Time-Aware Multi Agent Systems

Time emerges as a key concept in Multi Agent Systems (MASs) and influences the overall system architecture. Since architectural abstractions aim at capturing issues that are relevant in specific domains, MAS architectures should provide abstractions allowing the temporal behaviour to be modelled, observed, and controlled. In other terms, time should be a full-fledged first-class concept in MAS architectures. This paper proposes Time-Awareness Model (TAM), a reference model for building Time-Aware MASs. The model defines a collection of architectural abstractions allowing temporal issues to be modelled in a platform-independent way. Moreover, the paper applies TAM in a reference architecture for Time-Aware MASs. The reference architecture has been exploited in the Packet-World test-bed.