GHOST: experimenting countermeasures for conflicts in the pilot's activity

An approach for designing countermeasures to cure conflict in aircraft pilots’ activities is presented, both based on Artificial Intelligence and Human Factors concepts. The first step is to track the pilot’s activity, i.e. to reconstruct what he has actually done thanks to the flight parameters and reference models describing the mission and procedures. The second step is to detect conflict in the pilot’s activity, and this is linked to what really matters to the achievement of the mission. The third step is to design accu- rate countermeasures which are likely to do bet- ter than the existing onboard devices. The three steps are presented and supported by experimental results obtained from private and professional pi- lots

Negotiation Between Distributed Agents in a Concurrent Engineering System

Current approaches to design are often serial and iterative in nature, leading to poor quality of design and reduced productivity. Complex artifacts are designed by groups of experts, each with his/her own area of expertise. Hence design can be modeled as a cooperative multi-agent problem-solving task, where different agents possess different expertise and evaluation criteria. New techniques for Concurrent Design, which emphasize parallel interaction among design experts involved, are needed. During this concurrent design process, disagreements may arise among the expert agents as the design is being produced. The process by which these differences are resolve to arrive at a common set of design decisions is called Negotiation. The main issues associated with the negotiation process are, whether negotiation should be centralized or distributed, the language of communication and the negotiation strategy. The goals of this thesis are to study the work done by various researchers in this field, to do a comarative analysis of their work and to design and implement an approach to handle negotiation between expert agents in an existing Concurrent Engineering Design System

Automated Purchase Negotiations in a Dynamic Electronic Marketplace

Nowadays, there is a surge of B2C and B2B e-commerce operated\ud on the Internet. However, many of these systems are often nothing\ud more than electronic product or service catalogues. Against this background,\ud it is argued that new generation systems based on automatic\ud negotiation will emerge. This paper covers a particular kind of automatic\ud negotiation systems, where a number of participants in a mobile\ud dynamic electronic marketplace automatically negotiate the purchase of\ud products or services, by means of multiple automated one-to-one bargainings.\ud In a dynamic e-marketplace, the number of buyers and sellers\ud and their preferences may change over time. By mobile we mean that\ud buyers in a commercial area may initiate simultaneous negotiations with\ud several sellers using portable devices like cell phones, laptops or personal\ud digital assistants, so these negotiations do not require participants to be\ud colocated in space. We will show how an expressive approach to fuzzy\ud constraint based agent purchase negotiations in competitive trading environments,\ud is ideally suited to work on these kind of e-marketplaces. An\ud example of mobile e-marketplace, and a comparison between an expressive\ud and an inexpressive approach will be presented to show the efficiency\ud of the proposed solution

Contributions to artificial intelligence: the IIIA perspective

La intel·ligència artificial (IA) és un camp científic i tecnològic relativament nou dedicat a l'estudi de la intel·ligència mitjançant l'ús d'ordinadors com a eines per produir comportament intel·ligent. Inicialment, l'objectiu era essencialment científic: assolir una millor comprensió de la intel·ligència humana. Aquest objectiu ha estat, i encara és, el dels investigadors en ciència cognitiva. Dissortadament, aquest fascinant però ambiciós objectiu és encara molt lluny de ser assolit i ni tan sols podem dir que ens hi haguem acostat significativament. Afortunadament, però, la IA també persegueix un objectiu més aplicat: construir sistemes que ens resultin útils encara que la intel·ligència artificial de què estiguin dotats no tingui res a veure amb la intel·ligència humana i, per tant, aquests sistemes no ens proporcionarien necessàriament informació útil sobre la naturalesa de la intel·ligència humana. Aquest objectiu, que s'emmarca més aviat dins de l'àmbit de l'enginyeria, és actualment el que predomina entre els investigadors en IA i ja ha donat resultats impresionants, tan teòrics com aplicats, en moltíssims dominis d'aplicació. A més, avui dia, els productes i les aplicacions al voltant de la IA representen un mercat anual de desenes de milers de milions de dòlars. Aquest article resumeix les principals contribucions a la IA fetes pels investigadors de l'Institut d'Investigació en Intel·ligència Artificial del Consell Superior d'Investigacions Científiques durant els darrers cinc anys.Artificial intelligence is a relatively new scientific and technological field which studies the nature of intelligence by using computers to produce intelligent behaviour. Initially, the main goal was a purely scientific one, understanding human intelligence, and this remains the aim of cognitive scientists. Unfortunately, such an ambitious and fascinating goal is not only far from being achieved but has yet to be satisfactorily approached. Fortunately, however, artificial intelligence also has an engineering goal: building systems that are useful to people even if the intelligence of such systems has no relation whatsoever with human intelligence, and therefore being able to build them does not necessarily provide any insight into the nature of human intelligence. This engineering goal has become the predominant one among artificial intelligence researchers and has produced impressive results, ranging from knowledge-based systems to autonomous robots, that have been applied to many different domains. Furthermore, artificial intelligence products and services today represent an annual market of tens of billions of dollars worldwide. This article summarizes the main contributions to the field of artificial intelligence made at the IIIA-CSIC (Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish Scientific Research Council) over the last five years

Social Mental Shaping: Modelling the Impact of Sociality on Autonomous Agents' Mental States

This paper presents a framework that captures how the social nature of agents that are situated in a multi-agent environment impacts upon their individual mental states. Roles and relationships provide an abstraction upon which we develop the notion of social mental shaping. This allows us to extend the standard Belief-Desire-Intention model to account for how common social phenomena (e.g. cooperation, collaborative problem-solving and negotiation) can be integrated into a unified theoretical perspective that reflects a fully explicated model of the autonomous agent's mental state

Fuzzy Logic Based Negotiation in E-Commerce

The evolution of multi-agent system (MAS) presents new challenges in computer science and software engineering. A particularly challenging problem is the design of various forms of interaction among agents. Interaction may be aimed at enabling agents to coordinate their activities, cooperate to reach common objectives, or exchange resources to better achieve their individual objectives. This thesis is dealing with negotiation in e-commerce: a process through which multiple self-interested agents can reach agreement over the exchange of scarce resources. In particular, we present a fuzzy logic-based negotiation approach to automate multi-issue bilateral negotiation in e-marketplaces. In such frameworks issues to negotiate on can be multiple, interrelated, and may not be fixed in advance. Therefore, we use fuzzy inference system to model relations among issues and to allow agents express their preferences on them. We focus on settings where agents have limited or uncertain information, ruling them out from making optimal decisions. Since agents make decisions based on particular underlying reasons, namely their interests, beliefs then applying logic (by using fuzzy logic) over these reasons can enable agents to refine their decisions and consequently reach better agreements. I refer to this form of negotiation as: Fuzzy logic based negotiation in e-commerce. The contributions of the thesis begin with the use of fuzzy logic to design a reasoning model through which negotiation tactics and strategy are expressed throughout the process of negotiation. Then, an exploration of the differences between this approach and the more traditional bargaining-based approaches is presented. Strategic issues are then explored and a methodology for designing negotiation strategies is developed. Finally, the applicability of the framework is simulated using MATLAB toolbox

An Argumentation-based Perspective over the Social IoT

The crucial role played by social interactions between smart objects in the Internet of Things is being rapidly recognized by the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) vision. In this paper, we build upon the recently introduced vision of Speaking Objects – “things” interacting through argumentation – to show how different forms of human dialogue naturally fit cooperation and coordination requirements of the SIoT. In particular, we show how speaking objects can exchange arguments in order to seek for information, negotiate over an issue, persuade others, deliberate actions, and so on, namely, striving to reach consensus about the state of affairs and their goals. In this context, we illustrate how argumentation naturally enables such a form of conversational coordination through practical examples and a case study scenario