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A METHODOLOGY FOR MODELING MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS USING NESTED PETRI NETS

LILY CHANG

School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199, USA

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XUDONG HE

School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33199, USA

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, and

SOL M. SHATZ

Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago, 851 S. Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607, USA

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https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218194012500246Cited by:10 (Source: Crossref)

Abstract

In the past two decades, multi-agent systems have emerged as a new paradigm for conceptualizing large and complex distributed software systems. Even though there are many conceptual frameworks for using multi-agent systems, there is no well established and widely accepted method for the representation of multi-agent systems. We adapt a well-known formal model, predicate transition nets, to include the notions of dynamic structure, agent communication and coordination to address the representation problems. This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for modeling multi-agents based on the extensions. We demonstrate our modeling approach with an example. Several case studies on different application domains from our previous works are also discussed.

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