Proactive and Reactive Reconfiguration for the Robust Execution of Multi Modality Plans

The paper addresses the problem of executing a plan in a dynamic environment for tasks involving constraints on consumable resources modeled as numeric fluents. In particular, the paper proposes a novel monitoring and adaptation strategy joining reactivity and proactivity in a unified framework. By exploiting the flexibility of a multi modality plan (where each action can be executed in different modalities), reactivity and proactivity are guaranteed by means of a reconfiguration step. The reconfiguration is performed (i) when the plan is no more valid to recovery from the impasse (reactively), or (ii) under the lead of a kernel based strategy to enforce the tolerance to unexpected situations (proactivity). Both mechanisms have been integrated into a continual planning system and experimentally evaluated over three numeric domains, extensions of planning competition domains. Results show that the approach is able to increase the percentage of cases successfully solved while preserving efficiency in most situations

Cooperative transportation scheduling : an application domain for DAI

A multiagent approach to designing the transportation domain is presented. The MARS system is described which models cooperative order scheduling within a society of shipping companies. We argue why Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) offers suitable tools to deal with the hard problems in this domain. We present three important instances for DAI techniques that proved useful in the transportation application: cooperation among the agents, task decomposition and task allocation, and decentralised planning. An extension of the contract net protocol for task decomposition and task allocation is presented; we show that it can be used to obtain good initial solutions for complex resource allocation problems. By introducing global information based upon auction protocols, this initial solution can be improved significantly. We demonstrate that the auction mechanism used for schedule optimisation can also be used for implementing dynamic replanning. Experimental results are provided evaluating the performance of different scheduling strategies

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications