Agent-based coordination for the sensor web

This paper addresses the problem of coordination within the Sensor Web, where the Sensor Web is defined as an amorphous network of spatially distributed nodes that sense various phenomena in the environment, that are battery powered, and that communicate and coordinate wirelessly. The approach described advocates the use of a multi-agent system, and specifically the use of multi-agent distributed constraint optimisation algorithms. Developing software for low powered sensing devices introduces several problems to be addressed; the most obvious being the limited computational resources available. In this paper we discuss an implementation of ADOPT, a pre-existing algorithm for distributed constraint optimisation, and describe how it has been integrated with a reflective agent platform developed for resource constrained devices, namely Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME). The usefulness of this work is illustrated through the canonical multi-agent coordination problem, namely graph colouring.