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.

Secure tropos: a security-oriented extension of the tropos methodology

Abstract: Although security plays an important role in the development of multiagent systems, a careful analysis of software development processes shows that the definition of security requirements is, usually, considered after the design of the system. One of the reasons is the fact that agent oriented software engineering methodologies have not integrated security concerns throughout their developing stages. The integration of security concerns during the whole range of the development stages can help towards the development of more secure multiagent systems. In this paper we introduce extensions to the Tropos methodology to enable it to model security concerns throughout the whole development process. A description of the new concepts and modelling activities is given along with a discussion on how these concepts and modelling activities are integrated to the current stages of Tropos. A real life case study from the health and social care sector is used to illustrate the approach.

Network Topology and Communication-Computation Tradeoffs in Decentralized Optimization

Abstract: In decentralized optimization, nodes cooperate to minimize an overall objective function that is the sum (or average) of per-node private objective functions. Algorithms interleave local computations with communication among all or a subset of the nodes. Motivated by a variety of applications..decentralized estimation in sensor networks, fitting models to massive data sets, and decentralized control of multirobot systems, to name a few..significant advances have been made toward the development of robust, practical algorithms with theoretical performance guarantees. This paper presents an overview of recent work in this area. In general, rates of convergence depend not only on the number of nodes involved and the desired level of accuracy, but also on the structure and nature of the network over which nodes communicate (e.g., whether links are directed or undirected, static or time varying). We survey the state-of-theart algorithms and their analyses tailored to these different scenarios, highlighting the role of the network topology.

Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice

Abstract: The concept of an agent has become important in both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mainstream computer science. Our aim in this paper is to point the reader at what we perceive to be the most important theoretical and practical issues associated with the design and construction of intelligent agents. For convenience, we divide these issues into three areas (though as the reader will see, the divisions are at times somewhat arbitrary). Agent theory is concerned with the question of what an agent is, and the use of mathematical formalisms for representing and reasoning about the properties of agents. Agent architectures can be thought of as software engineering models of agents;researchers in this area are primarily concerned with the problem of designing software or hardware systems that will satisfy the properties specified by agent theorists. Finally, agent languages are software systems for programming and experimenting with agents; these languages may embody principles proposed by theorists. The paper is not intended to serve as a tutorial introduction to all the issues mentioned; we hope instead simply to identify the most important issues, and point to work that elaborates on them. The article includes a short review of current and potential applications of agent technology.

A multi-agent approach to power system restoration

Abstract: This paper proposes a multi-agent approach to power system restoration. The proposed system consists of a number of bus agents (BAGS) and a single facilitator agent (FAG). BAG is developed to decide a suboptimal target configuration after a fault occurrence by interacting with other BAGS based on only locally available information, while FAG is to act as a manager in the decision process. The interaction of several simple agents leads to a dynamic system, allowing efficient approximation of a solution. Simulation results have demonstrated that this method is able to reach suboptimal target configurations, which are favorably compared with those obtained by a mathematical programming approach.

A Social Semantics for Agent Communication Languages

Abstract: The ability to communicate is one of the salient properties of agents. Although a number of agent communication languages (ACLs) have been developed, obtaining a suitable formal semantics for ACLs remains one of the greatest challenges of multiagent systems theory. Previous semantics have largely been mentalistic in their orientation and are based solely on the beliefs and intentions of the participating agents. Such semantics are not suitable for most multiagent applications, which involve autonomous and heterogeneous agents, whose beliefs and intentions cannot be uniformly determined. Accordingly, we present a social semantics for ACLs that gives primacy to the interactions among the agents. Our semantics is based on social commitments and is developed in temporal logic. This semantics, because of its public orientation, is essential to providing a rigorous basis for multiagent protocols.