An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems.

Many researchers have demonstrated that the organizational design employed by an agent system can have a significant, quantitative effect on its performance characteristics A range of organizational strategies have emerged from this line of research, each with different strengths and weaknesses In this article we present a survey of the major organizational paradigms used in multi-agent systems These include hierarchies, holarchies, coalitions, teams, congregations, societies, federations, markets, and matrix organizations We will provide a description of each, discuss their advantages and disadvantages, and provide examples of how they may be instantiated and maintained This summary will facilitate the comparative evaluation of organizational styles, allowing designers to first recognize the spectrum of possibilities, and then guiding the selection of an appropriate organizational design for a particular domain and environment

https://cse.unl.edu/~lksoh/Classes/CSCE990AMAS_Spring13/Seminar04.pdf

A survey of multi-agent organizational paradigms

The European Commission's eEurope initiative aims to bring every citizen, home, school, business and administration online to create a digitally literate Europe. The value lies not in the objective itself, but in its ability to facilitate the advance of Europe into new ways of living and working. Just as in the first literacy revolution, our lives will change in ways never imagined. The vision of eEurope is underpinned by a technological infrastructure that is now taken for granted. Yet it provides us with the ability to pioneer radical new ways of doing business, of undertaking science, and, of managing our everyday activities. Key to this step change is the development of appropriate mechanisms to automate and improve existing tasks, to anticipate desired actions on our behalf (as human users) and to undertake them, while at the same time enabling us to stay involved and retain as much control as required. For many, these mechanisms are now being realised by agent technologies, which are already providing dramatic and sustained benefits in several business and industry domains, including B2B exchanges, supply chain management, car manufacturing, and so on. While there are many real successes of agent technologies to report, there is still much to be done in research and development for the full benefits to be achieved. This is especially true in the context of environments of pervasive computing devices that are envisaged in coming years. This paper describes the current state-of-the-art of agent technologies and identifies trends and challenges that will need to be addressed over the next 10 years to progress the field and realise the benefits. It offers a roadmap that is the result of discussions among participants from over 150 organisations including universities, research institutions, large multinational corporations and smaller IT start-up companies. The roadmap identifies successes and challenges, and points to future possibilities and demands; agent technologies are fundamental to the realisation of next generation computing.

A Manifesto for Agent Technology: Towards Next Generation Computing

In this paper we introduce a formal framework for the construction of normative multiagent systems, based on Searle's notion of the construction of social reality. Within the structure of normative multiagent systems we distinguish between regulative norms that describe obligations, prohibitions and permissions, and constitutive norms that regulate the creation of institutional facts as well as the modification of the normative system itself. Using the metaphor of normative systems as agents, we attribute mental attitudes to the normative system. In particular, we formalize regulative norms as goals of the normative system, and constitutive norms as beliefs of the normative system. Agents reason about norm creation using recursive modelling.

/pdf/regulative-and-constitutive-norms-in-normative-multiagent-16ajr541xe.pdf

Regulative and constitutive norms in normative multiagent systems

A key question in the field of agent-oriented software engineering is how the kind and extent of autonomy owned by computational agents can be appropriately captured. As long as this question is not answered convincingly, it is very unlikely that agent-oriented software (having "autonomy" as a real property rather than just a catchy label) gets broadly accepted in industry and commerce. In particular, in order to be of practical value an answer to this question has to come in form of concrete techniques which enable developers of agent-oriented software to precisely capture the scope of behavioral freedom and self-control they want to concede to a computational agent. This paper describes two such techniques. First, a formal schema called RNS for specifying the boundaries of autonomous agent behavior. This schema is conceptually grounded in sociological role theory, and employs the concepts of role, norm and sanction to capture agent autonomy. What makes RNS particularly valuable and distinct from related autonomy specification approaches is, among other things, its strong expressiveness and high precision. Second, a software tool called XRNS which enables developers to easily generate RNS-based autonomy specifications in XML format. Encoded in XML, these specifications are easily accessible to all stakeholders in an agent-oriented software under development, and can be even processed directly by XML enabled computational agents.

/pdf/capturing-agent-autonomy-in-roles-and-xml-n797ozpy26.pdf

Capturing agent autonomy in roles and XML

Despite many efforts to understand why and how norms can be incorporated into agents and multi-agent systems, there are still several gaps that must be filled. This paper focuses on one of the most important processes concerned with norms, namely that of norm compliance. However, instead of taking a static view of norms in which norms are straighforwardly complied with, we adopt a more dynamic view in which an agent's motivations, and therefore its autonomy, play an important role. We analyse the motivations that an agent might have to comply with norms, and then formally propose a set of strategies for use by agents in norm-based systems. Finally, through some simulation experiments, the effects of autonomous norm compliance in both individual agents and societies are analysed.

/pdf/constraining-autonomy-through-norms-i7bu26evbu.pdf

Constraining autonomy through norms

One of the key issues in the computational representation of open societies relates to the introduction of norms that help to cope with the heterogeneity, the autonomy and the diversity of interests among their members. Research regarding this issue presents two omissions. One is the lack of a canonical model of norms that facilitates their implementation, and that allows us to describe the processes of reasoning about norms. The other refers to considering, in the model of normative multi-agent systems, the perspective of individual agents and what they might need to effectively reason about the society in which they participate. Both are the concerns of this paper, and the main objective is to present a formal normative framework for agent-based systems that facilitates their implementation.

/pdf/a-normative-framework-for-agent-based-systems-45lx4637v8.pdf

A normative framework for agent-based systems

Several innovative software applications such as those required by ambient intelligence, the semantic grid, e-commerce and e-marketing, can be viewed as open societies of heterogeneous and self-interested agents in which social order is achieved through norms. For agents to participate in these kinds of societies, it is enough that they are able to represent and fulfill norms, and to recognise the authority of certain agents. However, to voluntarily be part of a society or to voluntarily leave it, other characteristics of agents are needed. To find these characteristics we observe that on the one hand, autonomous agents have their own goals and, sometimes, they act on behalf of others whose goals must be satisfied. On the other, we observe that by being members, agents must comply with some norms that can be in clear conflict with their goals. Consequently, agents must evaluate the positive or negative effects of norms on their goals before making a decision concerning their social behaviour. Providing a model of autonomous agents that undertake this kind of norm reasoning is the aim of this paper.

/pdf/normative-agent-reasoning-in-dynamic-societies-1ckp16hu00.pdf

Normative Agent Reasoning in Dynamic Societies

https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2007/933/pdf/07122.LopezyLopezFabiola.Paper.933.pdf/

Fabiola López y López

Papers

Constraining autonomy through norms

A normative framework for agent-based systems

Normative Agent Reasoning in Dynamic Societies

A Normative Framework for Agent-Based Systems

A Normative Framework for Agent-Based Systems.