Negotiation in Multi-Agent Systems

In systems composed of multiple autonomous agents, negotiation is a key form of interaction that enables groups of agents to arrive at a mutual agreement regarding some belief, goal or plan, for example. Particularly because the agents are autonomous and cannot be assumed to be benevolent, agents must influence others to convince them to act in certain ways, and negotiation is thus critical for managing such inter-agent dependencies. The process of negotiation may be of many different forms, such as auctions, protocols in the style of the contract net, and argumentation, but it is unclear just how sophisticated the agents or the protocols for interaction must be for successful negotiation in different contexts. All these issues were raised in the panel session on negotiation

Multi-agent Systems with Compasses

This paper investigates agreement protocols over cooperative and cooperative--antagonistic multi-agent networks with coupled continuous-time nonlinear dynamics. To guarantee convergence for such systems, it is common in the literature to assume that the vector field of each agent is pointing inside the convex hull formed by the states of the agent and its neighbors, given that the relative states between each agent and its neighbors are available. This convexity condition is relaxed in this paper, as we show that it is enough that the vector field belongs to a strict tangent cone based on a local supporting hyperrectangle. The new condition has the natural physical interpretation of requiring shared reference directions in addition to the available local relative states. Such shared reference directions can be further interpreted as if each agent holds a magnetic compass indicating the orientations of a global frame. It is proven that the cooperative multi-agent system achieves exponential state agreement if and only if the time-varying interaction graph is uniformly jointly quasi-strongly connected. Cooperative--antagonistic multi-agent systems are also considered. For these systems, the relation has a negative sign for arcs corresponding to antagonistic interactions. State agreement may not be achieved, but instead it is shown that all the agents' states asymptotically converge, and their limits agree componentwise in absolute values if and in general only if the time-varying interaction graph is uniformly jointly strongly connected.Comment: SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, In pres

MAS platforms as an enabler of enterprise mobilisation: The state of the art

One of the main application areas for multi-agent systems technology is enterprise mobilization, wherein the main business process actors are nomadic workers. An agent's autonomy, sociality and intelligence are highly prized features when it comes to supporting those mobile workers who are geographically isolated from the main knowledge source (i.e. the corporate Intranet) and are frequently moving from one location to another. Based on experience gained from two field trials of applications (built using for multi-agent systems technology and running on lightweight handheld devices) that support mobile business processes for telecommunications service provisioning and maintenance, this paper proposes desirable metrics for any multi-agent systems platform intended for enterprise mobilisation use. These metrics are then used to compare a number of existing multi-agent systems platforms, and based on the results, this paper identifies some areas for improvement