Coordination of Software Agents: Models and Languages

Software agents are autonomous components that perform tasks on the behalf of users. In many contexts, agents do not exist in isolation, but they must interact with other agents, leading to multiagent systems (MASs). No matter whether they collaborate or compete in MASs, coordination is needed to rule their interactions and to support them in their activities. In this chapter, we present the agent coordination models defined in the last 25 years taking the contributions to the WOA workshops as fil rouge, along with the languages that have been proposed to allow agent coordination. In addition, we sketch how the research on agent coordination has paved the way to be applied in several application fields, such as autonomic computing, self-organizing systems, energy management, and autonomous vehicles.