Programming stigmergic coordination with the TOTA middleware

Stigmergic coordination has received a growing attention in the past few years. In fact, by decoupling interacting agents via the mediation of an active environment, stigmergy promotes the definition of robust and adaptive multiagent systems. However, beside a large amount of scientific studies, the problem of defining usable and general-purpose tools to program stigmergy-coordinated multiagent systems is still open. In this context, this paper shows how the TOTA middleware can be effectively exploited to support a variety of stigmergy-based coordination activities. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on a simple API for injecting tuple-based information in a network. have it propagate and/or evaporate accordingly to application-specific policies, and have it locally sensed by application agents. Application examples are presented to show that TOTA can promote a simple programming of a variety of different types of stigmergic interactions, in a variety of operational environments.