Showing papers presented at "European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems in 2008"

Instrumenting Multi-Agent Organisations with Artifacts to Support Reputation Processes

Abstract: Reputation is often cited as an instrument to enforce norm compliance: agents that do not follow the norms have their reputation decreased. Conceiving reputation as a collective process, i.e. a kind of shared voices as proposed by Conte & Paolucci, is not a simple task. In this paper, we propose a rst step in this direction by instrumenting multi-agent organisation with an artifact that publishes some objective evaluations of the performance of the agents with respect to their behaviour within the organisation. The members of the organisation can then read these evaluations and build up their reputation of others. The artifact serves thus as an instrument that aid in the building of the reputation of the agents. We propose that the evaluation of the agents is not simply based on their obedience to norms, but also considers their proactiveness and their contribution to the success of collective tasks that are being executed in the organisation. This proposal is detailed and exempli ed in the context of the Moise+ organisational model supported by a set of organisational artifacts as proposed in the ora4mas approach.

On Partial Deduction and Conversational Agents

Abstract: Agents are situated autonomous entities that perceive and act in their environment, and communicate with other agents. An agent usually starts a conversation by querying another agent because it needs to satisfy a specific goal. This process allocates a new goal to the agent receiving the initial query, starting new dialogs with other agents, generating a recursive interaction. The generation of this kind of dialog is interesting when the system has the possibility of generating conditional answers with imprecise and uncertain values. We consider simple deliberative rule-based agents that proactively try to satisfy their goals. The mechanism to achieve this dialogs is based in the specialization of the mental state of agents, by means of the partial deduction of rule bases.

Computationally-efficient Mixed Auctions

Abstract: Mixed Multi-Unit Combinatorial Auctions (MMUCA) offer a high potential to automate assembly of supply chains of agents offering goods and services. Their winner determination problem (WDP) is an NP-hard problem that can be mapped into an integer program. Nonetheless, the computational cost of a solver that does not take into account the structure of the problem is very high, hindering the application of MMUCAs to realistic scenarios. Here we outline how to take advantage of the topology of the problem to eciently solve MMUCAs. Source URL: https://www.iiia.csic.es/en/node/54842 Links [1] https://www.iiia.csic.es/en/staff/andrea-giovannucci [2] https://www.iiia.csic.es/en/staff/meritxell-vinyals [3] https://www.iiia.csic.es/en/staff/juan-rodr%C3%ADguez-aguilar [4] https://www.iiia.csic.es/en/staff/jes%C3%BAs-cerquides