Multi-agent system

About: Multi-agent system is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 27978 publications have been published within this topic receiving 465191 citations. The topic is also known as: multi-agent systems & multiagent system.

Improving fault-tolerance by replicating agents

Abstract: Despite the considerable efforts spent on developing multi-agent systems the actual number of deployed systems is surprisingly small. One of the reasons for the significant gap between developed and deployed systems is their brittleness.The absence of centralized control components makes it difficult to detect and treat failures of individual agents thus risking fault-propagation that can seriously impact the performance of the system. Using redundancy by replication of individual agents within a multi-agent system is one possible approach for improving fault-tolerance. Unfortunately the introduction of replicates leads to increased complexity and system load. In this paper we examine the use of transparent agent replication, a technique in which the replicates of agents appear and act as one entity thus avoiding an increase in system complexity and minimizing additional system loads. The paper defines transparent agent replication and identifies the key challenges in using it. Special attention is given to the inter-agent communication, read/write consistency, resource locking, resource synthesis and state synchronization. An implementation of the transparent agent replication for the FIPA-OS framework is presented and the results of testing it within a real-world multi-agent system are shown.

Open protocol design for complex interactions in multi-agent systems

Abstract: This paper proposes a generic approach or protocol engineering through the analysis,the specification,and the verification of such protocols when several agents are involved. This approach is three folds:1)Starting from semi-formal specification by means o Protocol Diagrams (AUML),both formal specification of interaction protocols and their verification are allowed thanks to Colored Petri Nets (CPN);2) Debugging and qualitative analysis o interactions are based on distributed observation associated with the true concurrency semantics (i.e.CPN unfolding)and ;3)CPN formalism is extended to Recursive CPN (RCPN)with abstraction in order to deal with open protocols.The main interest of abstraction is the design of fexible protocols giving agents more autonomy during interaction.In addition,abstraction allows concise modeling and easier verification. measures,performance measures .

CArtAgO: a framework for prototyping artifact-based environments in MAS

Abstract: This paper describes CArtAgO, a framework for developing artifact-based working environments for multiagent systems (MAS) The framework is based on the notion of artifact, as a basic abstraction to model and engineer objects, resources and tools designed to be used and manipulated by agents at run-time to support their working activities, in particular the cooperative ones CArtAgO enables MAS engineers to design and develop suitable artifacts, and to extend existing agent platforms with the possibility to create artifact-based working environments, programming agents to exploit them In this paper, first the abstract model and architecture of CArtAgO is described, then a first Java-based prototype technology is discussed

Bounded control of network connectivity in multi-agent systems

Abstract: A distributed control law that guarantees connectivity maintenance in a network of multiple mobile agents is presented. The control law, which lets the agents perform formation manoeuvres, respects sensor limitations by allowing each agent to only take into account agents within its sensing radius. In contrast to previous approaches to the problem, the proposed control law does not attain infinite values whenever an edge of the communication graph tends to be lost. This is achieved via the use of decentralised navigation functions, which are bounded potential fields. The navigation functions are defined to take into account the connectivity maintenance objective. The authors first treat the case of connectivity maintenance for a static communication graph and then extend the result to the case of dynamic graphs. The results are illustrated on a formation control problem.