Publications

 A major current challenge in the area of complex multi-agent systems id the conceptual approach to, and practical treatment of, emergent behaviour. This paper indicates how Formal Methods may be applied to engineer multi-agent adaptive systems exhibiting emergence, by consideration of an 'emergence predicate' in the specification and incremental derivation of interacting components that achieve that predicate. To perform that task, 'policies' are introduced as a novel technique for constraining agents in a hierarchical manner so that the multi-agent implementation as a whole exhibits the specified emergence. The ideas are demonstrated on models of the foraging behaviour of an ant colony, and used to analyse various designs appearing in the literature.

 The complex systems lying at the heart of ensemble engineering exhibit-and are perhaps even characterised by-emergent behaviour: behaviour that is not explicitly derived from the func- tional description of the components of the ensemble at the level of abstraction at which they are provided. A typical example from Artificial Life comprises an ensemble consisting of a flock of birds; the components are the individual birds, thought of autonomously, and the emergent behaviour is that of the flock. Emergent behaviour can be understood by expanding the level of abstraction of description of the components to augment their functional behaviour; but that is infeasible in specifying ensembles of realistic size (although it is the main implementation method) since it amounts to consideration of an entire implementation. An alternative must be taken. It is proposed that to specify an ensemble, the functional behaviour of its components instead be augmented by a system-wide predicate (or conjunction of 'policies', which may be seen as kinds of weak 'ethical principles', when the components are agents) pertaining to the collec- tive behaviour of its components and accounting for emergence. An implementation, however, ranges in distribution from being centralised to being fully distributed, depending on the degree to which the emergent behaviour is incorporated in the components. So the next step in this work consists of identifying implementation designs. A further step consists of establishing cri- teria for the conformance of an implementation against a specification, and the final step applies those ideas to case studies using model checking. Important application of these ideas lies in ensembles whose dynamics is controlled by artificial agents, for which a satisfactory theory of ethical behaviour can be given that is not based on free will, and takes the form of policies. The tension between emergence and reductionism, that is felt in moving from a specification to an implementation, is resolved by making explicit the level of abstraction of a description.