Automated highway systems : platoons of vehicles viewed as a multiagent system

Tableau d'honneur de la Faculté des études supérieures et postdoctorales, 2005-2006La conduite collaborative est un domaine lié aux systèmes de transport intelligents, qui utilise les communications pour guider de façon autonome des véhicules coopératifs sur une autoroute automatisée. Depuis les dernières années, différentes architectures de véhicules automatisés ont été proposées, mais la plupart d’entre elles n’ont pas, ou presque pas, attaqué le problème de communication inter véhicules. À l’intérieur de ce mémoire, nous nous attaquons au problème de la conduite collaborative en utilisant un peloton de voitures conduites par des agents logiciels plus ou moins autonomes, interagissant dans un même environnement multi-agents: une autoroute automatisée. Pour ce faire, nous proposons une architecture hiérarchique d’agents conducteurs de voitures, se basant sur trois couches (couche de guidance, couche de management et couche de contrôle du trafic). Cette architecture peut être utilisée pour développer un peloton centralisé, où un agent conducteur de tête coordonne les autres avec des règles strictes, et un peloton décentralisé, où le peloton est vu comme une équipe d’agents conducteurs ayant le même niveau d’autonomie et essayant de maintenir le peloton stable.Collaborative driving is a growing domain of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that makes use of communications to autonomously guide cooperative vehicles on an Automated Highway System (AHS). For the past decade, different architectures of automated vehicles have been proposed, but most of them did not or barely addressed the inter-vehicle communication problem. In this thesis, we address the collaborative driving problem by using a platoon of cars driven by more or less autonomous software agents interacting in a Multiagent System (MAS) environment: the automated highway. To achieve this, we propose a hierarchical driving agent architecture based on three layers (guidance layer, management layer and traffic control layer). This architecture can be used to develop centralized platoons, where the driving agent of the head vehicle coordinates other driving agents by applying strict rules, and decentralized platoons, where the platoon is considered as a team of driving agents with a similar degree of autonomy, trying to maintain a stable platoon

From BDI and stit to bdi-stit logic

Since it is desirable to be able to talk about rational agents forming attitudes toward their concrete agency, we suggest an introduction of doxastic, volitional, and intentional modalities into the multi-agent logic of deliberatively seeing to it that, dstit logic. These modalities are borrowed from the well-known BDI (belief-desire-intention) logic. We change the semantics of the belief and desire operators from a relational one to a monotonic neighbourhood semantic in order to handle ascriptions of conflicting but not inconsistent beliefs and desires as being satisfiable. The proposed bdi-stit logic is defined with respect to branching time frames, and it is shown that this logic is a generalization of a bdi logic based on branching time possible worlds frames (but without temporal operators) and dstit logic. The new bdi-stit logic generalizes bdi and dstit logic in the sense that for any model of bdi or dstit logic, there is an equivalent bdi-stit model

Multiagent Decision Making for SME Supply Chain Simulation

International audienceTo tackle the complexity and heterogeneity of the networks that integrate Mechatronic SMEs, this paper describes a modelling and simulation solution based on multiagent system and ArchMDE (Architecture Model Drive Engineering) methodology for supply chain agentification. This research work outlines two main results: conceptualisation and modelling. The first one deals with the identification and concepts definition of the different entities moving and acting into the multiagent and supply chain systems. The second one discusses the agent approach providing a framework naturally oriented to model supply chain concepts and their dynamic behavior

Smart Document-Centric Processing of Human Oriented Information Flows

Usually people prefer to focus on creative rather than repetitive and schematic work patterns. Still, they must spend a lot of time complying with the procedures, selecting the information they receive and repeatedly restoring the previous state of work. This paper proposes the Mobile INteractive Document architecture (MIND) - a document-centric uniform interface to provide both effective communication of content and coordination of activities performed on documents. MIND documents are proactive, capable of initiating process activities, interacting with individuals on their personal devices and migrating on their own between collaborators. Each MIND document is a mobile agent that has built-in migration policy to control its own workflow and services enabling proper processing of contained information. The architecture supports users in the implementation of procedures, and selection of services needed to work on the document. A Personal Document-Agent (PDA) is a further development of MIND aimed at preserving continuity of state of individuals' work to support their creativity and comfort of their daily work

Engineering Multiagent Systems - Reflections

This report documents the programme and outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12342 ``Engineering multiagent Systems\u27\u27. The seminar brought together researchers from both academia and industry to identify the potential for and facilitate convergence towards standards for agent technology. As such it was particularly relevant to industrial research. A key objective of the seminar, moreover, has been to establish a road map for engineering multiagent systems. Various research areas have been identified as important topics for a research agenda with a focus on the development of multiagent systems. Among others, these include the integration of agent technology and legacy systems, component-based agent design, standards for tooling, establishing benchmarks for agent technology, and the development of frameworks for coordination and organisation of multiagent systems. This report presents a more detailed discussion of these and other research challenges that were identified. The unique atmosphere of Dagstuhl provided the perfect environment for leading researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds to discuss future directions in programming languages, tools and platforms for multiagent systems, and the road map produced by the seminar will have a timely and decisive impact on the future of this whole area of research

Adding Organizations and Roles as Primitives to the JADE Framework

The organization metaphor is often used in the design and implementation of multiagent systems. However, few agent programming languages provide facilities to define them. Several frameworks are proposed to coordinate MAS with organizations, but they are not programmable with general purpose languages. In this paper we extend the JADE framework with primitives to program in Java organizations structured in roles and to enable agents to play roles in organizations. Roles facilitate the coordination of agents inside an organization and give new abilities in the context of organizations, called powers, to the agents which satisfy the requirements necessary to play the roles. As primitives to program organizations and roles we provide classes and protocols which enable an agent to enact a new role in an organization and to interact with the role by invoking the execution of powers, and to receive new goals to be fulfilled. Roles have state and behaviour, thus, they are instances of classes and are strictly connected with the organization offering them. Since roles and organizations can be on a different platform with respect to the role player, the communication with them happens via protocols. Moreover, since, besides using protocols, roles and organizations can have complex behaviours, they are implemented by extending the JADE agent class

Reasoning about Goal-Plan Trees in Autonomous Agents: Development of Petri net and Constraint-Based Approaches with Resulting Performance Comparisons

Multi-agent systems and autonomous agents are becoming increasingly important in current computing technology. In many applications, the agents are often asked to achieve multiple goals individually or within teams where the distribution of these goals may be negotiated among the agents. It is expected that agents should be capable of working towards achieving all its currently adopted goals concurrently. However, in doing so, the goals can interact both constructively and destructively with each other, so a rational agent must be able to reason about these interactions and any other constraints that may be imposed on them, such as the limited availability of resources that could affect their ability to achieve all adopted goals when pursuing them concurrently. Currently, agent development languages require the developer to manually identify and handle these circumstances. In this thesis, we develop two approaches for reasoning about the interactions between the goals of an individual agent. The first of these employs Petri nets to represent and reason about the goals, while the second uses constraint satisfaction techniques to find efficient ways of achieving the goals. Three types of reasoning are incorporated into these models: reasoning about consumable resources where the availability of the resources is limited; the constructive interaction of goals whereby a single plan can be used to achieve multiple goals; and the interleaving of steps for achieving different goals that could cause one or more goals to fail. Experimental evaluation of the two approaches under various different circumstances highlights the benefits of the reasoning developed here whilst also identifying areas where one approach provides better results than the other. This can then be applied to suggest the underlying technique used to implement the reasoning that the agent may want to employ based on the goals it has been assigned

Model-Based Organization Analysis and Design for an ESG Organization

11th Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium (CCRTS), June 20-22, 2006, San Diego, C