Theory and Practice of Field-based Motion Coordination in Multiagent Systems

Enabling and managing coordination activities between autonomous, possibly mobile, computing entities in dynamic computing scenarios challenges traditional approaches to distributed application development and software engineering. This paper specically focuses on the problem of motion coordination, and proposes eld-based coordination as a general framework to model and engineer such coordinated behaviors. The key idea in eld-based coordination is to have agents' movements driven by computational force elds, generated by the agents themselves and/or by some infrastructure, and propagated across the environment. This paper shows that eld-based approaches enable the denition of adaptive and effective motion coordination schemes, which can be modeled and tested by making use of a dynamical systems formalism, and which can be easily implemented either above existing middleware infrastructures or by making use of novel middleware specically conceived for eld-based coordination.