13,977 research outputs found
Interaction and communication among autonomous agents in multiagent systems
The main goal of this doctoral thesis is to investigate a fundamental topic of research within the Multiagent Systems paradigm: the problem of defining open, heterogeneous, and dynamic interaction frameworks. That is to realize interaction systems where multiple agents can enter and leave dynamically and where no assumptions are made on the internal structure of the interacting agents. Such topic of research has received much attention in the past few years. In particular the need to realize applications where artificial agents can interact negotiate, exchange information, resources, and services has become more and more important thanks to the advent of Internet. I started my studies by developing a trading agent that took part to an international trading on-line game: the First Trading Agent Competition (TAC). During the design and development phase of the trading agent some crucial and critical troubles emerged: the problem of accurately understanding the rules that govern the different auctions; and the problem of understanding the meaning of the numerous messages. Another general problem is that the internal structure of the developed trading agent have been strongly determined by the peculiar interface of the interaction system, consequently without any changes in its code, it would not be able to take part to any other competition on the Web. Furthermore the trading agent would not have been able to exploit opportunities, to handle unexpected situations, or to reason about the rules of the various auctions, since it is not able to understand the meaning o the exchanged messages. The presence of all those problems bears out the need to find a standard common accepted way to define open interaction systems. The most important component of every interaction framework, as is remarked also by philosophical studies on human communication is the institution of language. Therefore I start to investigate the problem of defining a standard and common accepted semantics for Agent Communication Languages (ACL). The solutions proposed so far are at best partial, and are considered as unsatisfactory by a large number of specialists. In particular, they are unable to support verifiable compliance to standards and to make agents responsible for their communicative actions. Furthermore such proposals make the strong assumption that every interacting agent may be modeled as a Belief-Desire-Intention agent. What is required is an approach focused on externally observable events as opposed to the unobservable internal states of agents. Following Speech Act Theory that views language use as a form of action, I propose an operational specification for the definition of a standard ACL based on the notion of social commitment. In such a proposal the meaning of basic communicative acts is defined as the effect that it has on the social relationship between the sender and the receiver described through operation on an unambiguous, objective, and public "object": the commitment. The adoption of the notion of commitment is crucial to stabilize the interaction among agents, to create an expectation on other agents behavior, to enable agents to reason about their and other agents actions. The proposed ACL is verifiable, that is, it is possible to determine if an agent is behaving in accordance to its communicative actions; the semantics is objective, independent of the agent's internal structure, flexible and extensible, simple, yet enough expressive. A complete operational specification of an interaction framework using the proposed commitment-based ACL is presented. In particular some sample applications of how to use the proposed framework to formalize interaction protocols are reported. A list of soundness conditions to test if a protocol is sound is proposed
Automated Negotiation for Provisioning Virtual Private Networks Using FIPA-Compliant Agents
This paper describes the design and implementation of negotiating agents for the task of provisioning virtual private networks. The agents and their interactions comply with the FIPA specification and they are implemented using the FIPA-OS agent framework. Particular attention is focused on the design and implementation of the negotiation algorithms
Common Representation of Information Flows for Dynamic Coalitions
We propose a formal foundation for reasoning about access control policies
within a Dynamic Coalition, defining an abstraction over existing access
control models and providing mechanisms for translation of those models into
information-flow domain. The abstracted information-flow domain model, called a
Common Representation, can then be used for defining a way to control the
evolution of Dynamic Coalitions with respect to information flow
Towards engineering ontologies for cognitive profiling of agents on the semantic web
Research shows that most agent-based collaborations
suffer from lack of flexibility. This is due to the fact that
most agent-based applications assume pre-defined
knowledge of agents’ capabilities and/or neglect basic
cognitive and interactional requirements in multi-agent
collaboration. The highlight of this paper is that it brings
cognitive models (inspired from cognitive sciences and HCI)
proposing architectural and knowledge-based requirements
for agents to structure ontological models for cognitive
profiling in order to increase cognitive awareness between
themselves, which in turn promotes flexibility, reusability
and predictability of agent behavior; thus contributing
towards minimizing cognitive overload incurred on humans.
The semantic web is used as an action mediating space,
where shared knowledge base in the form of ontological
models provides affordances for improving cognitive
awareness
An agent-based implementation of hidden Markov models for gas turbine condition monitoring
This paper considers the use of a multi-agent system (MAS) incorporating hidden Markov models (HMMs) for the condition monitoring of gas turbine (GT) engines. Hidden Markov models utilizing a Gaussian probability distribution are proposed as an anomaly detection tool for gas turbines components. The use of this technique is shown to allow the modeling of the dynamics of GTs despite a lack of high frequency data. This allows the early detection of developing faults and avoids costly outages due to asset failure. These models are implemented as part of a MAS, using a proposed extension of an established power system ontology, for fault detection of gas turbines. The multi-agent system is shown to be applicable through a case study and comparison to an existing system utilizing historic data from a combined-cycle gas turbine plant provided by an industrial partner
Distributed Event-Based State Estimation for Networked Systems: An LMI-Approach
In this work, a dynamic system is controlled by multiple sensor-actuator
agents, each of them commanding and observing parts of the system's input and
output. The different agents sporadically exchange data with each other via a
common bus network according to local event-triggering protocols. From these
data, each agent estimates the complete dynamic state of the system and uses
its estimate for feedback control. We propose a synthesis procedure for
designing the agents' state estimators and the event triggering thresholds. The
resulting distributed and event-based control system is guaranteed to be stable
and to satisfy a predefined estimation performance criterion. The approach is
applied to the control of a vehicle platoon, where the method's trade-off
between performance and communication, and the scalability in the number of
agents is demonstrated.Comment: This is an extended version of an article to appear in the IEEE
Transactions on Automatic Control (additional parts in the Appendix
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