Multi-Modal Decentralized Interaction in Multi-Entity Systems

Abstract

Current multi-agent frameworks usually use centralized, fixed communication infrastructures for the entities that are deployed using them. This decreases the robustness of the system but is less challenging when having to deal with mobile agents that can migrate between nodes. We introduce, in the context of the FLASH-MAS (Fast and Lightweight Agent Shell) multi-entity deployment framework, methods to build decentralized interaction infrastructures which support migrating entities. We discuss the WS-Regions (WebSocket Regions) communication protocol, a proposal for interaction in deployments using multiple communication methods, and a mechanism to facilitate using arbitrary names for entities. The WS-Regions Protocol is compared against Jade (the Java Agent Development Framework), the most popular agent deployment framework, with a favorable trade-off between decentralization and performance.

Keywords

• multi-agent systems
• decentralized interaction