Building quests for online games with virtual institutions

Abstract. This document describes how to re-purpose an existing agent technology called Virtual Institutions as a mechanism to define new "quest" elements in Massively Multiplayer Online Games based on MultiAgent Systems. Quests are a very important part of most Massive Online Games as they wield to flow and narrative of the game in a linear or nonlinear manner

Learning Utilities and Equilibria in Non-Truthful Auctions

In non-truthful auctions, agents' utility for a strategy depends on the strategies of the opponents and also the prior distribution over their private types; the set of Bayes Nash equilibria generally has an intricate dependence on the prior. Using the First Price Auction as our main demonstrating example, we show that $\tilde O(n / \epsilon^2)$ samples from the prior with $n$ agents suffice for an algorithm to learn the interim utilities for all monotone bidding strategies. As a consequence, this number of samples suffice for learning all approximate equilibria. We give almost matching (up to polylog factors) lower bound on the sample complexity for learning utilities. We also consider settings where agents must pay a search cost to discover their own types. Drawing on a connection between this setting and the first price auction, discovered recently by Kleinberg et al. (2016), we show that $\tilde O(n / \epsilon^2)$ samples suffice for utilities and equilibria to be estimated in a near welfare-optimal descending auction in this setting. En route, we improve the sample complexity bound, recently obtained by Guo et al. (2019), for the Pandora's Box problem, which is a classical model for sequential consumer search

A platform-independent domain-specific modeling language for multiagent systems

Associated with the increasing acceptance of agent-based computing as a novel software engineering paradigm, recently a lot of research addresses the development of suitable techniques to support the agent-oriented software development. The state-of-the-art in agent-based software development is to (i) design the agent systems basing on an agent-based methodology and (ii) take the resulting design artifact as a base to manually implement the agent system using existing agent-oriented programming languages or general purpose languages like Java. Apart from failures made when manually transform an abstract specification into a concrete implementation, the gap between design and implementation may also result in the divergence of design and implementation. The framework discussed in this dissertation presents a platform-independent domain-specific modeling language for MASs called Dsml4MAS that allows modeling agent systems in a platform-independent and graphical manner. Apart from the abstract design, Dsml4MAS also allows to automatically (i) check the generated design artifacts against a formal semantic specification to guarantee the well-formedness of the design and (ii) translate the abstract specification into a concrete implementation. Taking both together, Dsml4MAS ensures that for any well-formed design, an associated implementation will be generated closing the gap between design and code.Aufgrund wachsender Akzeptanz von Agentensystemen zur Behandlung komplexer Problemstellungen wird der Schwerpunkt auf dem Gebiet der agentenorientierten Softwareentwicklung vor allem auf die Erforschung von geeignetem Entwicklungswerkzeugen gesetzt. Stand der Forschung ist es dabei das Agentendesign mittels einer Agentenmethodologie zu spezifizieren und die resultierenden Artefakte als Grundlage zur manuellen Programmierung zu verwenden. Fehler, die bei dieser manuellen Überführung entstehen, machen insbesondere das abstrakte Design weniger nützlich in Hinsicht auf die Nachhaltigkeit der entwickelten Softwareapplikation. Das in dieser Dissertation diskutierte Rahmenwerk erörtert eine plattformunabhängige domänenspezifische Modellierungssprache für Multiagentensysteme namens Dsml4MAS. Dsml4MAS erlaubt es Agentensysteme auf eine plattformunabhängige und graphische Art und Weise darzustellen. Die Modellierungssprache umfasst (i) eine abstrakte Syntax, die das Vokabular der Sprache definiert, (ii) eine konkrete Syntax, die die graphische Darstellung spezifiziert sowie (iii) eine formale Semantik, die dem Vokabular eine präzise Bedeutung gibt. Dsml4MAS ist Bestandteil einer (semi-automatischen) Methodologie, die es (i) erlaubt die abstrakte Spezifikation schrittweise bis hin zur konkreten Implementierung zu konkretisieren und (ii) die Interoperabilität zu alternativen Softwareparadigmen wie z.B. Dienstorientierte Architekturen zu gewährleisten

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