Communication, Coordination and Cooperation

Communication, cooperation and coordination are three key issues in multi-agent systems. Communication enables agents to exchange information and to coordinate their activities. Primitive communication is commonly restricted to some finite set of fixed signals with fixed interpretation. In the message-passing approach, agents communicate with each other by sending messages. Information exchange through a shared data repository is an important strategy for many distributed information systems described in the literature. Issues of high-level communication in multi-agent systems relate to natural language understanding, speech act theory, conversations, and other formal theories. Communication among agents can be direct or indirect. Communication among agents can be synchronous or asynchronous. In complex concurrent design and manufacturing systems, both synchronous and asynchronous communications are required. The global architecture of the agent-based concurrent design and manufacturing system strongly influences the way communications are organized. Agent-based concurrent design and manufacturing systems involve both human and software agents.