Supporting Dynamicity in Emergency Response Applications

Multiagent Systems are a promising paradigm for software development. It is feasible to model such systems with many components where each one can solve a specific problem. This division of responsibilities allows multiagent systems to work in dynamically changing environments. An example of an environment that is very changeable is related with emergencies management. Emergency management systems depend on the cooperation of all their components due to their specialization. In order to obtain this cooperation, the components need to interact with each other and adapt their interactions depending on their purpose and the system components they are interacting with. Also, new components may arrive on the scene, which must be informed about the interaction policies that original components are using. Although Multiagent Systems are suited to managing scenarios of this kind, their effectiveness depends on their capacity to dynamically modify and adapt the protocols that control the interactions among agents in the system. In this paper, an infrastructure to support dynamically changing interaction protocols is presented

Communicating open systems

Just as conventional institutions are organisational structures for coordinating the activities of multiple interacting individuals, electronic institutions provide a computational analogue for coordinating the activities of multiple interacting software agents. In this paper, we argue that open multi-agent systems can be effectively designed and implemented as electronic institutions, for which we provide a comprehensive computational model. More specifically, the paper provides an operational semantics for electronic institutions, specifying the essential data structures, the state representation and the key operations necessary to implement them. We specify the agent workflow structure that is the core component of such electronic institutions and particular instantiations of knowledge representation languages that support the institutional model. In so doing, we provide the first formal account of the electronic institution concept in a rigorous and unambiguous way

Agentes BDI bajo interacciones reguladas: un enfoque basado en flujos de trabajo

[ES] Un agente en un entorno multi-agente necesita comunicarse con otros para lograr sus objetivos. Los protocolos de interacción regulan estas interacciones estableciendo precedencias y restricciones en la secuencia de mensajes a intercambiar. Por otra parte, la naturaleza inteligente, proactiva y autónoma de los agentes es fácilmente representada a través de lenguajes de programación de alto nivel como AgentSpeak(L). En este trabajo se ofrece un mecanismo para que agentes programados en Jason, el cual es una extensión de AgentSpeak(L) y se basa en el modelo BDI de agentes, puedan hacer uso de protocolos de interacción según los estándares de FIPA. Un gestor de conversaciones estará a cargo de la creación y control de estas conversaciones en la plataforma, de manera que se abstrae al programador de aspectos como errores de sincronización, tiempos de espera etc. Además se extiende esta propuesta, con una herramienta de modelado que permite especificar los agentes en un sistema en términos de sus interacciones y las relaciones entre ellas, considerándose para ello los roles, estados de los agentes o condiciones que deban cumplirse durante la ejecución de sus acciones.[EN] In a multi-agent environment, an agent needs to communicate with others to achieve its goals. The interaction protocols regulate those interactions by establishing precedences and restrictions on the sequence of messages to be exchanged. On the other hand, the smart, proactive and autonomous nature of agents can be easily represented through high level programming languages such as AgentSpeak(L). This approach offers a mechanism in order to allow agents programmed in Jason, which is an extension of AgentSpeak (L) and is based on the BDI model of agents, to use the interaction protocols according to FIPA standards. A conversation manager will be responsible of the creation and control of these conversations on the platform, so that it prevents the developer from issues such as synchronization errors, timeouts and so on. Besides, this proposal is extended with a modeling tool that allows specifying the agents in a system in terms of their interactions and relationships between them, taking in to account the roles, the agent's states or conditions to be met during the execution of their actions.Alfonso Espinosa, B. (2012). Agentes BDI bajo interacciones reguladas: un enfoque basado en flujos de trabajo. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1796