Augmenting Agent Platforms to Facilitate Conversation Reasoning

Within Multi Agent Systems, communication by means of Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) has a key role to play in the co-operation, co-ordination and knowledge-sharing between agents. Despite this, complex reasoning about agent messaging, and specifically about conversations between agents, tends not to have widespread support amongst general-purpose agent programming languages. ACRE (Agent Communication Reasoning Engine) aims to complement the existing logical reasoning capabilities of agent programming languages with the capability of reasoning about complex interaction protocols in order to facilitate conversations between agents. This paper outlines the aims of the ACRE project and gives details of the functioning of a prototype implementation within the Agent Factory multi agent framework

Core Design Pattern for Efficient Multi-agent Architecture

Interaction engineering is fundamental for agent based systems. In this paper we will present a design pattern for the core of a multi-agent platform - the message communication and behavior activation mechanisms - using language features of C#. An agent platform is developed based on the pattern structure, which is legiti- mated through experiences of using JADE in real applications. Results of the communication model are compared against the popular JADE platform

Core Design Pattern for Efficient Multi-agent Architecture

Interaction engineering is fundamental for agent based systems. In this paper we will present a design pattern for the core of a multi-agent platform - the message communication and behavior activation mechanisms - using language features of C#. An agent platform is developed based on the pattern structure, which is legiti- mated through experiences of using JADE in real applications. Results of the communication model are compared against the popular JADE platform

Contract Net Protocol based Insertion Approach for the Dynamic multi-vehicle Pick-up and Delivery Problem

In this paper, we investigate in the application of the Contract Net negotiation Protocol (CNP) to deal with a dynamic hard transportation problems. Our interest in the Multi-agent negotiation approaches accounts for its proved suitablity with dynamic and uncertain domains [8][9]. We address the resolution of the uncapacitated-multi-vehicle-Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows m-DPDPTW, which is applied in the real world to the courier distribution services. This problem consists in finding the least cost routing allowing to satisfy requests of carrying items from pick-up locations to delivery ones, while dynamic requests continuously come to the planning center [4]. Our problem is implemented into a multi-agent system where cooperative agents representing the transporters and planning center negotiate possible m-DPDPTW solutions under the Contract Net Protocol[17][20]

Extending the Communication Capabilities of Agents

Agent technology is in principle well suited for realizing various kinds of distributed systems, but in practice agents are seldomly chosen for realizing real-world applications. One reason hindering agents being used in practice is their cumbersome communication mechanism focused on speech act based message exchange which makes them hard for practitioners used to work in an object oriented way. To broaden the application spectrum of agent technology in practice and make them more accessible for object-oriented developers, this paper presents additional communication means for agents. First, it will be shown how agents can interact using strongly typed service interfaces resorting to asynchronous future based methods. These allow keeping agents autonomous and further support several recurrent interaction patterns within one method call, i.e. without having to use complex message protocols. Second, an extension for binary data streaming via virtual connections will be presented. Its usage resembles established input and output streaming APIs and lets developers transfer data between agents in the same simple way as e.g. a file is written to hard disk. Furthermore, virtual connections allow failure tolerant transmission by multiplexing data across different physical connections. Usefulness of the extensions will be further explained with a real-word example application from the area of business intelligence workflows

Multi-agent communication for the realization of business-processes

As Internet and information technologies expand further into daily business activities, new solutions and techniques are required to cope with the growing complexity. One area that has gained attention is systems and organizations interoperability and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Web Services have grown as a preferred technology in this area. Although these techniques have proved to solve problems of low level integration of heterogeneous systems, there has been little advance at higher levels of integration like how to rule complex conversations between participants that are autonomous and cannot depend on some ruling or orchestrating system. Multi-agent technology has studied techniques for content-rich communication, negotiation, autonomous problem solving and conversation protocols. These techniques have solved some of the problems that emerge when integrating autonomous systems to perform complex business processes. The present research work intends to provide a solution for the realization of complex Business Process between heterogeneous autonomous participants using multi-agent technology. We developed an integration of Web Services and agent-based technologies along with a model for creating conversation protocols that respect the autonomy of participants. A modeling tool has been developed to create conversation protocols in a modular and reusable manner. BDI-Agents implementations that communicate over Web Services are automatically generated out of these models.Internet und Informationstechnik finden immer mehr Verwendung in alltäglichen Geschäftsaktivitäten und als Folge dessen, werden neue Lösungen und Verfahren gebraucht, um der steigenden Komplexität gerecht zu werden. Insbesondere Bereiche wie System- und Organizations- Interoperabilität, wie auch dienst-orientierte Architekturen (SOA) haben demzufolge mehr Aufmerksamkeit bekommen. Dabei sind Web Services zur bevorzugten Technologie geworden. Tatsächlich haben diese Techniken Probleme in niedrigeren Ebenen gelöst, die beim lntegrieren von heterogenen Systemen entstehen. Allerdings gab es bisher weniger Fortschritte in höheren Ebenen, wie der Regelung von komplexen Dialogen zwischen Teilnehmern, die aufgrund ihrer Autonomie, sich nicht nach anderen kontrollierenden oder orchestrierenden Systemen richten lassen. Multiagenten-Systeme haben Bereiche wie inhaltreiche Kommunikation, Handel, autonome Problemlösung und Interaktionsprotokolle im Detail geforscht. Diese Techniken haben Probleme gelöst, die beim Ausführen von komplexen Geschäftsprozessen auftreten. Die vorliegende Doktorarbeit beabsichtigt, mit Verwendung von Multiagenten-Technologien, eine Lösung für die Umsetzung von komplexen Geschäftsprozessen zwischen heterogenen autonomen Teilnehmern bereitzustellen. Wir haben eine Integrationslösung für Web Services und agenten-basierte Technologien zur Verfügung gestellt, zusammen mit einem Model für die Erstellung von Interaktions-Protokollen, die die Autonomie der Teilnehmer berücksichtigt. Ein Modellierungstool wurde entwickelt, um modulare und wiederverwendbare Interaktionsprotokolle gestalten zu können. Aus diesen Modellen kann man auch Implementierungen automatisch erzeugen lassen, welche BDI-Agenten, die über Web Services kommunizieren, verwenden

Proceedings of The Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organisations Federated Workshops (MALLOW 2010)

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-627/allproceedings.pdfInternational audienceMALLOW-2010 is a third edition of a series initiated in 2007 in Durham, and pursued in 2009 in Turin. The objective, as initially stated, is to "provide a venue where: the cost of participation was minimum; participants were able to attend various workshops, so fostering collaboration and cross-fertilization; there was a friendly atmosphere and plenty of time for networking, by maximizing the time participants spent together"

Evolutionary Learning of Goal-Driven Multi-agent Communication

Multi-agent systems are a common paradigm for building distributed systems in different domains such as networking, health care, swarm sensing, robotics, and transportation. Systems are usually designed or adjusted in order to reflect the performance trade-offs made according to the characteristics of the mission requirement. Research has acknowledged the crucial role that communication plays in solving many performance problems. Conversely, research efforts that address communication decisions are usually designed and evaluated with respect to a single predetermined performance goal. This work introduces Goal-Driven Communication, where communication in a multi-agent system is determined according to flexible performance goals. This work proposes an evolutionary approach that, given a performance goal, produces a communication strategy that can improve a multi-agent system's performance with respect to the desired goal. The evolved strategy determines what, when, and to whom the agents communicate. The proposed approach further enables tuning the trade-off between the performance goal and communication cost, to produce a strategy that achieves a good balance between the two objectives, according the system designer's needs

A platform-independent domain-specific modeling language for multiagent systems

Associated with the increasing acceptance of agent-based computing as a novel software engineering paradigm, recently a lot of research addresses the development of suitable techniques to support the agent-oriented software development. The state-of-the-art in agent-based software development is to (i) design the agent systems basing on an agent-based methodology and (ii) take the resulting design artifact as a base to manually implement the agent system using existing agent-oriented programming languages or general purpose languages like Java. Apart from failures made when manually transform an abstract specification into a concrete implementation, the gap between design and implementation may also result in the divergence of design and implementation. The framework discussed in this dissertation presents a platform-independent domain-specific modeling language for MASs called Dsml4MAS that allows modeling agent systems in a platform-independent and graphical manner. Apart from the abstract design, Dsml4MAS also allows to automatically (i) check the generated design artifacts against a formal semantic specification to guarantee the well-formedness of the design and (ii) translate the abstract specification into a concrete implementation. Taking both together, Dsml4MAS ensures that for any well-formed design, an associated implementation will be generated closing the gap between design and code.Aufgrund wachsender Akzeptanz von Agentensystemen zur Behandlung komplexer Problemstellungen wird der Schwerpunkt auf dem Gebiet der agentenorientierten Softwareentwicklung vor allem auf die Erforschung von geeignetem Entwicklungswerkzeugen gesetzt. Stand der Forschung ist es dabei das Agentendesign mittels einer Agentenmethodologie zu spezifizieren und die resultierenden Artefakte als Grundlage zur manuellen Programmierung zu verwenden. Fehler, die bei dieser manuellen Überführung entstehen, machen insbesondere das abstrakte Design weniger nützlich in Hinsicht auf die Nachhaltigkeit der entwickelten Softwareapplikation. Das in dieser Dissertation diskutierte Rahmenwerk erörtert eine plattformunabhängige domänenspezifische Modellierungssprache für Multiagentensysteme namens Dsml4MAS. Dsml4MAS erlaubt es Agentensysteme auf eine plattformunabhängige und graphische Art und Weise darzustellen. Die Modellierungssprache umfasst (i) eine abstrakte Syntax, die das Vokabular der Sprache definiert, (ii) eine konkrete Syntax, die die graphische Darstellung spezifiziert sowie (iii) eine formale Semantik, die dem Vokabular eine präzise Bedeutung gibt. Dsml4MAS ist Bestandteil einer (semi-automatischen) Methodologie, die es (i) erlaubt die abstrakte Spezifikation schrittweise bis hin zur konkreten Implementierung zu konkretisieren und (ii) die Interoperabilität zu alternativen Softwareparadigmen wie z.B. Dienstorientierte Architekturen zu gewährleisten