Evolution of the GPGP/TÆMS Domain-Independent
Victor Lesser, Keith Decker, Thomas A. Wagner, Natasha Carver, Alan Garvey, Bryan Horling, Daniel E. Neiman, M. Nagendra Prasad, Anita Raja, R. Vincent, Ping Xuan · 2002
The GPGP/TAEMS domain-independent coordination framework for small agent groups was first described almost ten years ago and then more fully detailed in an ICMAS95 paper. In this paper, we discuss the evolution of this framework over the last six years motivated by its use in a number of applications, including: information gathering and management, intelligent home automation, coordination of concurrent engineering activities, distributed situation assessment, and hospital scheduling. First, we review the basic architecture of GPGP and then present extensions to the TAEMS domainindependent representation of agent activities. We next describe extensions to GPGP that permit the representation of situation-specific coordination strategies and social laws as well as making possible the use of GPGP in large agent organizations. Additionally, we discuss a more complex view of commitments that takes into account uncertainty i n commitments. We then present new coordination mechanisms for use in resource sharing and contracting, and more complex coordination mechanisms that use a cooperative search among agents to find appropriate commitments. We conclude with a discussion of future research directions.