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Discrete | top |
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- Agents interact directly with one another using an established protocols.
- Agents must provide requisite functionality and must communicate with other participants.
- Scales in size.
- The ability of individual agents limits complexity.
- Protocols implicitly determine overall behaviour.
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- insect swarm
- traffic on highway
- laissez faire market
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Broker | top |
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- Agents use a common service to interact
- The service mediates the interaction.
- Agents may specialize
- Broker limits scale
- In "blackboard" variation, agents use broker to communicate status and results
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- electronic market
- air traffic control at an airport
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Central | top |
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- A central agent controls activites
- Peripheral agents execute command and report status
- Intermediates relay orders and status
- Abiity of central agent to process and to understand limits performance and scale.
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- Manually piloted vehicles
- Central economy
- Rigid military
- Early computers
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Mission | top |
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- Central agent performs mission
- Peripheral agents provide control, information, resources
- Scales complexity of task agent can perform by offloading specialties
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- Surgical team
- Apollo lunar missions
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Layered | top |
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- Factors function and concerns into layers with established protocols and concerns
- Higher level functions and emergents addressed at higher layers
- Agents specialize to layers
- Agents interact with those at the same or bordering layers
- Scales in size and complexity.
- Separate systems interact across the layers.
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- Internet
- Federalized governments
- manufactur-wholesale-retail-consumer
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