Agent-based virtual organization architecture

The purpose of this paper is to present the applicability of THOMAS, an architecture specially designed to model agent-based virtual organizations, in the development of a multiagent system for managing and planning routes for clients in a mall. In order to build virtual organizations, THOMAS offers mechanisms to take into account their structure, behaviour, dynamic, norms and environment. Moreover, one of the primary characteristics of the THOMAS architecture is the use of agents with reasoning and planning capabilities. These agents can perform a dynamic reorganization when they detect changes in the environment. The proposed architecture is composed of a set of related modules that are appropriate for developing systems in highly volatile environments similar to the one presented in this study. This paper presents THOMAS as well as the results obtained after having applied the system to a case study

A genetic approach for long term virtual organization distribution

Electronic versíon of an article published as International Journal on Artificial Intelligent Tools, Volume 20, issue 2, 2011. 10.1142/S0218213011000152. © World Scientific Publishing Company[EN] An agent-based Virtual Organization is a complex entity where dynamic collections of agents agree to share resources in order to accomplish a global goal or offer a complex service. An important problem for the performance of the Virtual Organization is the distribution of the agents across the computational resources. The final distribution should provide a good load balancing for the organization. In this article, a genetic algorithm is applied to calculate a proper distribution across hosts in an agent-based Virtual Organization. Additionally, an abstract multi-agent system architecture which provides infrastructure for Virtual Organization distribution is introduced. The developed genetic solution employs an elitist crossover operator where one of the children inherits the most promising genetic material from the parents with higher probability. In order to validate the genetic proposal, the designed genetic algorithm has been successfully compared to several heuristics in different scenarios. © 2011 World Scientific Publishing Company.This work is supported by TIN2008-04446, TIN2009-13839-C03-01, CSD2007-00022 and FPU grant AP2008-00600 of the Spanish government, and PROMETEO 2008/051 of the Generalitat Valenciana.Sánchez Anguix, V.; Valero Cubas, S.; García Fornes, AM. (2011). A genetic approach for long term virtual organization distribution. International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools. 20(2):271-295. https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218213011000152S27129520

A Layered Architecture for Implementing Autonomous Planning Agents

This paper briefly describes an architecture for implementing autonomous agents that embody sophisticated planning capabilities. In particular, we are currently working on a two-pass vertically layered architecture, designed to deal with a complex environment. Such an architecture is currently based on three levels of abstraction (i.e., situated, strategic and deliberative), but has been designed for being easily generalized to a N-levels architecture, depending on the given environment and task complexity. Each level controls the underlying one, so that an agent behavior is supported by a clean hierarchical organization. Our autonomous agents act in a virtual world created for a computer game, and must interact with it by suitably planning and executing complex actions

Interacting Unities: An Agent-Based System

Recently architects have been inspired by Thompsonis Cartesian deformations and Waddingtonis flexible topological surface to work within a dynamic field characterized by forces. In this more active space of interactions, movement is the medium through which form evolves. This paper explores the interaction between pedestrians and their environment by regarding it as a process occurring between the two. It is hypothesized that the recurrent interaction between pedestrians and environment can lead to a structural coupling between those elements. Every time a change occurs in each one of them, as an expression of its own structural dynamics, it triggers changes to the other one. An agent-based system has been developed in order to explore that interaction, where the two interacting elements, agents (pedestrians) and environment, are autonomous units with a set of internal rules. The result is a landscape where each agent locally modifies its environment that in turn affects its movement, while the other agents respond to the new environment at a later time, indicating that the phenomenon of stigmergy is possible to take place among interactions with human analogy. It is found that it is the environmentis internal rules that determine the nature and extent of change

Multi Site Coordination using a Multi-Agent System

A new approach of coordination of decisions in a multi site system is proposed. It is based this approach on a multi-agent concept and on the principle of distributed network of enterprises. For this purpose, each enterprise is defined as autonomous and performs simultaneously at the local and global levels. The basic component of our approach is a so-called Virtual Enterprise Node (VEN), where the enterprise network is represented as a set of tiers (like in a product breakdown structure). Within the network, each partner constitutes a VEN, which is in contact with several customers and suppliers. Exchanges between the VENs ensure the autonomy of decision, and guarantiee the consistency of information and material flows. Only two complementary VEN agents are necessary: one for external interactions, the Negotiator Agent (NA) and one for the planning of internal decisions, the Planner Agent (PA). If supply problems occur in the network, two other agents are defined: the Tier Negotiator Agent (TNA) working at the tier level only and the Supply Chain Mediator Agent (SCMA) working at the level of the enterprise network. These two agents are only active when the perturbation occurs. Otherwise, the VENs process the flow of information alone. With this new approach, managing enterprise network becomes much more transparent and looks like managing a simple enterprise in the network. The use of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) allows physical distribution of the decisional system, and procures a heterarchical organization structure with a decentralized control that guaranties the autonomy of each entity and the flexibility of the network

A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.Comment: 12 PAGES, 7 Figure

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