MASDynamics: Toward Systemic Modeling of Decentralized Agent Coordination

Enabling distributed software systems to purposefully self-organize, i.e. to adapt to dynamically changing execution contexts by the collective adjustment of individual components, challenges current development practices. Since the dynamics of self-organizing systems arise from agent coaction, developers cannot directly infer the macroscopic system behavior from established agent design models. This paper plays a part in an ongoing research effort that addresses the provision of self-organizing processes as design elements, i.e. reusable patterns of agent interrelations. We propose a systemic modeling approach and support the application independent description of (inter-) agent coordination patterns by a domain specific language that allows to map interrelations of agent activity to detailed agent design models. This facilitates the separation of decentralized coordination strategies from domain specific agent implementations and enables development teams to treat nature-inspired coordination strategies, which steer self-organizing dynamics, as design concepts. In addition, we show how this modeling conception provides a declarative programming approach by the automated supplementation of conventional developed agent models with non-linear, inter-agent coordination mechanisms.