with abilities to automatically devise societies so as to form coherent emergent groups that coordinate their behaviour via social laws, is highly challenging. These systems are called self-organised. We are beginning to understand some of the ways in which self-organised agent systems can be devised. In this perspective, this paper provides several examples of multi-agent systems in which self-organisation, based on different mechanisms, is used to solve complex problems. Several criteria for comparison of self-organisation between the different applications are provided.

Mots clés: self-organisation; applications; software; multi-agent system

Domaines: Système multi-agents [cs.MA]

Carole Bernon, Vincent Chevrier, Vincent Hilaire, Paul Marrow. Applications of Self-Organising Multi-Agent Systems: An Initial Framework for Comparison. Informatica, 2006, 30 (1), pp.73-82. ⟨inria-00000225⟩