The 1990 progress report and future plans

This document describes the progress and plans of the Artificial Intelligence Research Branch (RIA) at ARC in 1990. Activities span a range from basic scientific research to engineering development and to fielded NASA applications, particularly those applications that are enabled by basic research carried out at RIA. Work is conducted in-house and through collaborative partners in academia and industry. Our major focus is on a limited number of research themes with a dual commitment to technical excellence and proven applicability to NASA short, medium, and long-term problems. RIA acts as the Agency's lead organization for research aspects of artificial intelligence, working closely with a second research laboratory at JPL and AI applications groups at all NASA centers

Intelligent Agents and Their Potential for Future Design and Synthesis Environment

This document contains the proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Agents and Their Potential for Future Design and Synthesis Environment, held at NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, September 16-17, 1998. The workshop was jointly sponsored by the University of Virginia's Center for Advanced Computational Technology and NASA. Workshop attendees came from NASA, industry and universities. The objectives of the workshop were to assess the status of intelligent agents technology and to identify the potential of software agents for use in future design and synthesis environment. The presentations covered the current status of agent technology and several applications of intelligent software agents. Certain materials and products are identified in this publication in order to specify adequately the materials and products that were investigated in the research effort. In no case does such identification imply recommendation or endorsement of products by NASA, nor does it imply that the materials and products are the only ones or the best ones available for this purpose. In many cases equivalent materials and products are available and would probably produce equivalent results

Intelligent Agent Architectures: Reactive Planning Testbed

An Integrated Agent Architecture (IAA) is a framework or paradigm for constructing intelligent agents. Intelligent agents are collections of sensors, computers, and effectors that interact with their environments in real time in goal-directed ways. Because of the complexity involved in designing intelligent agents, it has been found useful to approach the construction of agents with some organizing principle, theory, or paradigm that gives shape to the agent's components and structures their relationships. Given the wide variety of approaches being taken in the field, the question naturally arises: Is there a way to compare and evaluate these approaches? The purpose of the present work is to develop common benchmark tasks and evaluation metrics to which intelligent agents, including complex robotic agents, constructed using various architectural approaches can be subjected

Simulating social relations in multi-agent systems

Open distributed systems are comprised of a large number of heterogeneous nodes with disparate requirements and objectives, a number of which may not conform to the system specification. This thesis argues that activity in such systems can be regulated by using distributed mechanisms inspired by social science theories regarding similarity /kinship, trust, reputation, recommendation and economics. This makes it possible to create scalable and robust agent societies which can adapt to overcome structural impediments and provide inherent defence against malicious and incompetent action, without detriment to system functionality and performance. In particular this thesis describes: • an agent based simulation and animation platform (PreSage), which offers the agent developer and society designer a suite of powerful tools for creating, simulating and visualising agent societies from both a local and global perspective. • a social information dissemination system (SID) based on principles of self organisation which personalises recommendation and directs information dissemination. • a computational socio-cognitive and economic framework (CScEF) which integrates and extends socio-cognitive theories of trust, reputation and recommendation with basic economic theory. • results from two simulation studies investigating the performance of SID and the CScEF. The results show the production of a generic, reusable and scalable platform for developing and animating agent societies, and its contribution to the community as an open source tool. Secondly specific results, regarding the application of SID and CScEF, show that revealing outcomes of using socio-technical mechanisms to condition agent interactions can be demonstrated and identified by using Presage.Open Acces

A Framework for Exploiting Emergent Behaviour to capture 'Best Practice' within a Programming Domain

Inspection is a formalised process for reviewing an artefact in software engineering. It is proven to significantly reduce defects, to ensure that what is delivered is what is required, and that the finished product is effective and robust. Peer code review is a less formal inspection of code, normally classified as inadequate or substandard Inspection. Although it has an increased risk of not locating defects, it has been shown to improve the knowledge and programming skills of its participants. This thesis examines the process of peer code review, comparing it to Inspection, and attempts to describe how an informal code review can improve the knowledge and skills of its participants by deploying an agent oriented approach. During a review the participants discuss defects, recommendations and solutions, or more generally their own experience. It is this instant adaptability to new 11 information that gives the review process the ability to improve knowledge. This observed behaviour can be described as the emergent behaviour of the group of programmers during the review. The wider distribution of knowledge is currently only performed by programmers attending other reviews. To maximise the benefits of peer code review, a mechanism is needed by which the findings from one team can be captured and propagated to other reviews / teams throughout an establishment. A prototype multi-agent system is developed with the aim of capturing the emergent properties of a team of programmers. As the interactions between the team members is unstructured and the information traded is dynamic, a distributed adaptive system is required to provide communication channels for the team and to provide a foundation for the knowledge shared. Software agents are capable of adaptivity and learning. Multi-agent systems are particularly effective at being deployed within distributed architectures and are believed to be able to capture emergent behaviour. The prototype system illustrates that the learning mechanism within the software agents provides a solid foundation upon which the ability to detect defects can be learnt. It also demonstrates that the multi-agent approach is apposite to provide the free flow communication of ideas between programmers, not only to achieve the sharing of defects and solutions but also at a high enough level to capture social information. It is assumed that this social information is a measure of one element of the review process's emergent behaviour. The system is capable of monitoring the team-perceived abilities of programmers, those who are influential on the programming style of others, and the issues upon III which programmers agree or disagree. If the disagreements are classified as unimportant or stylistic issues, can it not therefore be assumed that all agreements are concepts of "Best Practice"? The conclusion is reached that code review is not a substandard Inspection but is in fact complementary to the Inspection model, as the latter improves the process of locating and identifying bugs while the former improves the knowledge and skill of the programmers, and therefore the chance of bugs not being encoded to start with. The prototype system demonstrates that it is possible to capture best practice from a review team and that agents are well suited to the task. The performance criteria of such a system have also been captured. The prototype system has also shown that a reliable level of learning can be attained for a real world task. The innovative way of concurrently deploying multiple agents which use different approaches to achieve the same goal shows remarkable robustness when learning from small example sets. The novel way in which autonomy is promoted within the agents' design but constrained within the agent community allows the system to provide a sufficiently flexible communications structure to capture emergent social behaviour, whilst ensuring that the agents remain committed to their own goals

Zero-gravity movement studies

The use of computer graphics to simulate the movement of articulated animals and mechanisms has a number of uses ranging over many fields. Human motion simulation systems can be useful in education, medicine, anatomy, physiology, and dance. In biomechanics, computer displays help to understand and analyze performance. Simulations can be used to help understand the effect of external or internal forces. Similarly, zero-gravity simulation systems should provide a means of designing and exploring the capabilities of hypothetical zero-gravity situations before actually carrying out such actions. The advantage of using a simulation of the motion is that one can experiment with variations of a maneuver before attempting to teach it to an individual. The zero-gravity motion simulation problem can be divided into two broad areas: human movement and behavior in zero-gravity, and simulation of articulated mechanisms

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Security in Mobile Multiagent Systems

This report contains the Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Security on Security of Mobile Multiagent Systems (SEMAS2002). The Workshop was held in Montreal, Canada as a satellite event to the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents in 2001. The far reaching influence of the Internet has resulted in an increased interest in agent technologies, which are poised to play a key role in the implementation of successful Internet and WWW-based applications in the future. While there is still considerable hype concerning agent technologies, there is also an increasing awareness of the problems involved. In particular, that these applications will not be successful unless security issues can be adequately handled. Although there is a large body of work on cryptographic techniques that provide basic building-blocks to solve specific security problems, relatively little work has been done in investigating security in the multiagent system context. Related problems are secure communication between agents, implementation of trust models/authentication procedures or even reflections of agents on security mechanisms. The introduction of mobile software agents significantly increases the risks involved in Internet and WWW-based applications. For example, if we allow agents to enter our hosts or private networks, we must offer the agents a platform so that they can execute correctly but at the same time ensure that they will not have deleterious effects on our hosts or any other agents / processes in our network. If we send out mobile agents, we should also be able to provide guarantees about specific aspects of their behaviour, i.e., we are not only interested in whether the agents carry out-out their intended task correctly. They must defend themselves against attacks initiated by other agents, and survive in potentially malicious environments. Agent technologies can also be used to support network security. For example in the context of intrusion detection, intelligent guardian agents may be used to analyse the behaviour of agents on a firewall or intelligent monitoring agents can be used to analyse the behaviour of agents migrating through a network. Part of the inspiration for such multi-agent systems comes from primitive animal behaviour, such as that of guardian ants protecting their hill or from biological immune systems

Applications of agent architectures to decision support in distributed simulation and training systems

This work develops the approach and presents the results of a new model for applying intelligent agents to complex distributed interactive simulation for command and control. In the framework of tactical command, control communications, computers and intelligence (C4I), software agents provide a novel approach for efficient decision support and distributed interactive mission training. An agent-based architecture for decision support is designed, implemented and is applied in a distributed interactive simulation to significantly enhance the command and control training during simulated exercises. The architecture is based on monitoring, evaluation, and advice agents, which cooperate to provide alternatives to the dec ision-maker in a time and resource constrained environment. The architecture is implemented and tested within the context of an AWACS Weapons Director trainer tool. The foundation of the work required a wide range of preliminary research topics to be covered, including real-time systems, resource allocation, agent-based computing, decision support systems, and distributed interactive simulations. The major contribution of our work is the construction of a multi-agent architecture and its application to an operational decision support system for command and control interactive simulation. The architectural design for the multi-agent system was drafted in the first stage of the work. In the next stage rules of engagement, objective and cost functions were determined in the AWACS (Airforce command and control) decision support domain. Finally, the multi-agent architecture was implemented and evaluated inside a distributed interactive simulation test-bed for AWACS Vv\u27Ds. The evaluation process combined individual and team use of the decision support system to improve the performance results of WD trainees. The decision support system is designed and implemented a distributed architecture for performance-oriented management of software agents. The approach provides new agent interaction protocols and utilizes agent performance monitoring and remote synchronization mechanisms. This multi-agent architecture enables direct and indirect agent communication as well as dynamic hierarchical agent coordination. Inter-agent communications use predefined interfaces, protocols, and open channels with specified ontology and semantics. Services can be requested and responses with results received over such communication modes. Both traditional (functional) parameters and nonfunctional (e.g. QoS, deadline, etc.) requirements and captured in service requests