Coordination mechanisms for dependency relationships among multiple agents

A recent observation about multiagent coordination is that one can describe possible mechanisms in a domain-indepen\-dent way,as simple or complex responses to certain dependency relationships between the activities of different agents. Thus agent programmers can separate encoding agent domain actions from the solution to particular coordination problems. This paper explores the specification of a large range of coordination mechanisms for the common hard enablement relationship between tasks at different agents. This paper also presents the implementation of this idea in the DECAF agent architecture and an initial exploration of the separation of domain action from meta-level coordination actions for eight simple coordination mechanisms.