Coordination of Pervasive Systems

In this chapter a novel approach to coordination in situated Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is described, by presenting a meta-model for situated MAS engineering, an architecture for the design of tuplespace-based middleware for situated coordination, and a language dealing with situatedness-related issues. Accordingly, a review of meta-models and architectures from an historical perspective discusses their evolution, up to a reference meta-model and abstract architecture (Sect. 4.1); then, instantiation of the reference architecture on the TuCSoN middleware is described, focussing on the issue of environmental situatedness (Sect. 4.2); finally, spatial situatedness is analysed, by describing how the ReSpecT language deals with it (Sect. 4.3).