Analysis of communication processes in the multi-agent systems

The article deals with the problems related to the possibility of information exchange in the multi-agent systems. Therefore it presents a model of coloured Petri net which was created in order to illustrate and to simulate the agents communication processes as well as exemplary diagrams which determine the sequences of information exchange between the agents with the use of the required performatives of KQML

Application of ICT as a Key Element for Airport Safety and Security Operations

Airport risk management is a demanding task as several different areas have to be monitored including outer edges, car parks, terminals, and other passenger facilities. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are key elements for airport operation safety and security. One of the advantages of ICT based systems is they can react better and faster in real time and perform certain tasks at airports. This paper aims to present a safety overview of ICT and multi-agent systems (MAS) usage in the implementation of various airport operations. This paper aims to present a safety overview of ICT and MAS systems usage in the implementation of various airport operations. This paper summarizes a multi-agent concept that highlights their applications at airports such as passenger transfer, baggage management, aircraft handling, and field service through a detailed and extensive literature review on related topics. Much of the information on processes within the airport, processes in air traffic, and the processes of operators, i.e. airlines, is the result of monitoring work on a software development project for individual airports that serves to manage all processes in airports. The analysis led to the conclusion that safety and security in airports can be additionally improved by greater use of ICT as well as greater use of MAS, which ultimately contributes to the optimization of the airport

Agreement in epidemic information dissemination

Consensus is one of the fundamental problems in multi-agent systems and distributed computing, in which agents or processing nodes are required to reach global agreement on some data value, decision, action, or synchronisation. In the absence of centralised coordination, achieving global consensus is challenging especially in dynamic and large-scale distributed systems with faulty processes. This paper presents a fully decentralised phase transition protocol to achieve global consensus on the convergence of an underlying information dissemination process. The proposed approach is based on Epidemic protocols, which are a randomised communication and computation paradigm and provide excellent scalability and fault-tolerant properties. The experimental analysis is based on simulations of a large-scale information dissemination process and the results show that global agreement can be achieved without deterministic and global communication patterns, such as those based on centralised coordination

An Abstract Formal Basis for Digital Crowds

Crowdsourcing, together with its related approaches, has become very popular in recent years. All crowdsourcing processes involve the participation of a digital crowd, a large number of people that access a single Internet platform or shared service. In this paper we explore the possibility of applying formal methods, typically used for the verification of software and hardware systems, in analysing the behaviour of a digital crowd. More precisely, we provide a formal description language for specifying digital crowds. We represent digital crowds in which the agents do not directly communicate with each other. We further show how this specification can provide the basis for sophisticated formal methods, in particular formal verification.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figure

Time-and event-driven communication process for networked control systems: A survey

Copyright © 2014 Lei Zou et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.In recent years, theoretical and practical research topics on networked control systems (NCSs) have gained an increasing interest from many researchers in a variety of disciplines owing to the extensive applications of NCSs in practice. In particular, an urgent need has arisen to understand the effects of communication processes on system performances. Sampling and protocol are two fundamental aspects of a communication process which have attracted a great deal of research attention. Most research focus has been on the analysis and control of dynamical behaviors under certain sampling procedures and communication protocols. In this paper, we aim to survey some recent advances on the analysis and synthesis issues of NCSs with different sampling procedures (time-and event-driven sampling) and protocols (static and dynamic protocols). First, these sampling procedures and protocols are introduced in detail according to their engineering backgrounds as well as dynamic natures. Then, the developments of the stabilization, control, and filtering problems are systematically reviewed and discussed in great detail. Finally, we conclude the paper by outlining future research challenges for analysis and synthesis problems of NCSs with different communication processes.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61329301, 61374127, and 61374010, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Finite Time Bounds for Stochastic Bounded Confidence Dynamics

In this era of fast and large-scale opinion formation, a mathematical understanding of opinion evolution, a.k.a. opinion dynamics, acquires importance. Linear graph-based dynamics and bounded confidence dynamics are the two popular models for opinion dynamics in social networks. Stochastic bounded confidence (SBC) opinion dynamics was proposed as a general framework that incorporates both these dynamics as special cases and also captures the inherent stochasticity and noise (errors) in real-life social exchanges. Although SBC dynamics is quite general and realistic, its analysis is more challenging. This is because SBC dynamics is nonlinear and stochastic, and belongs to the class of Markov processes that have asymptotically zero drift and unbounded jumps. The asymptotic behavior of SBC dynamics was characterized in prior works. However, they do not shed light on its finite-time behavior, which is often of interest in practice. We take a stride in this direction by analyzing the finite-time behavior of a two-agent system and a bistar graph, which are crucial to the understanding of general multi-agent dynamics. In particular, we show that the opinion difference between the two agents is well-concentrated around zero under the conditions that lead to asymptotic stability of the SBC dynamics.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the proceedings of COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS) 2022. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2112.0437