Developing Multi-Agent Systems with Dynamic Binding Mechanism

Agents in many complex applications are often dynamic, which means that their abilities, services and even design objectives can change at run-time. Though a great number of agent-oriented modeling languages and methodologies have been proposed, it is still a challenge to develop complex multi-agent systems with dynamic agents. In this paper, the technology requirements to analyze, design and implement dynamic agents are discussed. A dynamic binding mechanism to develop multi-agent systems is proposed based on caste that is the basic abstraction to specify agents\´ behaviors and elementary modular unit to design and implement multi-agent systems. In our approach, the dynamic behaviors of agents are realized as the change of castes that agents bind to by executing "join" and "quit" operations on agent\´s casteships at run-time. The mechanism also enables agents to change the status of its castes to be either active or inactive at run-time by executing operations "activate" and "deactivate". In order to specify and analyze the adaptive agents, a graphical notation of caste transition diagram is designed and an example is illustrated. The posed problems and future research about dynamic binding mechanism are also discussed at last.