Spatio-Temporal Context in Agent-Based Meeting Scheduling

Meeting scheduling is a common task for organizations of all sizes. It involves searching for a time and place when and where all the participants can meet. However, scheduling a meeting is generally difficult in that it attempts to satisfy the preferences of all participants. Negotiation tends to be an iterative and time consuming task. Proxy agents can handle the negotiation on behalf of the individuals without sacrificing their privacy or overlooking their preferences. This thesis examines the implications of formalizing meeting scheduling as a spatiotemporal negotiation problem. The “Children in the Rectangular Forest” (CRF) canonical model is applied to meeting scheduling. By formalizing meeting scheduling within the CRF model, a generalized problem emerges that establishes a clear relationship with other spatiotemporal distributed scheduling problems. The thesis also examines the implications of the proposed formalization to meeting scheduling negotiations. A protocol for meeting location selection is presented and evaluated using simulations

Proceedings of the third International Workshop of the IFIP WG5.7

Contents of the papers presented at the international workshop deal with the wide variety of new and computer-based techniques for production planning and control that has become available to the scientific and industrial world in the past few years: formal modeling techniques, artificial neural networks, autonomous agent theory, genetic algorithms, chaos theory, fuzzy logic, simulated annealing, tabu search, simulation and so on. The approach, while being scientifically rigorous, is focused on the applicability to industrial environment

Automatic Service Agreement Negotiators in Open Commerce Environments

There is a steady shift in e‑commerce from goods to services that must be provisioned according to service agreements. This study focuses on software frameworks to develop automated negotiators in open commerce environments. Analysis of the litera‑ ture on automated negotiation and typical case studies led to a catalog of 16 objective requirements and a conceptual model that was used to compare 11 state-of-the-art software frameworks. None of them was well suited for negotiating service agreements in open commerce environments. This motivated work on a reference architecture that provides the foundations to develop negotiation systems that address the previous requirements. A software framework was devised to validate the proposal by means of case studies. The study contributes to the fields of requirements engineering and software design, and is expected to support future efforts of practitioners and researchers because its findings bridge the gap among the existing automated negotiation techniques and lay the founda‑ tions for developing new software frameworksMinisterio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2006–00472Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2009–07366Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-2533 (Isabel)Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2007–64119Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-02602Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-4100Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2008–04718-

Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. Multi-agent systems have been brought up and used in several application domains

A theoretical and computational basis for CATNETS

The main content of this report is the identification and definition of market mechanisms for Application Layer Networks (ALNs). On basis of the structured Market Engineering process, the work comprises the identification of requirements which adequate market mechanisms for ALNs have to fulfill. Subsequently, two mechanisms for each, the centralized and the decentralized case are described in this document. These build the theoretical foundation for the work within the following two years of the CATNETS project. --Grid Computing

Theoretical and Computational Basis for Economical Ressource Allocation in Application Layer Networks - Annual Report Year 1

This paper identifies and defines suitable market mechanisms for Application Layer Networks (ALNs). On basis of the structured Market Engineering process, the work comprises the identification of requirements which adequate market mechanisms for ALNs have to fulfill. Subsequently, two mechanisms for each, the centralized and the decentralized case are described in this document. --Grid Computing