Design and Implementation of ARCHON's Coordination Module

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of a domain-independent reusable coordination module. This module is at the heart of the ARCHON architecture and has been used in the development of cooperating multi-agent systems in a number of realworld industrial applications including: electricity distribution management, electricity transportation management, cement factory control, flexible assembly robotic cells and particle accelerator control. The module is based upon the philosophy of providing a corpus of extensible generic knowledge about cooperation and situation assessment. Special prominence is given to the problem of controlling the reasoning within the coordination module.