Designing Self-organising MAS Environments: The Collective Sort Case

Self-organisation is being recognised as an effective conceptual framework to deal with the complexity inherent to modern artificial systems. In this article, we explore the applicability of self-organisation principles to the development of multi-agent system (MAS) environments. First, we discuss a methodological approach for the engineering of complex systems, which features emergent properties: this is based on formal modelling and stochastic simulation, used to analyse global system dynamics and tune system parameters at the early stages of design. Then, as a suitable target for this approach, we describe an architecture for self-organising environments featuring artifacts and environmental agents as fundamental entities. As an example, we analyse a MAS distributed environment made of tuple spaces, where environmental agents are assigned the task of moving tuples across tuples spaces in background and according to local criteria, making complete clustering an emergent property achieved through self-organisation.