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

Middle-out domain-specific aspect languages and their application in agent-based modelling runtime inspection

Domain-Specific Aspect Languages (DSALs) are a valuable tool for separating cross-cutting concerns, particularly within fields with endemic cross-cutting practices. Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) runtime inspection, which cuts across the core concern of model development, serves as a prime example. Despite their usefulness, DSALs face multiple adoption issues: the literature regarding their development and use is incohesive, coupling to a weave target hinders re-use, and available tooling is immature compared to Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). We believe these issues can be aided by furthering DSL middle-out techniques for DSALs.We first define the background of what a DSAL is and how they may be used, moving onto how we can use DSL techniques to further DSALs. We develop a middle-out semantic model approach for developing domain-level DSALs with transparent aspect orientation using adaptions of DSL techniques. We have implemented the approach for model-specific DSALs for the in-house framework Animaux, and as middleware-specific DSAL for agent messages in the JADE framework, which can be specialised to models using extension DSALs. We give illustrative result cases using our implementations to provide a base of the user development costs and performance of this approach.In conclusion, we believe the adoption of these technologies aids ABM applications and encourage future work in similar fields. This thesis has given a base philosophy toward DSLs, a novel approach for the development of middle-out DSALs and illustrative cases of this approach

Multi-Agent Systems

This Special Issue ""Multi-Agent Systems"" gathers original research articles reporting results on the steadily growing area of agent-oriented computing and multi-agent systems technologies. After more than 20 years of academic research on multi-agent systems (MASs), in fact, agent-oriented models and technologies have been promoted as the most suitable candidates for the design and development of distributed and intelligent applications in complex and dynamic environments. With respect to both their quality and range, the papers in this Special Issue already represent a meaningful sample of the most recent advancements in the field of agent-oriented models and technologies. In particular, the 17 contributions cover agent-based modeling and simulation, situated multi-agent systems, socio-technical multi-agent systems, and semantic technologies applied to multi-agent systems. In fact, it is surprising to witness how such a limited portion of MAS research already highlights the most relevant usage of agent-based models and technologies, as well as their most appreciated characteristics. We are thus confident that the readers of Applied Sciences will be able to appreciate the growing role that MASs will play in the design and development of the next generation of complex intelligent systems. This Special Issue has been converted into a yearly series, for which a new call for papers is already available at the Applied Sciences journal’s website: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/special_issues/Multi-Agent_Systems_2019

Family planning service provision in Solomon Islands: a case study approach

Relmah Harrington explored family planning service provision at three health clinics in Solomon Islands. She found, not everyone accessed the service. Predominantly married women attended family planning, men and young people rarely access the services. Policy makers and service providers are using results to improve family planning service provision in Solomon Islands

9/11 and the International Media: A Cross-Cultural Analysis

The purpose of this study was to find how socio-political and cultural aspects influenced international media representation of the September 11 terrorist attacks to the United States. The study compared the results of textual analysis of newspaper editorials from five different countries. Using Worthington (2001) protocol of political activism framing by print media, it was found that the September 11 terrorist attacks were represented distinctively by each of the five newspapers investigated. The underpinning of the theoretical framework for this study is Stuart Hall\u27s encoding and decoding communication model. Stuart Hall (1979, 1980a, 1980c, 1993) postulates that in the communication process, the moments of encoding and decoding of a message are influenced by ideology. Ideology, as defined by Luis Althusser (1971), is a representation of the imaginary relationships of individuals and reality, therefore encapsulating cultural and socio-political aspects. The results of the qualitative textual analysis undertaken showed that issues such as identity, contextual information, visual aspects and sourcing were utilized distinctively by the editorials of the five newspapers to frame the discussions regarding the September 11 terrorist attacks. The September 11 terrorist attacks to New York and Washington D.C. were a timely event where one has to discuss history before and after it. The historical importance of the attacks is a reflex of its international reach, which was only attainable due to the international media coverage. The media-centric nature of the September 11 events calls for a detailed examination of the relationship between media, terrorism, culture and politics in contemporary society. This study found that politics and culture are prominent influences in the way international media encoded the events of September 11

Development agencies and their clients : the case of the En Nahud smallholder agricultural project (ENSAP), Sudan

This thesis is concerned with rural development in Ghubeish village communities in En Nahud district, Northern Kordofan, Sudan. The area currently experiences an intervention in its traditional rain-fed agriculture by an NGO and is supposedly an area where rural development is underway. The thesis has to make use of an 'eclectic approach' which, in my view, is theoretically grounded to provide a holistic account of the development process. The 'eclectic approach' is an amlagam of the micro- and macro-approaches to development. Traditional anthropological approaches to development are mostly predicated on the too narrow premises of micro-models (e.g. transactional, actor-oriented etc.), and this renders them ill-equipped to take any account of the macro-level processes (such as local government, agencies etc.), which come directly to bear on the local scene. This, plainly, does not fully grasp the totality of the development enterprise (micro and macro). Despite being viewed as polar opposites, both the micro- and macro-approaches are necessary for the study of rural development at the local level. Rather than detracting from theoretical strength, combining such models in an overall 'eclectic approach' adds to the vigour of the theoretical analysis. Ten villages were selected for the present study, with between 274 and 1957 inhabitants. The population is from the Hamar tribe, which has historically witnessed a long process of transformation from semi-pastoralism to sedentary agriculture, combining subsistence and cash crop production. The basis of agriculture is predominantly traditional, using simple implements in a savannah environment. The majority of the inhabitants are smallholder farmers cultivating less than thirty makhamas (1 makhamas = 1.79 acres), though a significant proportion are large landowners. In addition to household labour hired labour and sharaka (share- cropping) contribute to the overall structure of the farming system. Despite the fact that land remains plentiful, expansion of the area under cultivation was restricted by capital shortage (which gave rise to informal and exploitative credit systems), and the simplicity of the agricultural technique. The intention this thesis is to bring to the foreground the views and perceptions of the people in these villages who are affected by the development project and to compare them with those held by the agency itself. It is shown that some of the respective views square and others diverge, whilst closer communication works to bridge the misunderstanding and misplaced stereotyping held by both sides. The study also shows that the government authority tends to ignore the villagers in their remoteness despite its plans for community development. Evaluation of the project shows that over the limited period of three years (mid-term) of project implementation the agency has partly succeeded in its experiment with institutionalising a low-cost and sustainable credit/extension system appropriate to the needs of smallholder farmers. But, on balance, it had had a limited impact towards reaching its goal of raising, significantly, smallholders' income

A Quantitative Assessment of the JADEL Programming Language

This paper reports a quantitative assessment of JADEL, an agent-oriented programming language designed to implement JADE agents and multi-agent systems. The assessment is structured in two parts. The first part is intended to evaluate the effectiveness of JADEL for the concrete implementation of agent-based algorithms expressed using a pseudocode. The second part examines the functionality of the language regarding concurrency and message passing by comparing the implementation in JADEL of a set of benchmark algorithms with the corresponding implementations in Scala. The metrics introduced for the two parts of the assessment are meant to evaluate the expressiveness and ease of use of JADEL, and reported results are encouraging