Modelling awareness of agents using policies

In addition to cooperation, research in disaster management exposes the need for policy awareness to recognize relevant information in enhancing cooperation. Intelligent software agents have previously been employed for problem solving in disaster situations but without incorporating how the agents can create or model awareness. This paper presents an awareness based modelling method, called MAAP, to maintain awareness of software agents of a given set of policies. The paper presents preliminary results indicating that the use of policies as a source of awareness, as facilitated by MAAP, is a potentially effective method to enhance cooperation

Command Agent Belief Architecture to Support Commander Decision Making in Military Simulation

In the war, military conflicts have many aspects that are consistent with complexity theory e.g., the higher commander’s decision is directed at animate entity that react under hierarchical and self-organised structure in decentralised command and control for the collectivist dynamism of decomposed elements due to nonlinear complexity of warfare on the battlefield. Agent technology have been found to be suitable for modelling tactical behaviour of entities at multiple level of resolution under hierarchical command and control (C2) structure and provide a powerful abstraction mechanism required for designing simulations of complex and dynamic battlefield situations. Intelligent agents can potentially reduce the overhead on such experiments and studies. Command agents, plan how to carry out the operation and assign tasks to subordinate agents. They receive information from battlefield environment and use such information to build situation awareness and also to respond to unforeseen situations. In the paper, we have proposed a mechanism for modelling tactical behaviour of an intelligent agent by which higher command level entities should be able to synthesize their beliefs derived from the lower level sub ordinates entities. This paper presents a role-based belief, desire and intention mechanism to facilitate in the representation of military hierarchy, modelling of tactical behaviour based on agent current belief, teammate’s belief propagation, and coordination issues. Higher commander can view the battlefield information at different levels of abstraction based on concept of aggregation and disaggregation and take appropriate reactive response to any unforeseen circumstances happening in battlefield

A Survey of Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation Tools for Educational Purpose

Simulation is an experimentation with the imitation or model of the observed system, and observation of its behaviour over time, with the purpose of better understanding and/or improving the system. It is often used in situations where research cannot include the real system because of its inaccessibility, dangerous or unacceptable involvement, the fact that the system is designed but not built yet, in situations where the system is abstract or simply does not exist. Elements of these systems can be implemented as software entities which can percept their environment and autonomously react to the stimulation, i.e. intelligent agents. These tools, which allow the research of complex natural, social and technical phenomena and systems, are called agent-based modelling and simulation tools. This paper presents a review of some of these modern computer tools that can be successfully implemented in the teaching process

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

Engineering Agent Systems for Decision Support

This paper discusses how agent technology can be applied to the design of advanced Information Systems for Decision Support. In particular, it describes the different steps and models that are necessary to engineer Decision Support Systems based on a multiagent architecture. The approach is illustrated by a case study in the traffic management domain

Cooperation in Industrial Systems

ARCHON is an ongoing ESPRIT II project (P-2256) which is approximately half way through its five year duration. It is concerned with defining and applying techniques from the area of Distributed Artificial Intelligence to the development of real-size industrial applications. Such techniques enable multiple problem solvers (e.g. expert systems, databases and conventional numerical software systems) to communicate and cooperate with each other to improve both their individual problem solving behavior and the behavior of the community as a whole. This paper outlines the niche of ARCHON in the Distributed AI world and provides an overview of the philosophy and architecture of our approach the essence of which is to be both general (applicable to the domain of industrial process control) and powerful enough to handle real-world problems

Theory of deferred action: Agent-based simulation model for designing complex adaptive systems

Deferred action is the axiom that agents act in emergent organisation to achieve predetermined goals. Enabling deferred action in designed artificial complex adaptive systems like business organisations and IS is problematical. Emergence is an intractable problem for designers because it cannot be predicted. We develop proof-of-concept, conceptual proto-agent model, of emergent organisation and emergent IS to understand better design principles to enable deferred action as a mechanism for coping with emergence in artefacts. We focus on understanding the effect of emergence when designing artificial complex adaptive systems by developing an exploratory proto-agent model and evaluate its suitability for implementation as agent-based simulation

Distributed agent-based building evacuation simulator

The optimisation of the evacuation of a building plays a fundamental role in emergency situations. The behaviour of individuals, the directions that civilians receive, and the actions of the emergency personnel, will affect the success of the operation. We describe a simulation system that represents the individual, intelligent, and interacting agents that cooperate and compete while evacuating the building. The system also takes into account detailed information about the building and the sensory capabilities that it may contain. Since the level of detail represented in such a simulation can lead to computational needs that grow at least as a polynomial function of the number of the simulated agents, we propose an agent-oriented Distributed Building Evacuation Simulator (DBES). The DBES is integrated with a wireless sensor network which offers a closed loop representation of the evacuation procedure, including the sensed data and the emergency decision making