Conditional Partial Plans for Rational Situated Agents Capable of Deductive Reasoning and Inductive Learning

Rational, autonomous agents that are able to achieve their goals in dynamic, partially observable environments are the ultimate dream of Artificial Intelligence research since its beginning. The goal of this PhD thesis is to propose, develop and evaluate a framework well suited for creating intelligent agents that would be able to learn from experience, thus becoming more efficient at solving their tasks. We aim to create an agent able to function in adverse environments that it only partially understands. We are convinced that symbolic knowledge representations are the best way to achieve such versatility. In order to balance deliberation and acting, our agent needs to be emph{time-aware}, i.e. it needs to have the means to estimate its own reasoning and acting time. One of the crucial challenges is to ensure smooth interactions between the agent's internal reasoning mechanism and the learning system used to improve its behaviour. In order to address it, our agent will create several different conditional partial plans and reason about the potential usefulness of each one. Moreover it will generalise whatever experience it gathers and use it when solving subsequent, similar, problem instances. In this thesis we present on the conceptual level an architecture for rational agents, as well as implementation-based experimental results confirming that a successful lifelong learning of an autonomous artificial agent can be achieved using it

Control and Coordination in a Networked Robotic Platform

Control and Coordination of the robots has been widely researched area among the swarm robotics. Usually these swarms are involved in accomplishing tasks assigned to them either one after another or concurrently. Most of the times, the tasks assigned may not need the entire population of the swarm but a subset of them. In this project, emphasis has been given to determination of such subsets of robots termed as ”flock” whose size actually depends on the complexity of the task. Once the flock is determined from the swarm, leader and follower robots are determined which accomplish the task in a controlled and cooperative fashion. Although the entire control system,which is determined for collision free and coordinated environment, is stable, the results show that both wireless (bluetooth) and internet (UDP) communication system can introduce some lag which can lead robot trajectories to an unexpected set. The reason for this is each robot and a corresponding computer is considered as a complete robot and communication between the robot and the computer and between the computers was inevitable. These problems could easily be solved by integrating a computer on the robot or just add a wifi transmitter/receiver on the robot. On going down the lane, by introducing smarter robots with different kinds of sensors this project could be extended on a large scale for varied heterogenous and homogenous applications

A trust based approach to mobile multi-agent systems.

This thesis undertakes to provide an architecture and understanding of the incorporation of trust into the paradigm of mobile multi-agent systems. Trust deliberation is a soft security approach to the problem of mobile agent security whereby an agent is protected from the malicious behaviour of others within the system. Using a trust approach capitalises on observing malicious behaviour rather than preventing it. We adopt an architectural approach to trust such than we do not provide a model in itself, numerous mathematical models for the calculation of trust based on a history of observations already exist. Rather we look to provide the framework enabling such models to be utilised by mobile agents. As trust is subjective we envisage a system whereby individual agents will use different trust models or different weighting mechanisms. Three architectures are provided. Centralised whereby the platform itself provides all of the services needed by an agent to make observations and calculate trust. Decentralised in which each individual agent is responsible for making observations, communicating trust and the calculation of its own trust in others. A hybrid architecture such that trust mechanisms are provided by the platform and additionally are embedded within the agents themselves. As an optimisation of the architectures proposed in this thesis, we introduce the notion of trust communities. A community is used as a means to represent the trust information in categorisations dependant upon various properties. Optimisation occurs in two ways; firstly with subjective communities and secondly with system communities. A customised implementation framework of the architectures is introduced in the form of our TEMPLE (Trust Enabled Mobile-agent PLatform Environment) and stands as the underpinning of a case-study implementation in order to provide empirical evidence in the form of scenario test-bed data as to the effectiveness of each architecture. The case study chosen for use in a trust based system is that of a fish market' as given the number of interactions, entities, and migration of agents involved in the system thus, providing substantial output data based upon the trust decisions made by agents. Hence, a good indicator of the effectiveness of equipping agents with trust ability using our architectures

A real-time agent architecture and robust task scheduling.

by Zhao Lei.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-85).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Abstract --- p.iiAcknowledgments --- p.ivChapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 2 --- Background --- p.5Chapter 2.1 --- Agents --- p.5Chapter 2.1.1 --- Deliberative Agents --- p.7Chapter 2.1.2 --- Reactive Agents --- p.8Chapter 2.1.3 --- Interacting Agents --- p.9Chapter 2.1.4 --- Hybrid Architectures --- p.10Chapter 2.2 --- Real-time Artificial Intelligence --- p.10Chapter 2.3 --- Real-Time Agents --- p.12Chapter 2.3.1 --- The Subsumption Architecture --- p.13Chapter 2.3.2 --- The InterRAP Architecture --- p.15Chapter 2.3.3 --- The 3T Architecture --- p.16Chapter 2.4 --- On-line Scheduling in Real-Time Agents --- p.18Chapter 3 --- A Real-Time Agent Architecture --- p.20Chapter 3.1 --- Human Cognition Model --- p.20Chapter 3.1.1 --- Perception --- p.22Chapter 3.1.2 --- Cognition --- p.22Chapter 3.1.3 --- Action --- p.23Chapter 3.2 --- Real-Time Message Passing Primitives and Process Structuring --- p.24Chapter 3.2.1 --- Message Passing as IPC --- p.25Chapter 3.2.2 --- Administrator and Worker Processes --- p.28Chapter 3.3 --- Agent Architecture --- p.29Chapter 3.3.1 --- Sensor Workers and the Sensor Administrator --- p.30Chapter 3.3.2 --- The Cognition Workers --- p.32Chapter 3.3.3 --- "The Task Administrator, the Scheduler Worker and Ex- ecutor Workers" --- p.32Chapter 3.4 --- An Agent-Based Real-time Arcade Game --- p.34Chapter 4 --- A Multiple Method Approach to Task Scheduling --- p.37Chapter 4.1 --- Task Scheduling Mechanism --- p.37Chapter 4.1.1 --- Task and Action --- p.38Chapter 4.1.2 --- Task Administrator --- p.40Chapter 4.1.3 --- Task Scheduler --- p.43Chapter 4.2 --- A Task Scheduling Model --- p.44Chapter 4.3 --- Combination Rules and Special Cases --- p.46Chapter 4.4 --- Scheduling Algorithms --- p.49Chapter 5 --- Task Scheduling Model: Analysis and Experiments --- p.53Chapter 5.1 --- Goodness Measure --- p.53Chapter 5.2 --- Theoretical Analysis --- p.54Chapter 5.3 --- Implementation --- p.59Chapter 5.3.1 --- Task Generator Implementation --- p.59Chapter 5.3.2 --- Executor Workers Implementation --- p.61Chapter 5.4 --- Experimental Results --- p.62Chapter 5.4.1 --- Hybrid Mechanism and Individual Algorithms --- p.63Chapter 5.4.2 --- Effect of Average Execution Time --- p.65Chapter 5.4.3 --- Effect of the Greedy Algorithm --- p.65Chapter 5.4.4 --- Effect of the Advanced Algorithm --- p.67Chapter 5.4.5 --- Effect of Actions and Relations Among Them --- p.68Chapter 5.4.6 --- Effect of Deadline --- p.71Chapter 6 --- Conclusions --- p.73Chapter 6.1 --- Summary of Contributions --- p.73Chapter 6.2 --- Future Work --- p.7

Intelligent business processes composition based on mas, semantic and cloud integration (IPCASCI)

[EN]Component reuse is one of the techniques that most clearly contributes to the evolution of the software industry by providing efficient mechanisms to create quality software. Reuse increases both software reliability, due to the fact that it uses previously tested software components, and development productivity, and leads to a clear reduction in cost. Web services have become are an standard for application development on cloud computing environments and are essential in business process development. These services facilitate a software construction that is relatively fast and efficient, two aspects which can be improved by defining suitable models of reuse. This research work is intended to define a model which contains the construction requirements of new services from service composition. To this end, the composition is based on tested Web services and artificial intelligent tools at our disposal. It is believed that a multi-agent architecture based on virtual organizations is a suitable tool to facilitate the construction of cloud computing environments for business processes from other existing environments, and with help from ontological models as well as tools providing the standard BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). In the context of this proposal, we must generate a new business process from the available services in the platform, starting with the requirement specifications that the process should meet. These specifications will be composed of a semi-free description of requirements to describe the new service. The virtual organizations based on a multi-agent system will manage the tasks requiring intelligent behaviour. This system will analyse the input (textual description of the proposal) in order to deconstruct it into computable functionalities, which will be subsequently treated. Web services (or business processes) stored to be reused have been created from the perspective of SOA architectures and associated with an ontological component, which allows the multi-agent system (based on virtual organizations) to identify the services to complete the reuse process. The proposed model develops a service composition by applying a standard BPEL once the services that will compose the solution business process have been identified. This standard allows us to compose Web services in an easy way and provides the advantage of a direct mapping from Business Process Management Notation diagrams