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.

Software agent-based applications, platforms and development kits

Abstract: The JADE Platform and Experiences with Mobile MAS Applications.- A-globe: Agent Development Platform with Inaccessibility and Mobility Support.- Supporting Agent Development in Erlang through the eXAT Platform.- Living Systems(R) Technology Suite.- Multi Agent System Development Kit.- An Integrated Development Environment for Electronic Institutions.- Jadex: A BDI-Agent System Combining Middleware and Reasoning.- Component Agent Framework for Non-Experts (CAFnE) Toolkit.- The WSDL2Agent Tool.- WS2JADE: A Tool for Run-time Deployment and Control of Web Services as JADE Agent Services.- A System for Analysis of Multi-Issue Negotiation.- FuzzyMAN: An Agent-based E-Marketplace with a Voice and Mobile User Interface.- Efficient Agent Communication in Wireless Environments.- AMETAS - the Asynchronous MEssage Transfer Agent System.- Tracy: An Extensible Plugin-Oriented Software Architecture for Mobile Agent Toolkits.- The Packet-World: A Test Bed for Investigating Situated Multi-Agent Systems.- Decommitment in a Competitive Multi-Agent Transportation Setting.- TeamWorker: An Agent-Based Support System for Mobile Task Execution.

Resolving conflict and inconsistency in norm-regulated virtual organizations

Abstract: Norm-governed virtual organizations define, govern and facilitate coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in societies of agents. With an explicit account of norms, openness in virtual organizations can be achieved: new components, designed by various parties, can be seamlessly accommodated. We focus on virtual organizations realised as multiagent systems, in which human and software agents interact to achieve individual and global goals. However, any realistic account of norms should address their dynamic nature: norms will change as agents interact with each other and their environment. Due to the changing nature of norms or due to norms stemming from different virtual organizations, there will be situations when an action is simultaneously permitted and prohibited, that is, a conflict arises. Likewise, there will be situations when an action is both obliged and prohibited, that is, an inconsistency arises. We introduce an approach, based on first-order unification, to detect and resolve such conflicts and inconsistencies. In our proposed solution, we annotate a norm with the set of values their variables should not have in order to avoid a conflict or an inconsistency with another norm. Our approach neatly accommodates the domain-dependent interrelations among actions and the indirect conflicts/inconsistencies these may cause. More generally, we can capture a useful notion of inter-agent (and inter-role) delegation of actions and norms associated to them, and use it to address conflicts/inconsistencies caused by action delegation. We illustrate our approach with an e-Science example in which agents support Grid services.

Modeling the characteristics of system of systems

Abstract: The term system of systems (SoS) has become a quite common expression with no single accepted definition. Based on analysis [1], five characteristics have been identified from an assortment of SoS descriptions. These characteristics are named autonomy, belonging, connectivity, diversity, and emergence, whose degrees of strength determines the foundation of any SoS. To utilize these characteristics, concrete definitions are presented in context and then applied to the development of a theoretical model. The resulting model forms the basis of a generic SoS instantiated as an agent-based modeling simulation. This simulation demonstrates the appropriateness of the characteristics and can be used to explore further aspects of a SoS. Modeling and experimenting on these characteristics will contribute to the field of systems engineering by providing a means to increase our understanding of SoS.

Towards autonomic computing: agent-based modelling, dynamical systems analysis, and decentralised control

Abstract: Autonomic computing aims to deal with the complexity of today systems by letting the system handle the complexity autonomously. This is a very hard and challenging domain because current systems are complex, distributed, interconnected and rapidly changing systems. We firmly believe that a main challenge in conquering autonomic systems is the integration of three existing research communities: the multiagent systems community allows natural modelling of the system and explicitly considers autonomous behaviour and distributed interaction, dynamical systems theory allows analysis of the dynamics of these models and the decentralised control community can use insights gathered from the analysis to create decentralised control mechanisms to control the dynamics of autonomic systems. We describe this generic perspective on autonomic computing, give an overview of the relevant work done in each community and describe the contribution of each community in conquering autonomic computing.

A multi-issue negotiation protocol among agents with nonlinear utility functions

Abstract: Multi-Issue Negotiation protocols have been studied very widely and represent a promising field since most of negotiation problems in the real-world are complex ones including multiple issues. In particular, in reality issues are constrained each other. This makes agents' utilities nonlinear. There have been a lot of work on multi-issue negotiations. However, there have been very few work that focus on nonlinear utility spaces. In this paper, we assume agents have nonlinear utility spaces. For the linear utility domain, agents can aggregate the utilities of the issue-values by simple linear summation. In the real world, such aggregations are unrealistic. For example, we cannot just add up the value of car's tires and the value of car's engine when engineers design a car. In this paper, we propose an auction-based multiple-issue negotiation protocol among nonlinear utility agents. Our negotiation protocol employs several techniques, i.e., adjusting sampling, auction-based maximization of social welfare. Our experimental results show that our method can outperform the existing simple methods in particular in the huge utility space that can be often found in the real-world. Further, theoretically, our negotiation protocol can guarantee the completeness if some conditions are satisfied.