Towards Jacamo-rest: A Resource-Oriented Abstraction for Managing Multi-Agent Systems

The Multi-Agent Oriented Programming (MAOP) paradigm provides abstractions to model and implements entities of agents, as well as of their organisations and environments. In recent years, researchers have started to explore the integration of MAOP and the resource-oriented web architecture (REST). This paper further advances this line of research by presenting an ongoing work on jacamo-rest, a resource-oriented web-based abstraction for the multi-agent programming platform JaCaMo. Jacamo-rest takes Multi-Agent System (MAS) interoperability to a new level, enabling MAS to not only interact with services or applications of the World Wide Web but also to be managed and updated in their specifications by other applications. To add a developer interface to JaCaMo that is suitable for the Web, we provide a novel conceptual perspective on the management of MAOP specification entities as web resources. We tested jacamo-rest using it as a middleware of a programming interface application that provides modern software engineering facilities such as continuous deployments and iterative software development for MAS.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, Accepted to present on 14th Workshop-School on Agents, Environments, and Applications (WESAAC 2020

A Chatbot that Uses a Multi-agent Organization to Support Collaborative Learning

This work investigates and apply the use of a multi-agent system to assist in the coordination of group tasks, specifically in educational environments, in which the interaction occurs indirectly, that is, asynchronously. The system has a web interface integrated with a chatbot for more natural interaction. The chatbot communicates with the multi-agent system that is responsible for the organization of the group, that is, it contains information about the tasks and members of the groups, in addition to restrictions that can be imposed according to the organization of the group, and it is also able to return the requested information in natural language through the chatbot. This approach was validated in a practical undergraduate course of software engineering. The students assessed the functionalities and usability of the system while working in groups in order to develop software collaboratively. Our system was used to assist students in a real project. With this assessment, it was found that the system was able to support the development of the group tasks, ensuring quick and consistent responses to the student’s request

Intentional dialogues in multi-agent systems based on ontologies and argumentation

Some areas of application, for example, healthcare, are known to resist the replacement of human operators by fully autonomous systems. It is typically not transparent to users how artificial intelligence systems make decisions or obtain information, making it difficult for users to trust them. To address this issue, we investigate how argumentation theory and ontology techniques can be used together with reasoning about intentions to build complex natural language dialogues to support human decision-making. Based on such an investigation, we propose MAIDS, a framework for developing multi-agent intentional dialogue systems, which can be used in different domains. Our framework is modular so that it can be used in its entirety or just the modules that fulfil the requirements of each system to be developed. Our work also includes the formalisation of a novel dialogue-subdialogue structure with which we can address ontological or theory-of-mind issues and later return to the main subject. As a case study, we have developed a multi-agent system using the MAIDS framework to support healthcare professionals in making decisions on hospital bed allocations. Furthermore, we evaluated this multi-agent system with domain experts using real data from a hospital. The specialists who evaluated our system strongly agree or agree that the dialogues in which they participated fulfil Cohen’s desiderata for task-oriented dialogue systems. Our agents have the ability to explain to the user how they arrived at certain conclusions. Moreover, they have semantic representations as well as representations of the mental state of the dialogue participants, allowing the formulation of coherent justifications expressed in natural language, therefore, easy for human participants to understand. This indicates the potential of the framework introduced in this thesis for the practical development of explainable intelligent systems as well as systems supporting hybrid intelligence

Computational accountability in MAS organizations with ADOPT

This work studies how the notion of accountability can play a key role in the design and realization of distributed systems that are open and that involve autonomous agents that should harmonize their own goals with the organizational goals. The socio–technical systems that support the work inside human companies and organizations are examples of such systems. The approach that is proposed in order to pursue this purpose is set in the context of multiagent systems organizations, and relies on an explicit specification of relationships among the involved agents for capturing who is accountable to whom and for what. Such accountability relationships are created along with the agents’ operations and interactions in a shared environment. In order to guarantee accountability as a design property of the system, a specific interaction protocol is suggested. Properties of this protocol are verified, and a case study is provided consisting of an actual implementation. Finally, we discuss the impact on real-world application domains and trace possible evolutions of the proposal

Reasoning about Social Relationships with Jason

Abstract. This work faces the problem of enabling an approach to agent programming, which allows agents to seamlessly manage and work both on social relationships and on abstractions which typically characterize agents themselves, like goals, beliefs, intentions. A similar approach is necessary in order to easily develop Socio-Technical Systems and provides a basis for carrying on methodological studies on system engineering. The paper presents an extension of JaCa(Mo) in which Jason agents can reason on social relationships, that are represented as commitments, and where Jason agents interact by way of special CArtAgO artifacts, which reify commitment-based protocols