Organizational Structure-Satisfactory Social Law Determination in Multiagent Workflow Systems

The multiagent workflow systems can be formalized from an organizational structure viewpoint, which includes three parts: the interaction structure among agents, the temporal flow of activities, and the critical resource sharing relations among activities. While agents execute activities, they should decide their strategies to satisfy the constraints brought by the organizational structure of multiagent workflow system. To avoid collisions in the multiagent workflow system, this paper presents a method to determine social laws in the system to restrict the strategies of agents and activities; the determined social laws can satisfy the characteristics of organization structures so as to minimize the conflicts among agents and activities. Moreover, we also deal with the social law adjustment mechanism for the alternations of interaction relations, temporal flows, and critical resource sharing relations. It is proved that our model can produce useful social laws for organizational structure of multiagent workflow systems, i.e., the conflicts brought by the constraints of organization structure can be minimized

Context-Aware Information Retrieval for Enhanced Situation Awareness

In the coalition forces, users are increasingly challenged with the issues of information overload and correlation of information from heterogeneous sources. Users might need different pieces of information, ranging from information about a single building, to the resolution strategy of a global conflict. Sometimes, the time, location and past history of information access can also shape the information needs of users. Information systems need to help users pull together data from disparate sources according to their expressed needs (as represented by system queries), as well as less specific criteria. Information consumers have varying roles, tasks/missions, goals and agendas, knowledge and background, and personal preferences. These factors can be used to shape both the execution of user queries and the form in which retrieved information is packaged. However, full automation of this daunting information aggregation and customization task is not possible with existing approaches. In this paper we present an infrastructure for context-aware information retrieval to enhance situation awareness. The infrastructure provides each user with a customized, mission-oriented system that gives access to the right information from heterogeneous sources in the context of a particular task, plan and/or mission. The approach lays on five intertwined fundamental concepts, namely Workflow, Context, Ontology, Profile and Information Aggregation. The exploitation of this knowledge, using appropriate domain ontologies, will make it feasible to provide contextual assistance in various ways to the work performed according to a user’s taskrelevant information requirements. This paper formalizes these concepts and their interrelationships

An Approach to Agent-Based Service Composition and Its Application to Mobile

This paper describes an architecture model for multiagent systems that was developed in the European project LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Agent Platform). Its main feature is a set of generic services that are implemented independently of the agents and can be installed into the agents by the application developer in a flexible way. Moreover, two applications using this architecture model are described that were also developed within the LEAP project. The application domain is the support of mobile, virtual teams for the German automobile club ADAC and for British Telecommunications

Evoplex: A platform for agent-based modeling on networks

Agent-based modeling and network science have been used extensively to advance our understanding of emergent collective behavior in systems that are composed of a large number of simple interacting individuals or agents. With the increasing availability of high computational power in affordable personal computers, dedicated efforts to develop multi-threaded, scalable and easy-to-use software for agent-based simulations are needed more than ever. Evoplex meets this need by providing a fast, robust and extensible platform for developing agent-based models and multi-agent systems on networks. Each agent is represented as a node and interacts with its neighbors, as defined by the network structure. Evoplex is ideal for modeling complex systems, for example in evolutionary game theory and computational social science. In Evoplex, the models are not coupled to the execution parameters or the visualization tools, and there is a user-friendly graphical interface which makes it easy for all users, ranging from newcomers to experienced, to create, analyze, replicate and reproduce the experiments.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in SoftwareX [software available at https://evoplex.org

A middleware for creating physical mashups of things

Indexación: Scopus.Nowadays, “things” deployed in cities are crucial to gather data to support decision making systems. Unfortunately, there is a low level of reuse of “things” between smart city applications of different organizations because “things” were unknown to developers or because it was harder to reuse them than use new ones due to technical details. In this ongoing work, we propose to convert “things” into active entities capable of discovering and organizing themselves driven by the applications goals’ satisfaction. Moreover, “things” are capable of collaborating between them in order to satisfy or maintain satisfied the published goals of applications. To validate the feasibility of our proposal, we are building mashThings, an Internet of Things (IoT) platform to build smart city applications as physical mashups, where the middleware layer is augmented by a multiagent layer of broker agents representing the available “things” in the city.http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1950/paper11.pd

A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.Comment: 12 PAGES, 7 Figure

Practical applications of multi-agent systems in electric power systems

The transformation of energy networks from passive to active systems requires the embedding of intelligence within the network. One suitable approach to integrating distributed intelligent systems is multi-agent systems technology, where components of functionality run as autonomous agents capable of interaction through messaging. This provides loose coupling between components that can benefit the complex systems envisioned for the smart grid. This paper reviews the key milestones of demonstrated agent systems in the power industry and considers which aspects of agent design must still be addressed for widespread application of agent technology to occur