Following the experience done in previous competitions, it has been developed the 2000 version of PaSo-Team (The University
of PAdua Simulated Robot SOccer Team), a reviewed release of Paso-Team99. During the RoboCup ’99 competition in Stockholm
some teams suffered syncronization problems with the soccer server: these problems greatly influenced their performances and
prevented them from playing successfully. While developing PaSo-Team 2000 the main efforts were dedicated to better understanding
timing and syncronization techniques for real-time multi-agent systems. Following the interesting experience done by Kostiadis
in developing the Essex Wizzard team [1] we redesigned the syncronization procedures using the multi-threading paradigm. Solving syncronization in a multi-threading
environment gives important theoretical hints to approch the coordination for those multi-agent systems made by thousand of
very simple concurrent interacting modules. During the Stockholm competition PaSo-Team99 suffered another major problem regarding
the actions a player must take when the game is stopped (i.e. when the ball is outside or when a team is offside). For example
if a player has to throw-in the ball, he must go outside the field, turn toward the field and eventually kick the ball, performing
different actions even if the state of the game doesn’t change. As in a reactive architecture the current behaviour can change
only when the game state changes, PaSo-Team99 introduced virtual states to ensure a change of behaviour. Instead in PaSo-Team
2000 we simplify the design of these actions introducing multi-step behaviours.
Acknowledgements This research work could not be done without the enthusiastic participation of the students of Electronics and Computer Engineering
Undergraduate Division of Padua University Engineering School. Financial support has been provided by both CNR, under the
Special Research Project on “Real-Time Computing for Real-World” and MURST, under the 60% and 40% Grants.