Multi-tier communication abstractions for distributed multi-agent systems

Most multiagent system (MAS) architectures use a single communication model for sharing of data, propagation of tasking, and negotiation for services. We describe the Cougaar distributed multitiered MAS infrastructure which uses different communication techniques at each tier to gain large-scale parallelization, scalability and asynchronous operation without sacrificing the ability to support efficient, tightly coupled business-logic components. We illustrate the architecture with results gathered from a set of small to medium-sized Cougaar applications.