A comparison of organization-centered and agent-centered multi-agent systems

Abstract

Whereas most classical multi-agent systems have the agent in center, there has recently been a development towards focusing more on the organization of the system, thereby allowing the designer to focus on what the system goals are, without considering how the goals should be fulfilled.

We have developed and evaluated two teams of agents for a variant of the well-known Bomberman computer game. One team is based on the basic Jason system, which is an implementation in Java of an extension of the logic-based agent-oriented programming language AgentSpeak. The other team is based on the organizational model Moise+, which is combined with Jason in the middleware called J-Moise+.

We have investigated whether taking the organization-oriented approach had any clear advantages to the classical way of implementing multi-agent systems. Although not decisive the investigation did indicate that the agent-oriented approach has a number of advantages when it comes to game-like scenarios with just a few different character types.