Multi-agent systems for power engineering applications - part 2 : Technologies, standards and tools for building multi-agent systems

This is the second part of a 2-part paper that has arisen from the work of the IEEE Power Engineering Society's Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) Working Group. Part 1 of the paper examined the potential value of MAS technology to the power industry, described fundamental concepts and approaches within the field of multi-agent systems that are appropriate to power engineering applications, and presented a comprehensive review of the power engineering applications for which MAS are being investigated. It also defined the technical issues which must be addressed in order to accelerate and facilitate the uptake of the technology within the power and energy sector. Part 2 of the paper explores the decisions inherent in engineering multi-agent systems for applications in the power and energy sector and offers guidance and recommendations on how MAS can be designed and implemented. Given the significant and growing interest in this field, it is imperative that the power engineering community considers the standards, tools, supporting technologies and design methodologies available to those wishing to implement a MAS solution for a power engineering problem. The paper describes the various options available and makes recommendations on best practice. It also describes the problem of interoperability between different multi-agent systems and proposes how this may be tackled

mPower: A component-based development framework for multi-agent systems to support business processes

One of the obstacles preventing the widespread adoption of multi-agent systems in industry is the difficulty of implementing heterogeneous interactions among participating agents via asynchronous messages. This difficulty arises from the need to understand how to combine elements of various content languages, ontologies, and interaction protocols in order to construct meaningful and appropriate messages. In this paper mPower, a component-based layered framework for easing the development of multi-agent systems, is described, and the facility for customising the components for reuse in similar domains is explained. The framework builds on the JADE-LEAP platform, which provides a homogeneous layer over diverse operating systems and hardware devices, and allows ubiquitous deployment of applications built on multi-agent systems both in wired and wireless environments. The use of the framework to develop mPowermobile , a multi-agent system to support mobile workforces, is reported

MAS platforms as an enabler of enterprise mobilisation: The state of the art

One of the main application areas for multi-agent systems technology is enterprise mobilization, wherein the main business process actors are nomadic workers. An agent's autonomy, sociality and intelligence are highly prized features when it comes to supporting those mobile workers who are geographically isolated from the main knowledge source (i.e. the corporate Intranet) and are frequently moving from one location to another. Based on experience gained from two field trials of applications (built using for multi-agent systems technology and running on lightweight handheld devices) that support mobile business processes for telecommunications service provisioning and maintenance, this paper proposes desirable metrics for any multi-agent systems platform intended for enterprise mobilisation use. These metrics are then used to compare a number of existing multi-agent systems platforms, and based on the results, this paper identifies some areas for improvement

TeamWorker: An agent-based support system for mobile task execution

Traditional workflow management systems are considered insufficiently flexible to support autonomous job management via close team working. This paper proposes a multi-agent system approach to enhancing existing workflow management systems to enable team-based job management in the field of telecommunications service provision and maintenance. This paper adopts a component-based approach and explains how applications can be developed by customising the generic components provided by a multi-agent systems framework

Measuring the BDARX architecture by agent oriented system a case study

Distributed systems are progressively designed as multi-agent systems that are helpful in designing high strength complex industrial software. Recently, distributed systems cooperative applications are openly access, dynamic and large scales. Nowadays, it hardly seems necessary to emphasis on the potential of decentralized software solutions. This is because the main benefit lies in the distributed nature of information, resources and action. On the other hand, the progression in multi agent systems creates new challenges to the traditional methodologies of fault-tolerance that typically relies on centralized and offline solution. Research on multi-agent systems had gained attention for designing software that operates in distributed and open environments, such as the Internet. DARX (Dynamic Agent Replication eXtension) is one of the architecture which aimed at building reliable software that would prove to be both flexible and scalable and also aimed to provide adaptive fault tolerance by using dynamic replication methodologies. Therefore, the enhancement of DARX known as BDARX can provide dynamic solution of byzantine faults for the agent based systems that embedded DARX. The BDARX architecture improves the fault tolerance ability of multi-agent systems in long run and strengthens the software to be more robust against such arbitrary faults. The BDARX provide the solution for the Byzantine fault tolerance in DARX by making replicas on the both sides of communication agents by using BFT protocol for agent systems instead of making replicas only on server end and assuming client as failure free. This paper shows that the dynamic behaviour of agents avoid us from making discrimination between server and client replicas