44,908 research outputs found
A multi-agent platform for auction-based allocation of loads in transportation logistics
This paper describes an agent-based platform for the allocation of loads in distributed transportation logistics, developed as a collaboration between CWI, Dutch National Center for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam and Vos Logistics Organizing, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The platform follows a real business scenario proposed by Vos, and it involves a set of agents bidding for transportation loads to be distributed from a central depot in the Netherlands to different locations across Germany. The platform supports both human agents (i.e. transportation planners), who can bid through specialized planning and bidding interfaces, as well as automated, software agents. We exemplify how the proposed platform can be used to test both the bidding behaviour of human logistics planners, as well as the performance of automated auction bidding strategies, developed for such settings. The paper first introduces the business problem setting and then describes the architecture and main characteristics of our auction platform. We conclude with a preliminary discussion of our experience from a human bidding experiment, involving Vos planners competing for orders both against each other and against some (simple) automated strategies
Towards engineering ontologies for cognitive profiling of agents on the semantic web
Research shows that most agent-based collaborations
suffer from lack of flexibility. This is due to the fact that
most agent-based applications assume pre-defined
knowledge of agents’ capabilities and/or neglect basic
cognitive and interactional requirements in multi-agent
collaboration. The highlight of this paper is that it brings
cognitive models (inspired from cognitive sciences and HCI)
proposing architectural and knowledge-based requirements
for agents to structure ontological models for cognitive
profiling in order to increase cognitive awareness between
themselves, which in turn promotes flexibility, reusability
and predictability of agent behavior; thus contributing
towards minimizing cognitive overload incurred on humans.
The semantic web is used as an action mediating space,
where shared knowledge base in the form of ontological
models provides affordances for improving cognitive
awareness
Smart Grid Technologies in Europe: An Overview
The old electricity network infrastructure has proven to be inadequate, with respect to modern challenges such as alternative energy sources, electricity demand and energy saving policies. Moreover, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) seem to have reached an adequate level of reliability and flexibility in order to support a new concept of electricity network—the smart grid. In this work, we will analyse the state-of-the-art of smart grids, in their technical, management, security, and optimization aspects. We will also provide a brief overview of the regulatory aspects involved in the development of a smart grid, mainly from the viewpoint of the European Unio
Towards trusted volunteer grid environments
Intensive experiences show and confirm that grid environments can be
considered as the most promising way to solve several kinds of problems
relating either to cooperative work especially where involved collaborators are
dispersed geographically or to some very greedy applications which require
enough power of computing or/and storage. Such environments can be classified
into two categories; first, dedicated grids where the federated computers are
solely devoted to a specific work through its end. Second, Volunteer grids
where federated computers are not completely devoted to a specific work but
instead they can be randomly and intermittently used, at the same time, for any
other purpose or they can be connected or disconnected at will by their owners
without any prior notification. Each category of grids includes surely several
advantages and disadvantages; nevertheless, we think that volunteer grids are
very promising and more convenient especially to build a general multipurpose
distributed scalable environment. Unfortunately, the big challenge of such
environments is, however, security and trust. Indeed, owing to the fact that
every federated computer in such an environment can randomly be used at the
same time by several users or can be disconnected suddenly, several security
problems will automatically arise. In this paper, we propose a novel solution
based on identity federation, agent technology and the dynamic enforcement of
access control policies that lead to the design and implementation of trusted
volunteer grid environments.Comment: 9 Pages, IJCNC Journal 201
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