Coordination and Control in Mobile Ubiquitous Computing Applications Using Law Governed Interaction

This paper introduces a mechanism for regulating the interactions between the members of an ad hoc, heterogeneous and mobile multi-agent system, in order to ensure reliable and secure coordination between them. We demonstrate this mechanism, and its importance, by describing its application to a police team whose mission is to manage (i.e., monitor and control) the traffic in an area, by operating on a set of traffic-related devices, such as draw bridges, traffic lights, and road blocks. In particular, we demonstrate how the following critical aspects of the working of such a team are provided for: a) reliable coordination between the team members; b) the ability of the leader of the team to steer its subordinates; c) reliable auditing of the operations of the team; and d) robustness of the team under certain unexpected adverse conditions, such as the unpredictable failure of the team leader. Beyond developing suitable formalisms for local regulation of actions and communications, performance tests have been conducted with the proposed implementation on the ORBIT testbed and the results presented show the viability of this approach. Keywords-Law Governed Interaction; ad hoc coordination; decentralized enforcement; security