3,160 research outputs found
Logic-Based Specification Languages for Intelligent Software Agents
The research field of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) aims to find
abstractions, languages, methodologies and toolkits for modeling, verifying,
validating and prototyping complex applications conceptualized as Multiagent
Systems (MASs). A very lively research sub-field studies how formal methods can
be used for AOSE. This paper presents a detailed survey of six logic-based
executable agent specification languages that have been chosen for their
potential to be integrated in our ARPEGGIO project, an open framework for
specifying and prototyping a MAS. The six languages are ConGoLog, Agent-0, the
IMPACT agent programming language, DyLog, Concurrent METATEM and Ehhf. For each
executable language, the logic foundations are described and an example of use
is shown. A comparison of the six languages and a survey of similar approaches
complete the paper, together with considerations of the advantages of using
logic-based languages in MAS modeling and prototyping.Comment: 67 pages, 1 table, 1 figure. Accepted for publication by the Journal
"Theory and Practice of Logic Programming", volume 4, Maurice Bruynooghe
Editor-in-Chie
Model Driven Evolution of an Agent-Based Home Energy Management System
Advanced smart home appliances and new models of energy tariffs imposed
by energy providers pose new challenges in the automation of home energy
management. Users need some assistant tool that helps them to make complex decisions
with different goals, depending on the current situation. Multi-agent systems
have proved to be a suitable technology to develop self-management systems,
able to take the most adequate decision under different context-dependent situations,
like the home energy management. The heterogeneity of home appliances
and also the changes in the energy policies of providers introduce the necessity of
explicitly modeling this variability. But, multi-agent systems lack of mechanisms
to effectively deal with the different degrees of variability required by these kinds
of systems. Software Product Line technologies, including variability models, has
been successfully applied to different domains to explicitly model any kind of variability.
We have defined a software product line development process that performs
a model driven generation of agents embedded in heterogeneous smart objects with
different degrees of self-management. However, once deployed, the home energy
assistant system has to be able to evolve to self-adapt its decision making or devices
to new requirements. So, in this paper we propose a model driven mechanism to
automatically manage the evolution of multi-agent systems distributed among several
devices.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional AndalucÃa Tech
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
Charters for Self-Evolving Communities
Self-organisation and self-evolution is evident in physics, chem-istry, biology, and human societies. Despite the existing literature on the topic, we believe self-organisation and self-evolution is still missing in the IT tools we are building and using. Instead of creating numerous rigid systems, we should aim at providing tools for creating self-evolving systems that adapt to the ever evolving community's needs. This pa- per proposes a roadmap for self-evolution by presenting a set of building blocks, which we refer to as community charters. The paper also presents an approach for each of these blocks, helping build the first prototype for self-evolving communities.This work is supported by the PRAISE project (funded by the European Commission under the FP7 STREP grant number 318770), the CBIT project (funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science & Innovation under the grant number TIN2010-16306), and the Agreement Technologies project (funded by CONSOLIDER CSD
2007-0022, INGENIO 2010).Peer Reviewe
Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
We consider the problem of multiple agents sensing and acting in environments
with the goal of maximising their shared utility. In these environments, agents
must learn communication protocols in order to share information that is needed
to solve the tasks. By embracing deep neural networks, we are able to
demonstrate end-to-end learning of protocols in complex environments inspired
by communication riddles and multi-agent computer vision problems with partial
observability. We propose two approaches for learning in these domains:
Reinforced Inter-Agent Learning (RIAL) and Differentiable Inter-Agent Learning
(DIAL). The former uses deep Q-learning, while the latter exploits the fact
that, during learning, agents can backpropagate error derivatives through
(noisy) communication channels. Hence, this approach uses centralised learning
but decentralised execution. Our experiments introduce new environments for
studying the learning of communication protocols and present a set of
engineering innovations that are essential for success in these domains
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