Here - Agents Lab - University of Nottingham

A in the example) can evaluate all bids, including its own, before sending a message(to platform D in the example) to accept the best bid. Upon reception ofthe accept message, the chosen platform will instantiate the selected componentplan and automatically register with R-OSGi the service goal it provides. Theinitiating platform will then retrieve the reference to the service goal from theremote platform, create a proxy, and export it to the local OSGi registry.Fig. 2. Automatic distribution of Self -OSGi SystemsWithin the RUBICON Control Architecture, the distributed extension ifSelf -OSGi has the following roles:– provide the backbone upon which AI techniques, such as planning, cognitivereasoning and learning, can be integrated into a single system.– provide a semantic vocabulary for expressing the capabilities and the requirementsof all available devices and software components in the ecology,in order to support self-organization capabilities and the modular specificationof the behaviour of the robotic ecology.– enhance system’s scalability by framing it as a multi-agent system in orderto leverage agent communication languages (ACLs) and multi-agent system(MAS) coordination & negotiation protocols.– reduce the gap between the mainstream software solutions traditionally usedin AmI/AAL domains and the state of the art techniques used in agentorientedsoftware engineering and in the control of robotic ecologies.The final element to allow the use of the same mechanisms for the coordinationof robotic ecologies is the interface between Self -OSGi and the PEISmiddleware discussed in Section 2.79