MASL: a Language for Multi-Agent System

Michel Dubois (1) , Yann Le Guyadec (1) , Dominique Duhaut (1)

1 VALORIA - Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique et ses Applications de Vannes et Lorient

The classical approach for Multi-Agent System (MAS) Control, especially autonomous and robotic ones, deals first from a microscopic point of view: each agent embed a control program with communication/synchronization primitives that enable cooperation between agents. The emergence of a global behaviour from a macroscopic point of view can only be observed afterwards. In this context, MASL offers a macroscopic and unified approach with heterogeneous and distributed calculations over deliberative, reactive or hybrid agents. In this high level language, regardless of the runtime, each concurrent agent locally decides its participation in a collective execution block named an e-block. Each e-block is an anonymous collective program that runs over an agent network following local conditions. The orchestral mode (scalar, asynchronous, synchronous) is statically fixed by a shared block attribute. The communication use shared memory, events, synchronous messages passing, and asynchronous messages passing. Heterogeneous agents are managed with heritage and polymorphism. Permeability mechanism, dealing with agent autonomy, allows an agent to dynamically filter calls to its interface in respects to the sender position in the e-block hierarchy. In dynamic task allocation of agents, auto failover and recovery, agent replacement in a robot fleet (case of agent failure, loss of a mandatory functionality for the mission) an e-block is an entry point of a collaborative work. In the case of synchronous e-block, the programming paradigm is the data parallel model with iterative task for waves of agents. Finally, MASL offers advances in the field of MAS (dynamic belonging to groups, accuracy of the pace of actions to undertake to enable a desired cooperation) and for the management of errors.

Mots clés: Synchronous Language; Multi-Agents System; Collective Robotics; Control Language; Parallelism; Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robotic System

Domaines: Système multi-agents [cs.MA]; Robotique [cs.RO]; Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Michel Dubois, Yann Le Guyadec, Dominique Duhaut. MASL: a Language for Multi-Agent System. Salman Ahmed and Mohd Noh Karsiti. Multiagent Systems, IN-TECH, pp.247, 2009. ⟨hal-00502442⟩