Mulan

(Multi-Agent Nets)

Mulan is a Petri net-based reference model of an MAS implementation. It utilizes reference nets as the specification formalism, which -- as a nets-within-nets paradigm -- allows for a natural nesting of system units. The basic model consists of four layers. These are the MAS infrastructure, the agent platforms, the agents and the agent internal components. The figure shows the schematic Mulan model with its four layers. Please note that the four layers define three basic forms of nesting / embedding.