Colored trails: A multiagent system testbed for decision-making research (demonstration)

With increasing frequency, computer agents participate in collaborative and competitive multiagent domains in which humans reason strategically to make decisions. The deployment of computer agents in such domains requires that the agents understand something about human behavior so that they can interact successfully with people; the computer agents must be sensitive to how people reason in strategic settings as well as to the social utilities people employ to inform their reasoning. To date, these design requirements for computer agents have received relatively little attention. To further research in this area, we are developing the Colored Trails (CT) testbed [5], a configurable and extensible open-source system for use by the research community at large to investigate multiagent decision making.Engineering and Applied Science

Scenarios for system requirements traceability and testing

Scenarios in current design methodologies, provide a natural way for the users to identify the inputs and outputs of the system revolving around a particular interaction process. A scenario typically consists of a sequence of steps which captures a particular run of the system and satisfies some aspect of the requirements. In this work we add additional structure to the scenarios used in the Prometheus agent development methodology. This additional structure then facilitates both traceability and automated testing. We describe our process for mapping the scenarios and their steps to the initial detailed design, where we then maintain the traceability as the design develops. The structured action lists that we define for both scenarios and their variations provides the basis for facilitating automated testing of system behavior. We describe how we use the newly defined structure within the scenarios to facilitate testing, describing how we automate test case generation, execution and analysis

Resilience, reliability, and coordination in autonomous multi-agent systems

Acknowledgements The research reported in this paper was funded and supported by various grants over the years: Robotics and AI in Nuclear (RAIN) Hub (EP/R026084/1); Future AI and Robotics for Space (FAIR-SPACE) Hub (EP/R026092/1); Offshore Robotics for Certification of Assets (ORCA) Hub (EP/R026173/1); the Royal Academy of Engineering under the Chair in Emerging Technologies scheme; Trustworthy Autonomous Systems “Verifiability Node” (EP/V026801); Scrutable Autonomous Systems (EP/J012084/1); Supporting Security Policy with Effective Digital Intervention (EP/P011829/1); The International Technology Alliance in Network and Information Sciences.Peer reviewedPostprin

The SEMAINE API: Towards a Standards-Based Framework for Building Emotion-Oriented Systems

This paper presents the SEMAINE API, an open source framework for building emotion-oriented systems. By encouraging and simplifying the use of standard representation formats, the framework aims to contribute to interoperability and reuse of system components in the research community. By providing a Java and C++ wrapper around a message-oriented middleware, the API makes it easy to integrate components running on different operating systems and written in different programming languages. The SEMAINE system 1.0 is presented as an example of a full-scale system built on top of the SEMAINE API. Three small example systems are described in detail to illustrate how integration between existing and new components is realised with minimal effort

Logic-based Technologies for Multi-agent Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

Precisely when the success of artificial intelligence (AI) sub-symbolic techniques makes them be identified with the whole AI by many non-computerscientists and non-technical media, symbolic approaches are getting more and more attention as those that could make AI amenable to human understanding. Given the recurring cycles in the AI history, we expect that a revamp of technologies often tagged as “classical AI” – in particular, logic-based ones will take place in the next few years. On the other hand, agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) have been at the core of the design of intelligent systems since their very beginning, and their long-term connection with logic-based technologies, which characterised their early days, might open new ways to engineer explainable intelligent systems. This is why understanding the current status of logic-based technologies for MAS is nowadays of paramount importance. Accordingly, this paper aims at providing a comprehensive view of those technologies by making them the subject of a systematic literature review (SLR). The resulting technologies are discussed and evaluated from two different perspectives: the MAS and the logic-based ones

Petri Net Plans A framework for collaboration and coordination in multi-robot systems

Programming the behavior of multi-robot systems is a challenging task which has a key role in developing effective systems in many application domains. In this paper, we present Petri Net Plans (PNPs), a language based on Petri Nets (PNs), which allows for intuitive and effective robot and multi-robot behavior design. PNPs are very expressive and support a rich set of features that are critical to develop robotic applications, including sensing, interrupts and concurrency. As a central feature, PNPs allow for a formal analysis of plans based on standard PN tools. Moreover, PNPs are suitable for modeling multi-robot systems and the developed behaviors can be executed in a distributed setting, while preserving the properties of the modeled system. PNPs have been deployed in several robotic platforms in different application domains. In this paper, we report three case studies, which address complex single robot plans, coordination and collaboration

インタラクションに注目したマルチエージェントシステムの効率的な開発手法

マルチエージェントシステム(MAS) の開発の課題の一つは，インタラクションを適切に開発することが難しいことである．そこで，本研究ではインタラクションを一つのソフトウェアモジュールとして表現する記述言語IOM/T を提案する．IOM/T は，実装したインタラクションとシーケンス図による設計との等価性をπ計算を用いて可能にする．また．インタラクションに対する契約による設計の拡張や，インタラクションをソフトウェアモジュールと見做した単体テスト手法についても述べる．さらに，近年普及してきたアジャイル開発でMASを開発する場合において，インタラクションに注目して，要求(ユーザストーリ) から設計を導く手法について示す．IOM/T により，これまでのMAS 開発の課題が解決するのみならず，より堅牢性を高めたり，より容易に開発することが可能となる．電気通信大学201

A systematic approach for detecting faults in agent designs

This thesis proposes a mechanism, including automated tool support, for early-phase defect detection by comparing the plan structures of a belief-desire-intention (BDI) agent design against the following: (1) requirement models, specified in terms of scenarios and goals; and (2) agent communication models. The intuition of our approach is to extract sets of possible behaviour runs from the agent-behaviour models and to verify whether these runs conform to the specifications of the system-to-be. The proposed approach in this thesis is applicable at design time and does not require source code. Our approach is based on the Prometheus agent-design methodology but is applicable to other methodologies that support the same notions. We evaluate the proposed verification framework on designs, ranging from student projects to case studies of industry-level projects. Our evaluation demonstrates that even a simple specification developed by relatively experienced developers is prone to defects, and our approach is successful in uncovering most of these defects. In addition, we conduct a scalability analysis of our methods, and the outcomes reveal that our approach can scale when designs grow in size