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Coordination Issues in Multi-agent Event Data Processing

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Book cover Engineering Societies in the Agents World (ESAW 2000)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1972))

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Abstract

We present a multi-agent systems approach to distributed event-data processing as it is pervasive in scientific computing environments. The task investigated is the one of configuration and execution of event-data processing pipelines to be assembled from single computational services (agents) that perform an asynchronous mapping of streams of inputs to streams of outputs, where the specification is given by characterizing the final output of a pipeline.

Comprehensive declarative descriptions of the capabilities of single agents in such systems can be shown to be computationally intractable because of the complexity of the mapping between inputs and outputs of individual agents. We therefore investigate the consequences of circumventing this problem by publishing just the output capabilities of agents, performing the transformation of output requirements to input requirements opaquely within individual agents, and utilizing recursive runtime contracting to configure complete data processing pipelines.

The information loss entailed by this kind of information propagation opens up the possibility of pipeline misconfigurations that in turn lead to runtime exceptions when constraints between interfaces that were not explicitly enforced by the published capability descriptions are violated. We characterize the ensuing coordination needs and related design requirements for such kinds of multi-agent systems and propose the introduction of social laws as a promising principled solution approach to be further researched.

The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence is supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Culture

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), CH-1211, Geneva, Switzerland

    Christoph Koch

  2. Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Schottengasse 3, A-1010, Vienna, Austria

    Paolo Petta

Authors
  1. Christoph Koch
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  2. Paolo Petta
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Bologna, Viale Risorgimento 2, 40136, Bologna, Italy

    Andrea Omicini

  2. Fachbereich 13 - Informatik, Technische Universität Berlin, Franklinstr. 28/29, 10587, Berlin, Germany

    Robert Tolksdorf

  3. Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Ingegneria, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Via Vignolese 905, 41100, Modena, Italy

    Franco Zambonelli

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Koch, C., Petta, P. (2000). Coordination Issues in Multi-agent Event Data Processing. In: Omicini, A., Tolksdorf, R., Zambonelli, F. (eds) Engineering Societies in the Agents World. ESAW 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1972. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44539-0_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44539-0_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-41477-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44539-5

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