Advances in infrastructures and tools for multiagent systems

In the last few years, information system technologies have focused on solving challenges in order to develop distributed applications. Distributed systems can be viewed as collections of service-provider and ser vice-consumer components interlinked by dynamically defined workflows (Luck and McBurney 2008).Alberola Oltra, JM.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Such Aparicio, JM. (2014). Advances in infrastructures and tools for multiagent systems. Information Systems Frontiers. 16:163-167. doi:10.1007/s10796-014-9493-6S16316716Alberola, J. M., Búrdalo, L., Julián, V., Terrasa, A., & García-Fornes, A. (2014). An adaptive framework for monitoring agent organizations. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9478-x .Alfonso, B., Botti, V., Garrido, A., & Giret, A. (2014). A MAS-based infrastructure for negotiation and its application to a water-right market. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9443-8 .Andrighetto, G., Castelfranchi, C., Mayor, E., McBreen, J., López-Sánchez, M., & Parsons, S. (2013). (Social) norm dynamics. In G. Andrighetto, G. Governatori, P. Noriega, & L. W. van der Torre (Eds.), Normative multi-agent systems (pp. 135–170). Dagstuhl: Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik.Baarslag, T., Fujita, K., Gerding, E. H., Hindriks, K., Ito, T., Jennings, N. R., et al. (2013). Evaluating practical negotiating agents: results and analysis of the 2011 international competition. Artificial Intelligence, 198, 73–103.Boissier, O., Bordini, R. H., Hübner, J. F., Ricci, A., & Santi, A. (2013). Multi-agent oriented programming with JaCaMo. Science of Computer Programming, 78(6), 747–761.Campos, J., Esteva, M., López-Sánchez, M., Morales, J., & Salamó, M. (2011). Organisational adaptation of multi-agent systems in a peer-to-peer scenario. Computing, 91(2), 169–215.Carrera, A., Iglesias, C. A., & Garijo, M. (2014). Beast methodology: an agile testing methodology for multi-agent systems based on behaviour driven development. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9438-5 .Criado, N., Such, J. M., & Botti, V. (2014). Norm reasoning services. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9444-7 .Del Val, E., Rebollo, M., & Botti, V. (2014). Enhancing decentralized service discovery in open service-oriented multi-agent systems. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 28(1), 1–30.Denti, E., Omicini, A., & Ricci, A. (2002). Coordination tools for MAS development and deployment. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 16(9–10), 721–752.Dignum, V., & Dignum, F. (2012). A logic of agent organizations. Logic Journal of IGPL, 20(1), 283–316.Ferber, J., & Gutknecht, O. (1998). A meta-model for the analysis and design of organizations in multi-agent systems. In Multi agent systems. Proceedings. International Conference on (pp. 128–135). IEEE.Fogués, R. L., Such, J. M., Espinosa, A., & Garcia-Fornes, A. (2014). BFF: a tool for eliciting tie strength and user communities in social networking services. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9453-6 .Garcia, E., Giret, A., & Botti, V. (2011). Evaluating software engineering techniques for developing complex systems with multiagent approaches. Information and Software Technology, 53(5), 494–506.Garcia-Fornes, A., Hübner, J., Omicini, A., Rodriguez-Aguilar, J., & Botti, V. (2011). Infrastructures and tools for multiagent systems for the new generation of distributed systems. Engineering Applications of Articial Intelligence, 24(7), 1095–1097.Jennings, N., Faratin, P., Lomuscio, A., Parsons, S., Sierra, C., & Wooldridge, M. (2001). Automated negotiation: prospects, methods and challenges. International Journal of Group Decision and Negotiation, 10(2), 199–215.Jung, Y., Kim, M., Masoumzadeh, A., & Joshi, J. B. (2012). A survey of security issue in multi-agent systems. Artificial Intelligence Review, 37(3), 239–260.Kota, R., Gibbins, N., & Jennings, N. R. (2012). Decentralized approaches for self-adaptation in agent organizations. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS), 7(1), 1.Kraus, S. (1997). Negotiation and cooperation in multi-agent environments. Artificial Intelligence, 94(1), 79–97.Lin, Y. I., Chou, Y. W., Shiau, J. Y., & Chu, C. H. (2013). Multi-agent negotiation based on price schedules algorithm for distributed collaborative design. Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 24(3), 545–557.Luck, M., & McBurney, P. (2008). Computing as interaction: agent and agreement technologies.Luck, M., McBurney, P., Shehory, O., & Willmott, S. (2005). Agent technology: Computing as interaction (A roadmap for agent based computing). AgentLink.Ossowski, S., & Menezes, R. (2006). On coordination and its significance to distributed and multiagent systems. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 18(4), 359–370.Ossowski, S., Sierra, C., & Botti. (2013). Agreement technologies: A computing perspective. In Agreement Technologies (pp. 3–16). Springer Netherlands.Pinyol, I., & Sabater-Mir, J. (2013). Computational trust and reputation models for open multi-agent systems: a review. Artificial Intelligence Review, 40(1), 1–25.Ricci, A., Piunti, M., & Viroli, M. (2011). Environment programming in multi-agent systems: an artifact-based perspective. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 23(2), 158–192.Sierra, C., & Debenham, J. (2006). Trust and honour in information-based agency. In Proceedings of the 5th international conference on autonomous agents and multi agent systems, (p. 1225–1232). New York: ACM.Sierra, C., Botti, V., & Ossowski, S. (2011). Agreement computing. KI-Knstliche Intelligenz, 25(1), 57–61.Vasconcelos, W., García-Camino, A., Gaertner, D., Rodríguez-Aguilar, J. A., & Noriega, P. (2012). 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Designing and trusting multi-agent systems for B2B applications

This thesis includes two main contributions. The first one is designing and implementing B usiness-to-B usiness (B2B ) applications using multi-agent systems and computational argumentation theory. The second one is trust management in such multi-agent systems using agents' credibility. Our first contribution presents a framework for modeling and deploying B2B applications, with autonomous agents exposing the individual components that implement these applications. This framework consists of three levels identified by strategic, application, and resource, with focus here on the first two levels. The strategic level is about the common vision that independent businesses define as part of their decision of partnership. The application level is about the business processes, which are virtually integrated as result of this common vision. Since conflicts are bound to arise among the independent applications/agents, the framework uses a formal model based upon computational argumentation theory through a persuasion protocol to detect and resolve these conflicts. Termination, soundness, and completeness properties of this protocol are presented. Distributed and centralized coordination strategies are also supported in this framework, which is illustrated with an online purchasing case study followed by its implementation in Jadex, a java-based platform for multi-agent systems. An important issue in such open multi-agent systems is how much agents trust each other. Considering the size of these systems, agents that are service providers or customers in a B2B setting cannot avoid interacting with others that are unknown or partially known regarding to some past experience. Due to the fact that agents are self-interested, they may jeopardize the mutual trust by not performing the actions as they are supposed to. To this end, our second contribution is proposing a trust model allowing agents to evaluate the credibility of other peers in the environment. Our multi-factor model applies a number of measurements in trust evaluation of other party's likely behavior. After a period of time, the actual performance of the testimony agent is compared against the information provided by interfering agents. This comparison process leads to both adjusting the credibility of the contributing agents in trust evaluation and improving the system trust evaluation by minimizing the estimation error

Agoric computation: trust and cyber-physical systems

In the past two decades advances in miniaturisation and economies of scale have led to the emergence of billions of connected components that have provided both a spur and a blueprint for the development of smart products acting in specialised environments which are uniquely identifiable, localisable, and capable of autonomy. Adopting the computational perspective of multi-agent systems (MAS) as a technological abstraction married with the engineering perspective of cyber-physical systems (CPS) has provided fertile ground for designing, developing and deploying software applications in smart automated context such as manufacturing, power grids, avionics, healthcare and logistics, capable of being decentralised, intelligent, reconfigurable, modular, flexible, robust, adaptive and responsive. Current agent technologies are, however, ill suited for information-based environments, making it difficult to formalise and implement multiagent systems based on inherently dynamical functional concepts such as trust and reliability, which present special challenges when scaling from small to large systems of agents. To overcome such challenges, it is useful to adopt a unified approach which we term agoric computation, integrating logical, mathematical and programming concepts towards the development of agent-based solutions based on recursive, compositional principles, where smaller systems feed via directed information flows into larger hierarchical systems that define their global environment. Considering information as an integral part of the environment naturally defines a web of operations where components of a systems are wired in some way and each set of inputs and outputs are allowed to carry some value. These operations are stateless abstractions and procedures that act on some stateful cells that cumulate partial information, and it is possible to compose such abstractions into higher-level ones, using a publish-and-subscribe interaction model that keeps track of update messages between abstractions and values in the data. In this thesis we review the logical and mathematical basis of such abstractions and take steps towards the software implementation of agoric modelling as a framework for simulation and verification of the reliability of increasingly complex systems, and report on experimental results related to a few select applications, such as stigmergic interaction in mobile robotics, integrating raw data into agent perceptions, trust and trustworthiness in orchestrated open systems, computing the epistemic cost of trust when reasoning in networks of agents seeded with contradictory information, and trust models for distributed ledgers in the Internet of Things (IoT); and provide a roadmap for future developments of our research

A MAS-based infrastructure for negotiation and its application to a water-right market

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10796-013-9443-8This paper presents a MAS-based infrastructure for the specification of a negotiation framework that handles multiple negotiation protocols in a coherent and flexible way. Although it may be used to implement one single type of agreement mechanism, it has been designed in such a way that multiple mechanisms may be available at any given time, to be activated and tailored on demand (on-line) by participating agents. The framework is also generic enough so that new protocols may be easily added. This infrastructure has been successfully used in a case study to implement a simulation tool as a component of a larger framework based on an electronic market of water rights.This paper was partially funded by the Consolider AT project CSD2007-0022 INGENIO 2010 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation; the MICINN projects TIN2011-27652-C03-01 and TIN2009-13839-C03-01; and the Valencian Prometeo project 2008/051.Alfonso Espinosa, B.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Garrido Tejero, A.; Giret Boggino, AS. (2014). A MAS-based infrastructure for negotiation and its application to a water-right market. Information Systems Frontiers. 16(2):183-199. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-013-9443-8S183199162Alberola, J.M., Such, J.M., Espinosa, A., Botti, V., García-Fornes, A. (2008). Magentix: a multiagent platform integrated in linux. In EUMAS (pp. 1–10).Alfonso, B., Vivancos, E., Botti, V., García-Fornes, A. (2011). Integrating jason in a multi-agent platform with support for interaction protocols. 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(1987). A foundation for the study of group decision support systems. Knowledge based systems, 33(5), 589–609.Eckersley, P. (2003). Virtual markets for virtual goods. Available at http://www.ipria.com/publications/wp/2003/IPRIAWP02.2003.pdf (Accessed April 2012).Fjermestad, J., & Hiltz, S. (2001). Group support systems: a descriptive evaluation of case and field studies. Journal of Management Information Systems, 17(3), 115–161.Fogués, R.L., Alberola, J.M., Such, J.M., Espinosa, A., García-Fornes, A. (2010). Towards dynamic agent interaction support in open multiagent systems. In Proceedings of the 13th international conference of the catalan association for artificial intelligence (Vol. 220, pp. 89–98). IOS Press.Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. (2001). FIPA interaction protocol library specification XC00025E. FIPA Consortium.Garrido, A., Arangu, M., Onaindia, E. (2009). A constraint programming formulation for planning: from plan scheduling to plan generatio. Journal of Scheduling, 12(3), 227–256.Giret, A., Garrido, A., Gimeno, J.A., Botti, V., Noriega, P. (2011). A MAS decision support tool for water-right markets. In Proceedings of the tenth international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (Demonstrations@AAMAS) (pp. 1305–1306).Gomez-Limon, J., & Martinez, Y. (2006). Multi-criteria modelling of irrigation water market at basin level: a Spanish case study. European Journal of Operational Research, 173, 313–336.Janjua, N.K., Hussain, F.K., Hussain, O.K. (2013). Semantic information and knowledge integration through argumentative reasoning to support intelligent decision making. Information Systems Frontiers, 15(2), 167–192.jen Hsu, J.Y., Lin, K.-J., Chang, T.-H., ju Ho, C., Huang, H.-S., rong Jih, W. (2006). Parameter learning of personalized trust models in broker-based distributed trust management. Information Systems Frontiers, 8(4), 321–333.Kersten, G., & Lai, H. (2007). European Journal of Operational Research, 180(2), 922–937.Lee, N., Bae, J.K., Koo, C. (2012). A case-based reasoning based multi-agent cognitive map inference mechanism: an application to sales opportunity assessment. Information Systems Frontiers, 14(3), 653–668.Luck, M., & AgentLink. (2005). Agent technology: computing as interaction: a roadmap for agent-based computing. Compiled, written and edited by Michael Luck et al. AgentLink, Southampton.Ma, J., & Orgun, M.A. (2008). Formalizing theories of trust for authentication protocols. Information Systems Frontiers, 10(1), 19–32.Pokahr, A., Braubach, L., Walczak, A., Lamersdorf, W. (2007). Developing multi-agent systems with JADE. Jadex-Engineering Goal-Oriented Agents (pp. 254258). Wiley.Ramos, C., Cordeiro, M., Praça, I., Vale, Z. (2005). Intelligent agents for negotiation and game-based decision support in electricity market. 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Supporting cooperation and coordination in open multi-agent systems

Cooperation and coordination between agents are fundamental processes for increasing aggregate and individual benefit in open Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). The increased ubiquity, size, and complexity of open MAS in the modern world has prompted significant research interest in the mechanisms that underlie cooperative and coordinated behaviour. In open MAS, in which agents join and leave freely, we can assume the following properties: (i) there are no centralised authorities, (ii) agent authority is uniform, (iii) agents may be heterogeneously owned and designed, and may consequently have con icting intentions and inconsistent capabilities, and (iv) agents are constrained in interactions by a complex connecting network topology. Developing mechanisms to support cooperative and coordinated behaviour that remain effective under these assumptions remains an open research problem. Two of the major mechanisms by which cooperative and coordinated behaviour can be achieved are (i) trust and reputation, and (ii) norms and conventions. Trust and reputation, which support cooperative and coordinated behaviour through notions of reciprocity, are effective in protecting agents from malicious or selfish individuals, but their capabilities can be affected by a lack of information about potential partners and the impact of the underlying network structure. Regarding conventions and norms, there are still a wide variety of open research problems, including: (i) manipulating which convention or norm a population adopts, (ii) how to exploit knowledge of the underlying network structure to improve mechanism efficacy, and (iii) how conventions might be manipulated in the middle and latter stages of their lifecycle, when they have become established and stable. In this thesis, we address these issues and propose a number of techniques and theoretical advancements that help ensure the robustness and efficiency of these mechanisms in the context of open MAS, and demonstrate new techniques for manipulating convention emergence in large, distributed populations. Specfically, we (i) show that gossiping of reputation information can mitigate the detrimental effects of incomplete information on trust and reputation and reduce the impact of network structure, (ii) propose a new model of conventions that accounts for limitations in existing theories, (iii) show how to manipulate convention emergence using small groups of agents inserted by interested parties, (iv) demonstrate how to learn which locations in a network have the greatest capacity to in uence which convention a population adopts, and (v) show how conventions can be manipulated in the middle and latter stages of the convention lifecycle

Blockchain Solutions for Multi-Agent Robotic Systems: Related Work and Open Questions

The possibilities of decentralization and immutability make blockchain probably one of the most breakthrough and promising technological innovations in recent years. This paper presents an overview, analysis, and classification of possible blockchain solutions for practical tasks facing multi-agent robotic systems. The paper discusses blockchain-based applications that demonstrate how distributed ledger can be used to extend the existing number of research platforms and libraries for multi-agent robotic systems.Comment: 5 pages, FRUCT-2019 conference pape

Trust Strategies for the Semantic Web

Everyone agrees on the importance of enabling trust on the SemanticWebto ensure more efficient agent interaction. Current research on trust seems to focus on developing computational models, semantic representations, inference techniques, etc. However, little attention has been given to the plausible trust strategies or tactics that an agent can follow when interacting with other agents on the Semantic Web. In this paper we identify five most common strategies of trust and discuss their envisaged costs and benefits. The aim is to provide some guidelines to help system developers appreciate the risks and gains involved with each trust strategy