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

Logic-based Technologies for Multi-agent Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

Precisely when the success of artificial intelligence (AI) sub-symbolic techniques makes them be identified with the whole AI by many non-computerscientists and non-technical media, symbolic approaches are getting more and more attention as those that could make AI amenable to human understanding. Given the recurring cycles in the AI history, we expect that a revamp of technologies often tagged as “classical AI” – in particular, logic-based ones will take place in the next few years. On the other hand, agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) have been at the core of the design of intelligent systems since their very beginning, and their long-term connection with logic-based technologies, which characterised their early days, might open new ways to engineer explainable intelligent systems. This is why understanding the current status of logic-based technologies for MAS is nowadays of paramount importance. Accordingly, this paper aims at providing a comprehensive view of those technologies by making them the subject of a systematic literature review (SLR). The resulting technologies are discussed and evaluated from two different perspectives: the MAS and the logic-based ones

Adaptive SLA management along value chains for service individualization

The object of our investigation is a software architecture for adaptive Service Level Agreement (SLA) management in value chains for service individualization. We address the problem that current SLA management is not capable to represent the full complexity of SLAs existing in real-world service industries. The problem is investigated from a functional-analytical supply chain perspective. The solution is developed from a software architecture modeling perspective according to the design science paradigm. The contribution of this paper is a software architecture that facilitates SLA negotiation and SLA-based resource management in complex agreement hierarchies. The architecture is validated in an application scenario from the airport logistics domain

Autonomous search in a social and ubiquitous Web

International audienceRecent W3C recommendations for the Web of Things (WoT) and the Social Web are turning hypermedia into a homogeneous information fabric that interconnects heterogeneous resources: devices, people, information resources,abstract concepts, etc. The integration of multi-agent systems with such hypermedia environments now provides a means to distribute autonomous behavior in worldwide pervasive systems. A central problem then is to enable autonomous agents to discover heterogeneous resources in world wide and dynamic hypermedia environments. This is a problem in particular in WoT environments that rely on open standards and evolve rapidly—thus requiring agents to adapt their behavior at runtime in pursuit of their design objectives. To this end, we developed a hypermedia search engine for the WoT that allows autonomous agents to perform approximate search queries in order to retrieve relevant resources in their environment in(weak) real time. The search engine crawls dynamic WoT environments to discover and index device metadata described with the W3C WoT Thing Description, and exposes a SPARQL endpoint that agents can use for approximate search. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we implemented a prototype application for the maintenance of industrial robots in worldwide manufacturing systems. The prototype demonstrates that our semantic hypermedia search engine enhances the flexibility and agility of autonomous agents in a social and ubiquitous Web

A Review of Platforms for the Development of Agent Systems

Agent-based computing is an active field of research with the goal of building autonomous software of hardware entities. This task is often facilitated by the use of dedicated, specialized frameworks. For almost thirty years, many such agent platforms have been developed. Meanwhile, some of them have been abandoned, others continue their development and new platforms are released. This paper presents a up-to-date review of the existing agent platforms and also a historical perspective of this domain. It aims to serve as a reference point for people interested in developing agent systems. This work details the main characteristics of the included agent platforms, together with links to specific projects where they have been used. It distinguishes between the active platforms and those no longer under development or with unclear status. It also classifies the agent platforms as general purpose ones, free or commercial, and specialized ones, which can be used for particular types of applications.Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures, 9 tables, 83 reference

Engineering Multi-Agent Systems: State of Affairs and the Road Ahead

The continuous integration of software-intensive systems together with the ever-increasing computing power offer a breeding ground for intelligent agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) more than ever before. Over the past two decades, a wide variety of languages, models, techniques and methodologies have been proposed to engineer agents and MAS. Despite this substantial body of knowledge and expertise, the systematic engineering of large-scale and open MAS still poses many challenges. Researchers and engineers still face fundamental questions regarding theories, architectures, languages, processes, and platforms for designing, implementing, running, maintaining, and evolving MAS. This paper reports on the results of the 6th International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2018, 14th-15th of July, 2018, Stockholm, Sweden), where participants discussed the issues above focusing on the state of affairs and the road ahead for researchers and engineers in this area

Logic-Based Specification Languages for Intelligent Software Agents

The research field of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) aims to find abstractions, languages, methodologies and toolkits for modeling, verifying, validating and prototyping complex applications conceptualized as Multiagent Systems (MASs). A very lively research sub-field studies how formal methods can be used for AOSE. This paper presents a detailed survey of six logic-based executable agent specification languages that have been chosen for their potential to be integrated in our ARPEGGIO project, an open framework for specifying and prototyping a MAS. The six languages are ConGoLog, Agent-0, the IMPACT agent programming language, DyLog, Concurrent METATEM and Ehhf. For each executable language, the logic foundations are described and an example of use is shown. A comparison of the six languages and a survey of similar approaches complete the paper, together with considerations of the advantages of using logic-based languages in MAS modeling and prototyping.Comment: 67 pages, 1 table, 1 figure. Accepted for publication by the Journal "Theory and Practice of Logic Programming", volume 4, Maurice Bruynooghe Editor-in-Chie

Enhancing Workflow with a Semantic Description of Scientific Intent

Peer reviewedPreprin