Systemic Modeling of Agent Coaction: A Catalog of Decentralized Coordinating Processes

Abstract

Taking inspiration from natural self-organizing systems is a successful
strategy to solve computational problems in distributed systems. Faced with a particular
problem, application designers have to identify an appropriate dynamical behavior
and decide how to induce similar behavioral modes. In order to consolidate
these ad-hoc activities to a systematic dynamical design method, we discuss and exemplify
a behavioral modeling approach that describes the macroscopic behavior of
agent-based software systems. This formalism is used to catalog the dynamic behavior
of prominent examples of natural self-organizing systems. These here presented
models represent generic, reusable templates for decentralized system adaptations
that serve as analysis templates for application designs. A tailored programming
model allows to supplement these templates in agent-based software applications
with minimal intervention in the agent models.