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Showing papers on "Contract Net Protocol published in 2017"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Considering that uncertainty in task allocation can be a great advantage in the disaster environment, and considering these factors in the decision-making procedure, the proposed method has improved confidence in allocating tasks with fewer errors.
Abstract: The uncertainty of task allocation in disaster environments is challenging both practically and theoretically. In real environments, agents encounter uncertain factors for the selection and execution of tasks. The present methods for task allocation seem inadequate in such environments. This paper aims to provide an efficient approach to improving the task allocation, despite the uncertainty in disaster environments. Therefore, after deduction of the major uncertainties in disaster environments, we propose a method for the agents’ decision-making about the task allocation. The allocation procedure includes four phases of ordering the tasks, choosing the coordinating agent, implementing the auction by considering the uncertainties, performing tasks and observing the real environment. The main innovation of this research is using the concepts of interval uncertainty in the task ordering as well as in the auction implementing. The results were obtained by comparing the proposed method with the contract net protocol (CNP) at three scales. In addition, the results were evaluated in the presence of uncertainties at different ranges. On average, the proposed method was better than the CNP in terms of search and rescue (SAR) operation time (124 min), the number of dead people (8) and the number of incorrect allocations (180 tasks). The uncertainties range in the tasks’ decision-making procedure affected SAR operation time by more than 26%. Therefore, considering that uncertainty in task allocation can be a great advantage in the disaster environment, and considering these factors in the decision-making procedure, we have improved confidence in allocating tasks with fewer errors.

46 citations


Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Oct 2017
TL;DR: A mobility on-demand simulation that reflects its system behavior on an operational level and confirms the feasibility of operating a shared autonomous vehicle fleet with both high service levels and vehicle utilization is proposed.
Abstract: Recent technological progress in automation and electrification gives room to create sustainable, costumer-orientated and economical transportation solutions. For vehicle-based systems, on-demand mobility services are considered to play an important role. To support decision making in an early stage of development, we propose a mobility on-demand simulation that reflects its system behavior on an operational level. Its core forms a discrete event simulation combined with a multi-agent approach. The main entities are fully-automated electric taxis, a central dispatcher and customers. All agents live in a shared environment consisting of a street network and charging infrastructure. The dispatching center handles matchmaking between customers and vehicles with the help of a Contract Net Protocol. Taxis compete for customer transportation requests broadcasted by the dispatcher. Routing and charging decisions are made individually by each agent. A simulation study evaluates three mobility on-demand services for Munich. The basic scenario analyzes a limited service area, where a shared vehicle fleet is responsible for the entire local traffic demand. The second scenario considers additional commuter trips entering or leaving this zone. The third scenario investigates a citywide operation. Key findings confirm the feasibility of operating a shared autonomous vehicle fleet with both high service levels and vehicle utilization.

41 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper has developed a scheduling system based on a FIPA compliant MAS platform to solve the dynamic patient scheduling problem and compares the performance of the approach with a heuristic rule commonly used in practice.
Abstract: Scheduling patients in a hospital is a challenging issue due to distributed organizational structure, dynamic medical workflows, variability of resources and the computational complexity involved. It calls for a sustainable architecture and a flexible scheduling scheme that can dynamically allocate available resources to promptly react to patients in a hospital and deliver healthcare services timely. The objectives of this paper are to propose a viable and systematic approach to develop a scalable and sustainable scheduling system based on multi-agent system (MAS) to shorten patient stay in a hospital and plan schedules based on the medical workflows and available resources. To develop a patient scheduling system, we combine MAS architecture, contract net protocol (CNP), workflow specification models based on Petri nets and the cooperative distributed problem solving concept. To achieve interoperability and sustainability, Petri Net Markup Language (PNML) and XML are used to specify precedence constraints of operations in medical workflows and capabilities of resource agents, respectively. Agent communication language (ACL) and CNP are used to achieve communication and negotiation/mutual selection of agents. A collaborative algorithm is invoked by individual agents to optimize the schedules locally based on a problem formulation automatically obtained by Petri net models. We have developed a scheduling system based on a FIPA compliant MAS platform to solve the dynamic patient scheduling problem. To illustrate the benefit of our approach, we compare the performance of our method with a heuristic rule commonly used in practice. In addition, we also analyze and verify scalability of our approach by experiments.

28 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
25 Sep 2017-Energies
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed an auto-configuration function for the microgrid to adjust the operation schedule followed by any event or integration of a new device by using a multi-agent system.
Abstract: Monitoring the status of existing devices and identification of newly added devices is required in microgrids to adjust the operation schedule followed by any event or integration of a new device Therefore, in this paper, automatic reconfiguration of microgrids is considered after the addition of a new device or change in the operation status of an existing device by using a multiagent system This capability of the microgrid is named as auto-configuration function, which is performed by the auto-configurator agent In case of addition of a new device, the auto-configurator agent is responsible for authorization and registration of the newly added device In case of change in status of any existing device, the status information is updated After integration of a new device or change in status of an existing device, re-optimization is carried out by the energy management system (EMS) agent Agent communication language (ACL) is used to develop a modified contract net protocol (MCNP) for communication among different agents EMS agent and auto-configurator agent exchange information for economic rescheduling of the microgrid components Simulation results have shown that the proposed method can be used for optimal operation of microgrids when the configuration changes due to the addition/removal of a device

27 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This research proposes a Multi-Agent System framework, specifically considering the Indian scenario of paddy procurement operations, and formally defines procurement, allocation, milling and scheduling agents under this context and explicitly state the interaction protocols and related algorithms.

19 citations


Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Oct 2017
TL;DR: The simulation results show compared with the traditional electricity business model, the market participants who use the proposed TES can gain more economic benefits as well as protecting their own privacy.
Abstract: Distributed energy resources (DERs) include distributed generations (DGs), distributed energy storages (DESs), and the demand response resources (DRRs). With the increasing penetration of DERs in distribution network, more and more users change from power consumers to prosumers which have great influences on distribution network as well as generate new business models on the demand side. Based on the emerging change of the power system, this paper proposes a transactive energy scheme (TES) based on multi-factor evaluation and contract net protocol to determine energy trading strategies among prosumers to realize economic and stable operation of distribution network. In the proposed TES, a TE market is built in the deregulatory retail power market. Power consumers, smart homes, industrial parks, or virtual power plants with DERs take the initiative as transactive nodes (TNs), and the peer to peer transactions among TNs in TE market can be carried out based on the multi-factor evaluation and contract protocol. When a TN cannot meet its own electricity demand, it launches the contract net to other TNs, requests to carry on the electric energy transaction, and determines the selected TNs according to the multi-factor evaluation. The simulation results show compared with the traditional electricity business model, the market participants who use the proposed TES can gain more economic benefits as well as protecting their own privacy.

10 citations


Book ChapterDOI
12 Sep 2017
TL;DR: A semi-centralized protocol is proposed to overcome the limitation of the existing protocols and enable robust and adaptable solution in a highly dynamic environment and shows significant improvement in time and communication overhead under various conditions.
Abstract: An important application of multi-agent systems is task negotiation. The existing protocols for controlling negotiation in multi-agent systems are either centralized or decentralized. The centralized protocols suffer from dependency on the central agent. If any problem occurs at the central agent, such as shutting down or becoming slow, the whole system will be blocked. By contrast, decentralized protocol has insufficient information about the agents being used, which might result in a high possibility of agent failure due to internal or external factors, such as losing connections. In this paper, a semi-centralized protocol is proposed to overcome the limitation of the existing protocols and enable robust and adaptable solution in a highly dynamic environment. The outcome of Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE’s) implementation proves the capabilities of the proposed protocol. In comparison with the Contract Net Protocol, the proposed protocol shows significant improvement in time and communication overhead under various conditions.

6 citations


Book ChapterDOI
18 Oct 2017
TL;DR: This work modeled the process of emergency care in the operating room with an IDSS embedded in a system multi agent (MAS), assisted by a decision support system for planning elective surgery and the allocation of the necessary human and medical resources.
Abstract: The effective management of the hospital system user depends on multiple factors including the anticipation and responsiveness. A system of this exceptional situation is characterized by sudden onset of several elements that disrupt the execution of operatory program underway. Dealing with this kind of situations, the hospital must have a tool to help making decisions on time. In this context, we modeled the process of emergency care in the operating room with an IDSS (Interactive Support System Decision) embedded in a system multi agent (MAS). Specifically, the agents are assisted by a decision support system for planning elective surgery and the allocation of the necessary human and medical resources. Agents express their preferences using the method ELECTRE III to resolve the differences. The negotiation mechanism is based on the CNP (Contract Net Protocol). The protocol developed on JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) provides message exchanges between agents and their proposes predefined behaviors. The approach is tested through simple scenarios

4 citations


Journal Article
TL;DR: This paper proposed a new organizational structure of multi-agent for focused crawlers, in which the agents were divided into three categories, namely F-Agent (Facilitator-Agent), As- agent (Assistance-Agent) and C-agent (Crawler-Agent).
Abstract: Multi-Agent theory which is used for communication and collaboration among focused crawlers has been proved that it can improve the precision of returned result significantly. In this paper, we proposed a new organizational structure of multi-agent for focused crawlers, in which the agents were divided into three categories, namely F-Agent (Facilitator-Agent), As-Agent (Assistance-Agent) and C-Agent (Crawler-Agent). They worked on their own responsibilities and cooperated mutually to complete a common task of web crawling. In our proposed architecture of focused crawlers based on multi-agent system, we emphasized discussing the collaborative process among multiple agents. To control the cooperation among agents, we proposed a negotiation protocol based on the contract net protocol and achieved the collaboration model of focused crawlers based on multi-agent by JADE. At last, the comparative experiment results showed that our focused crawlers had higher precision and efficiency than other crawlers using the algorithms with breadth-first, best-first, etc.

3 citations


01 Jul 2017
TL;DR: Results show that the Clustering Task Assignment Approach CTA can be applied to time non critical applications because the solution quality found are outstanding in comparison to other approaches.
Abstract: Time critical task assignment problems are frequently found in operating systems and flight control applications. Tasks have to be assigned in less than one second, otherwise operating systems don’t work properly or catastrophes could happen. For instance, in a flight control real time application, one wrong task assignment decision could result in an airplane accident. To make things worse, these crucial decisions have to be taken in milliseconds, therefore, the efficiency of these kind of algorithm has to be optimized. In order to address time critical task assignment problems, the Clustering Task Assignment Approach CTA is proposed. The idea is to cluster the groups into tasks with the best candidates(free agents) according to a heuristic. In other words, the place where agents needs to reach(task facility) is designed as a cluster centroid and the agents inside each cluster are the candidates to execute each task. Agents compete with each other by means of an objective function in order to define the assigned task. This heuristic is capable of dramatically reduce the number of calls to the score function, thus assigning groups of agents efficiently to groups of tasks. The algorithm is compared against the well known Contract Net Protocol(CNET) and outperform it in terms of speed reducing the number of calls to the score function in 400%, the solution quality is 28% better as well. This algorithm was designed to work with time critical applications in which agents have to move from one place to another and when the score function is very costly. However results show that it can also be applied to time non critical applications because the solution quality found are outstanding in comparison to other approaches.

2 citations


Proceedings ArticleDOI
05 Oct 2017
TL;DR: Based on the background of air and missile defense distributed element corporative engagement, the interception task allocation problem of multiple weapon units with multiple targets under network condition is analyzed and a mathematical model of task allocation is established by combat task decomposition.
Abstract: Based on the background of air and missile defense distributed element corporative engagement, the interception task allocation problem of multiple weapon units with multiple targets under network condition is analyzed. Firstly, a mathematical model of task allocation is established by combat task decomposition. Secondly, the initialization assignment based on auction contract and the adjustment allocation scheme based on swap contract were introduced to the task allocation. Finally, through the simulation calculation of typical situation, the model can be used to solve the task allocation problem in complex combat environment.

Book ChapterDOI
16 Aug 2017
TL;DR: This paper focuses on online managing Earth observation satellite constellation under dynamic environment, like detecting, observing, and tracking forest fires or volcanic eruptions without ground interval and proposes the novel online coordination mechanism and the core algorithm based on Contract Net Protocol.
Abstract: This paper focuses on online managing Earth observation satellite constellation under dynamic environment, like detecting, observing, and tracking forest fires or volcanic eruptions without ground interval. In reality, the inter-satellite communication is limited by practical reasons. The objective is to maximize the total profit of the satellite constellation by increasing the efficiency of onboard resources and coordinating the different satellite to provide a greater level of responsiveness and adaptability, subject to communication time window constraints and observation time window constraints. Firstly, the online scheduling algorithm for a single satellite is proposed on basis of revision techniques and progressive techniques. Then, we propose the novel online coordination mechanism and the core algorithm based on Contract Net Protocol.

DOI
01 Dec 2017
TL;DR: A distributed multi-agent-based interval type-2 fuzzy (IT2F) expert system for scheduling steel continuous casting and a simple procedure is proposed to calculate the total earliness and tardiness penalty when the due date’s MFs are IT2F.
Abstract: This paper deals with a multi-agent-based interval type-2 fuzzy (IT2F) expert systemfor scheduling steel continuous casting. Continuous caster scheduling is a complex and extensiveprocess that needs expert staff. In this study, a distributed multi-agent-based structure is proposed as asolution. The agents used herein can cooperate with each other via various communication protocols.To facilitate such communication, an appropriate negotiation protocol (i.e., contract net protocol)is proposed. The due dates specified by expert staff are represented by IT2F membership functions(MFs). As a part of the objective functions, a simple procedure is proposed to calculate the totalearliness and tardiness penalty when the due date’s MFs are IT2F. The proposed hybrid multi-agentbasedsystem combines the multi-agent systems with type-2 fuzzy concepts which conforms to thereal-world continuous casting problem.