Abstract
Traditionally, two alternative design approaches have been available
to engineers: top-down and bottom-up. In the top-down approach, the
design process starts with specifying the global system state and
assuming that each component has global knowledge of the system,
as in a centralized approach. The solution is then decentralized
by replacing global knowledge with communication. In the bottom-up
approach, on the other hand, the design starts with specifying requirements
and capabilities of individual components, and the global behavior
is said to emerge out of interactions among constituent components
and between components and the environment. In this paper we present
a comparative study of both approaches with particular emphasis on
applications to multi-agent system engineering and robotics. We outline
the generic characteristics of both approaches from the MAS perspective,
and identify three elements that we believe should serve as criteria
for how and when to apply either of the approaches. We demonstrate
our analysis on a specific example of load balancing problem in robotics.
We also show that under certain assumptions on the communication
and the external environment, both bottom-up and top-down methodologies
produce very similar solutions.
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