1,042 research outputs found

    Intrusiveness, Trust and Argumentation: Using Automated Negotiation to Inhibit the Transmission of Disruptive Information

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    The question of how to promote the growth and diffusion of information has been extensively addressed by a wide research community. A common assumption underpinning most studies is that the information to be transmitted is useful and of high quality. In this paper, we endorse a complementary perspective. We investigate how the growth and diffusion of high quality information can be managed and maximized by preventing, dampening and minimizing the diffusion of low quality, unwanted information. To this end, we focus on the conflict between pervasive computing environments and the joint activities undertaken in parallel local social contexts. When technologies for distributed activities (e.g. mobile technology) develop, both artifacts and services that enable people to participate in non-local contexts are likely to intrude on local situations. As a mechanism for minimizing the intrusion of the technology, we develop a computational model of argumentation-based negotiation among autonomous agents. A key component in the model is played by trust: what arguments are used and how they are evaluated depend on how trustworthy the agents judge one another. To gain an insight into the implications of the model, we conduct a number of virtual experiments. Results enable us to explore how intrusiveness is affected by trust, the negotiation network and the agents' abilities of conducting argumentation

    Cultural Differences and Economic Incentives: an Agent-Based Study of Their Impact on the Emergence of Regional Autonomy Movements

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    Explanations of the emergence of regional autonomy movements - political organizations seeking to express sub-state affinities and interests - often highlight cultural differences and economic incentives as important reasons driving regional elites and local politicians to form such organization and explain the support regional autonomy movements receive. In this paper I employ a specialized agent-based computer simulation as a laboratory for 'thought experiments' to evaluate alternative theoretical expectations of the independent and combined consequences of regional economic and cultural circumstances on the likelihood of regional mobilization. The simulations suggest that pronounced cultural differences and strong economic incentives contribute to the emergence of three independent yet related aspects of autonomy mobilization: the emergence of political boundaries, minority support, and minority clustering. Furthermore, these experiment indicate that the impact of cultural differences on the emergence of political boundaries may be contingent on the strength of the economic incentives, and visa versa.Autonomy Movements, Ethno-Regional Mobilization, Constructivism, Agent-Based Modeling, Collective Identity

    Modeling human and organizational behavior using a relation-centric multi-agent system design paradigm

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    Today's modeling and simulation communities are being challenged to create rich, detailed models incorporating human decision-making and organizational behavior. Recent advances in distributed artificial intelligence and complex systems theory have demonstrated that such ill-defined problems can be effectively modeled with agent-based simulation techniques using multiple, autonomoous, adaptive entities. RELATE, a relation-centric design paradigm for multi-agent systems (MAS), is presented to assist developers incorporate MAS solutions into their simulations. RELATe focuses the designer on six key concepts of MAS simulations: relationships, environment, laws, agents, things, and effectors. A library of Java classes is presented which enables the user to rapidly prototype an agent-based simulation. This library utilizes the Java programming language to support cross-platform and web based designs. All Java classes and interfaces are fully documented using HTML Javadoc format. Two reference cases are provided that allow for easy code reuse and modification. Finally, an existing metworked DIS-Java-VRML simulation was modified to demonstrate the ability to utilize the RELATE library to add agents to existing applications. LCDR Kim Roddy focused on the development and refinement of the RELATE design paradigm, while LT Mike Dickson focused on the actual Java implementation. Joint work was conducted on all research and reference caseshttp://www.archive.org/details/modelinghumanorg00roddU.S. Navy (U.S.N.) author

    Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation of Product Development Teams

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    The success of product development highly depends on the quality of cooperation among members of a team involved in the process. Thus, a tool capable of simulating product development team may be beneficial for researchers interested in teamwork, as well as useful for managers struggling with team formation during process planning phase. This work aims at providing a detailed overview of agent-based simulators of product development teams. Specifically, the scientific databases Web of Science, Scopus, ACM DL, and IEEE were searched to extract relevant agent-based models of teamwork in mechanical engineering and aerospace context and obtained models were reviewed to identify their key advantages and limitations

    The Simulation of Financial Markets by Agent-Based Mix-Game Models

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    This paper studies the simulation of financial markets using an agent-based mix-game model which is a variant of the minority game (MG). It specifies the spectra of parameters of mix-game models that fit financial markets by investigating the dynamic behaviors of mix-game models under a wide range of parameters. The main findings are (a) in order to approach efficiency, agents in a real financial market must be heterogeneous, boundedly rational and subject to asymmetric information; (b) an active financial market must be dominated by agents who play a minority game; otherwise, the market would die; (c) the system could be stable if agents who play a majority game have a faster learning rate than those who play a minority game; otherwise, the system could be unstable. The paper then induces the rules for simulating financial markets with mix-game models and gives an example. Finally, the appendix of this paper presents background information about \'El Farol bar\', MG and mix-games.Financial Markets, Simulation, Minority Game, Mix-Game

    A multi-agent approach for design consistency checking

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    The last decade has seen an explosion of interest to advanced product development methods, such as Computer Integrated Manufacture, Extended Enterprise and Concurrent Engineering. As a result of the globalization and future distribution of design and manufacturing facilities, the cooperation amongst partners is becoming more challenging due to the fact that the design process tends to be sequential and requires communication networks for planning design activities and/or a great deal of travel to/from designers' workplaces. In a virtual environment, teams of designers work together and use the Internet/Intranet for communication. The design is a multi-disciplinary task that involves several stages. These stages include input data analysis, conceptual design, basic structural design, detail design, production design, manufacturing processes analysis, and documentation. As a result, the virtual team, normally, is very changeable in term of designers' participation. Moreover, the environment itself changes over time. This leads to a potential increase in the number of design. A methodology of Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control (IDMC) is proposed to alleviate some of the related difficulties. This thesis looks at the Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control, in the context of the European Aerospace Industry, and suggests a methodology for a conceptual framework based on a multi-agent architecture. This multi-agent architecture is a kernel of an Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control System (IDMCS) that aims at ensuring that the overall design is consistent and acceptable to all participating partners. A Methodology of Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control is introduced and successfully implemented to detect design mismatches in complex design environments. A description of the research models and methods for intelligent mismatch control, a taxonomy of design mismatches, and an investigation into potential applications, such as aerospace design, are presented. The Multi-agent framework for mismatch control is developed and described. Based on the methodology used for the IDMC application, a formal framework for a multi-agent system is developed. The Methods and Principles are trialed out using an Aerospace Distributed Design application, namely the design of an A340 wing box. The ontology of knowledge for agent-based Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control System is introduced, as well as the distributed collaborative environment for consortium based projects

    Lifeworld Analysis

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    We argue that the analysis of agent/environment interactions should be extended to include the conventions and invariants maintained by agents throughout their activity. We refer to this thicker notion of environment as a lifeworld and present a partial set of formal tools for describing structures of lifeworlds and the ways in which they computationally simplify activity. As one specific example, we apply the tools to the analysis of the Toast system and show how versions of the system with very different control structures in fact implement a common control structure together with different conventions for encoding task state in the positions or states of objects in the environment.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file
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