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.

Using Domain-Independent Exception Handling Services to Enable Robust Open Multi-Agent Systems: The Case of Agent Death

Abstract: This paper addresses a simple but critical question: how can we create robust multi-agent systems out of the often unreliable agents and infrastructures we can expect to find in open systems contexts? We propose an approach to this problem based on distinct exception handling (EH) services that enact coordination protocol-specific but domain-independent strategies to monitor agent systems for problems (‘exceptions’) and intervene when necessary to avoid or resolve them. The value of this approach is demonstrated for the ‘agent death’ exception in the Contract Net protocol; we show through simulation that the EH service approach provides substantially improved performance compared to existing approaches in a way that is appropriate for open multi-agent systems.

Supporting internet-scale multi-agent systems

Abstract: The Internet provides a large-scale environment for (intelligent) software agents. Agents are autonomous (mobile) processes, capable of communication with other agents, interaction with the world, and adaptation to changes in their environment. Current approaches to support agents are not geared for large-scale settings. The near future holds thousands of agents, hosts, messages, and migratory movements of agents. These large-scale aspects require a new approach to facilitate the development of agent applications and support. AgentScape is a scalable agent-based distributed system, described in this paper, that aims at tackling these aspects.

Decentralized Markov Decision Processes with Event-Driven Interactions

Abstract: Decentralized MDPs provide a powerful formal framework for planning in multi-agent systems, but the complexity of the model limits its usefulness. We study in this paper a class of DEC-MDPs that restricts the interactions between the agents to a structured, event-driven dependency. These dependencies can model locking a shared resource or temporal enabling constraints, both of which arise frequently in practice. The complexity of this class of problems is shown to be no harder than exponential in the number of states and doubly exponential in the number of dependencies. Since the number of dependencies is much smaller than the number of states for many problems, this is significantly better than the doubly exponential (in the state space) complexity of DEC-MDPs. We also demonstrate how an algorithm we previously developed can be used to solve problems in this class both optimally and approximately. Experimental work indicates that this solution technique is significantly faster than a naive policy search approach.

Optimal Output Regulation for Heterogeneous Multiagent Systems via Adaptive Dynamic Programming

Abstract: In this paper, the optimal output regulation problem for partially model-free heterogeneous linear multiagent systems with disturbance generated by an exosystem is addressed by using adaptive dynamic programming and double compensator method. The topology graph for the information exchange of the agents has a spanning tree. The dynamic of individual agent is assumed to be nonidentical and of different dimensions. One distributed compensator is designed to deal with the nonidentical agents, and the other compensator is used to handle the optimal performance index. By constructing the double compensator, the distributed feedback control laws are designed to make the output of each agent synchronize with the reference output and minimize the energy of the output error simultaneously. To overcome the lack of the dynamics knowledge of each agent, a novel online policy iteration algorithm is developed to obtain the optimal feedback gain matrix. Finally, two examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of our results.

Development of an agent-based system for manufacturing control and coordination with ontology and RFID technology

Abstract: Integrating physical objects with the corresponding enterprise applications any time any where is the essential issue for a real-time enterprise. This study proposes a multi-agent system framework called agent-based manufacturing control and coordination (AMCC) system, a agent-based framework using ontology and RFID technology to monitor and control dynamic production flows and also to improve the traceability and visibility of mass customization manufacturing processes. The capabilities offered by multi-agent systems to respond to RFID events in real-time and a broad class of agent design and coordination issue regarding just in time (JIT) and just in sequence (JIS) manufacturing processes are also exploited in this study. To validate the proposed framework, case study of a bicycle manufacturing company is used to demonstrate how the proposed framework can benefit its JIT production. Finally, an example prototype system is implemented to demonstrate the concept of the proposed framework.