Chinese Journal of Computers   Full Text
Title	Emergence-Oriented Research on Multi-Agent Systems and Its State of Arts
Authors	JIN Shi-Yao HUANG Hong-Bing FAN Gao-Jun
Address	(National Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Processing, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073) (School of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073)
Year	2008
Issue	No.6(881—895)
Abstract &   Background	Abstract Nowadays, more attentions are paid to the phenomenon of emergence in MASs. And emergence-oriented research on MASs becomes a new direction in the area of MAS. Emergence-oriented researches focus on the emergent characteristics of MASs and the mechanisms of emergence which correlate the macro- and micro-level characteristics. The final goal of these researches is to develop a set of methods for engineering emergence in MASs. In this paper, after an introduction of the concept of emergence, the emergence-oriented approaches for characterizing emergent behaviors of MASs are reviewed. Then the authors give an overview of the micro-macro mechanisms of emergence in MASs, and a survey of emergence-oriented engineering methodologies and design patterns of MASs. Finally, the problems and future directions in this area are discussed. Keywords multi-agent system; emergence; emergence-oriented; mechanism; complex adaptive system Background In a lot of applications, MASs are identified as CASs. So, in the area of MAS, more and more attentions are paid to the phenomenon of emergence which is intrinsic in CASs. And emergence-oriented research on MASs becomes a new direction in the area of MAS. Emergence-oriented researches focus on the emergent characteristics of MASs and the mechanisms of emergence which correlate the macro- and micro-level characteristics. The final goal of these researches is to develop a set of methods for engineering emergence in MASs. In this area, the concept of emergence has been debated for a long time, and is not settled yet. To study the emergent characteristics, the laws governing the evolution of MASs must be fined. This leads to the emergence-oriented description of MAS. At present, there are mainly two approaches: Logic-based and statistics-based. To engineer emergence in MASs at runtime, the proper way is to adopt relevant mechanisms for emergence and to introduce appropriate artifact for controlling. So design patterns using emergent mechanisms are very popular. Most of the mechanisms, now, are come form biology, economic and society. And the engineering methodologies are extends of the traditional software engineering methodologies. In this paper, after an introduction of the concept of emergence, the emergence-oriented approaches for characterizing emergent behaviors of MASs are reviewed. Then the authors give an overview of the micro-macro mechanisms of emergence in MASs, and a survey of emergence-oriented engineering methodologies and design patterns of MASs. Finally, the problems of these researches are discussed; and future directions in this area are given by the authors. Authors have done research on MAS and CAS, especially on MAS-based modeling and simulation of CASs, for many years. By these studies, they have a deep understanding of emergence in CASs. Recently, they apply their research result to emergence-oriented research on MASs. A remarkable tool, namely JCass, have facilitated their research, which is a distributed platform for Agent-based simulations developed by themselves.