From Agent Game Protocols to Implementable Roles

kostas.stathis-at-cs.rhul.ac.uk Abstract. We present a formal framework for decomposing agent interaction protocols to the roles their participants should play. The framework allows an Authority Agent that knows a protocol to compute the protocol’s roles so that it can allocate them to interested parties. We show how the Authority Agent can use the role descriptions to identify problems with the protocol and repair it on the fly, to ensure that participants will be able to implement their role requirements without compromising the protocol’s interactions. Our representation of agent interaction protocols is a game-based one and the decomposition of a game protocol into its constituent roles is based upon the branching bisimulation equivalence reduction of the game. The work extends our previous work on using games to admit agents in an artificial society by checking their competence according to the society rules. The applicability of the overall approach is illustrated by showing how to decompose the NetBill protocol into its roles. We also show how to automatically repair the interactions of a protocol that cannot be implemented in its original form.

Realising Team-Working in the Field: An Agent-based Approach

Multi-agent systems technology is applied to enable co-operation between mobile workers in the field, minimising user intervention and increasing reachability. A component-based approach is taken to simplify the management of deployed co-operation services. A Personal Assistant running on a mobile device is introduced to show how an intelligent and autonomous agent can increase the utility of users during workforce co-operation processes. Finally, a real world trial of the technology by network installation and maintenance engineers in the UK is described. Some technical issues revealed during the trial are discussed, as is the impact of the technology on the business process

A Role-Based Approach for Orchestrating Emergent Configurations in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned as a global network of connected things enabling ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. With estimations of billions of sensors and devices to be connected in the coming years, the IoT has been advocated as having a great potential to impact the way we live, but also how we work. However, the connectivity aspect in itself only accounts for the underlying M2M infrastructure. In order to properly support engineering IoT systems and applications, it is key to orchestrate heterogeneous 'things' in a seamless, adaptive and dynamic manner, such that the system can exhibit a goal-directed behaviour and take appropriate actions. Yet, this form of interaction between things needs to take a user-centric approach and by no means elude the users' requirements. To this end, contextualisation is an important feature of the system, allowing it to infer user activities and prompt the user with relevant information and interactions even in the absence of intentional commands. In this work we propose a role-based model for emergent configurations of connected systems as a means to model, manage, and reason about IoT systems including the user's interaction with them. We put a special focus on integrating the user perspective in order to guide the emergent configurations such that systems goals are aligned with the users' intentions. We discuss related scientific and technical challenges and provide several uses cases outlining the concept of emergent configurations.Comment: In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on the Internet of Agents @AAMAS201

Positionnement des systèmes multi-agents pour les systèmes de transport intelligents

National audienceThe use of new information and communication technologies has become a central solution to improve transport systems. What has led to which is called the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Societal challenges for ensuring their effective implementations are crucial both to respond to users needs, and to design sustainable transport systems. In this paper, we argue that multi-agent paradigm can address the needs of this domain. We introduce ITS, and we emphasize three main issues of ITS which are how to ensure its functionality, how to render it more "intelligent" despite constraints in scalability, and the ethical implications. Some selected research works are provided to illustrate these issuesL’utilisation des nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication pour l’amélioration des systèmes de transport est une solution devenue centrale dans le domaine du transport. Le résultat est ce que l’on appelle les systèmes de transport intelligents (STI). Les enjeux sociétaux de leur mise en œuvre sont cruciaux en termes de réponse aux besoins des usagers mais également pour la conception de systèmes de transports durables. Dans ce papier, nous défendons l’idée que le paradigme multi-agent peut répondre aux besoins de ce domaine. Nous proposons ainsi de présenter le domaine des STI et de focaliser notre attention sur trois problématiques : la manière d’assurer sa fonctionnalité, la manière de le rendre plus « intelligent » malgré des contraintes de passage à l’échelle, et enfin ses conséquences éthiques. Quelques travaux de recherche illustrent notre propos

Learning to Reach Agreement in a Continuous Ultimatum Game

It is well-known that acting in an individually rational manner, according to the principles of classical game theory, may lead to sub-optimal solutions in a class of problems named social dilemmas. In contrast, humans generally do not have much difficulty with social dilemmas, as they are able to balance personal benefit and group benefit. As agents in multi-agent systems are regularly confronted with social dilemmas, for instance in tasks such as resource allocation, these agents may benefit from the inclusion of mechanisms thought to facilitate human fairness. Although many of such mechanisms have already been implemented in a multi-agent systems context, their application is usually limited to rather abstract social dilemmas with a discrete set of available strategies (usually two). Given that many real-world examples of social dilemmas are actually continuous in nature, we extend this previous work to more general dilemmas, in which agents operate in a continuous strategy space. The social dilemma under study here is the well-known Ultimatum Game, in which an optimal solution is achieved if agents agree on a common strategy. We investigate whether a scale-free interaction network facilitates agents to reach agreement, especially in the presence of fixed-strategy agents that represent a desired (e.g. human) outcome. Moreover, we study the influence of rewiring in the interaction network. The agents are equipped with continuous-action learning automata and play a large number of random pairwise games in order to establish a common strategy. From our experiments, we may conclude that results obtained in discrete-strategy games can be generalized to continuous-strategy games to a certain extent: a scale-free interaction network structure allows agents to achieve agreement on a common strategy, and rewiring in the interaction network greatly enhances the agents ability to reach agreement. However, it also becomes clear that some alternative mechanisms, such as reputation and volunteering, have many subtleties involved and do not have convincing beneficial effects in the continuous case

Strategic Argumentation is NP-Complete

In this paper we study the complexity of strategic argumentation for dialogue games. A dialogue game is a 2-player game where the parties play arguments. We show how to model dialogue games in a skeptical, non-monotonic formalism, and we show that the problem of deciding what move (set of rules) to play at each turn is an NP-complete problem

mWater prototype #3 analysis and design

In themWater case study prototype #3 it has been used Magentix2 [1, 24, 3, 22, 4, 17] (for more details on Magentix2 see WP7 Deliverables) as the MAS platform for supporting the execution of the MAS system. The platform follows the FIPA standards [14] offering a set of useful mechanisms for the agents to communicate and also tools to allow programming agents in a high level language based on the BDI model. Magentix2 is an open system which facilitates the interaction between heterogeneous agents through FIPA-ACL messages. Also complex interactions can be carried out in a flexible an open way as conversations. The platform offers special structures to allow to use such conversations by considering a set of issues: In each conversation there are always two roles involved: Initiator and Participant. The first is the one who initiates the conversation, and the rest of agents play the Participant role. The conversation can be seen as a direct graph where nodes represent the actions to perform in each step of the conversation and arcs represent the transition between such states. Those steps allow to perform some actions and they can be of different kinds, for example: Begin, Final, Wait, Send, Receive, Action, etc. Conversations have a unique identifier that allows to manage them individually. 1Botti Navarro, VJ.; Garrido Tejero, A.; Giret Boggino, AS.; Noriega, P.; Bexi, A. (2013). mWater prototype #3 analysis and design. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/3212

Exploiting Reputation in Distributed Virtual Environments

The cognitive research on reputation has shown several interesting properties that can improve both the quality of services and the security in distributed electronic environments. In this paper, the impact of reputation on decision-making under scarcity of information will be shown. First, a cognitive theory of reputation will be presented, then a selection of simulation experimental results from different studies will be discussed. Such results concern the benefits of reputation when agents need to find out good sellers in a virtual market-place under uncertainty and informational cheating

Une architecture cognitive et affective orientée interaction

National audienceLes robots trouvent de nouvelles applications dans notre vie de tous les jours et interagissent de plus en plus etroi-tement avec leurs utilisateurs humains. Cependant, malgré une longue tradition de recherche, les architectures cogni-tives existantes restent souvent trop génériques et pas as-sez adaptées aux besoins spécifiques de l'Interaction sociale Humain-Robot, comme la gestion des emotions, du langage, des normes sociales, etc. Dans cet article, nous présentons CAIO, une architecture Cognitive et Affective Orientée Interaction. Elle permet aux robots de raisonner sur les etats mentaux (y compris les emotions) et d'agir physiquement, ´ emotionnellement et verbalement