OperA/ALIVE/OperettA

Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Obligation Norm Identification in Agent Societies

Most works on norms have investigated how norms are regulated using institutional mechanisms. Very few works have focused on how an agent may infer the norms of a society without the norm being explicitly given to the agent. This paper describes a mechanism for identifying one type of norm, an obligation norm. The Obligation Norm Inference (ONI) algorithm described in this paper makes use of an association rule mining approach to identify obligation norms. Using agent based simulation of a virtual restaurant we demonstrate how an agent can identify the tipping norm. The experiments that we have conducted demonstrate that an agent in the system is able to add, remove and modify norms dynamically. An agent can also flexibly modify the parameters of the system based on whether it is successful in identifying a norm.Norms, Social Norms, Obligations, Norm Identification, Agent-Based Simulation, Simulation of Norms, Artificial Societies, Normative Multi-Agent Systems (NorMAS)

Bringing action language C+ to normative contexts: preliminary report

C+ is an action language for specifying and reasoning about the e ects of actions and the persistence of facts over time. Based on it. we present CN+, an operational enhanced form of C+ designed for representing complex normative systems and integrate them easily into the semantics of the causal theory of actions. The proposed system contains a particular formalization of norms using a life-cycle approach to capture the whole normative meaning of a complex normative framework. We discuss this approach and illustrate it with examples.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Breve repaso a los enfoques y metodologías de los Sistemas Multiagente

[ES] El intercambio de ideas entre científicos y técnicos, tanto del ámbito académico como empresarial, es fundamental para facilitar el desarrollo de sistemas que puedan satisfacer las demandas de la sociedad actual. La transferencia de tecnología en este campo sigue siendo un reto y, por ello, este tipo de aportaciones se consideran de forma destacada en esta recopilación. Este libro trae debates y publicaciones sobre el desarrollo de técnicas innovadoras de problemas complejos de IoT. El programa técnico se centra tanto en la alta calidad como en la diversidad, con contribuciones en áreas de investigación bien establecidas y en evolución. Específicamente, 10 capítulos fueron presentados a este libro. Los editores alentaron y agradecieron particularmente las contribuciones sobre IA y computación distribuida en aplicaciones de IoT. Los editores agradecen especialmente el apoyo financiero del proyecto “Virtual-Ledgers-Tecnologías DLT/Blockchain y Cripto-IOT sobre organizaciones virtuales de agentes ligeros y su aplicación en la eficiencia en el transporte de última milla”, ID SA267P18, financiado por Junta de Castilla y León y fondos FEDER.[EN] The exchange of ideas between scientists and technicians, from both academic and business areas, is essential in order to ease the development of systems which can meet the demands of today’s society. Technology transfer in this field is still a challenge and, for that reason, this type of contributions are notably considered in this compilation. This book brings in discussions and publications concerning the development of innovative techniques of IoT complex problems. The technical program focuses both on high quality and diversity, with contributions in well-established and evolving areas of research. Specifically, 10 chapters were submitted to this book. The editors particularly encouraged and welcomed contributions on AI and distributed computing in IoT applications. The editors are specially grateful for the funding supporting by the project “Virtual-Ledgers-Tecnologías DLT/Blockchain y Cripto-IOT sobre organizaciones virtuales de agentes ligeros y su aplicación en la eficiencia en el transporte de última milla”, ID SA267P18, financed by regional government of Castilla y León and FEDER funds

Artificial institutions: a model of institutional reality for open multiagent systems

Software agents’ ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents’ interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open systems interacting agents may not conform to predefined specifications. A possible solution is to define interaction environments including a normative component, with suitable rules to regulate the behaviour of agents. To tackle this problem, we propose an application-independent model of artificial institutions that can be used to define open multiagent systems. With respect to other approaches to artificial (or electronic) institutions, which mainly focus on the definition of the normative component of open systems, our proposal has a wider scope, in that we model the social context of the interaction, define the semantics of an Agent Communication Language to operate on such a context, and give an operational definition of the norms that are necessary to constrain the agents’ actions. In particular, we define the semantics of a library of communicative acts in terms of operations on agents’ social reality, more specifically on commitments, and regard norms as event-driven rules that, when fired by events happening in the system, create or modify a set of commitments. An interesting aspect of our proposal is that both the definition of the ACL and the definition of norms are based on the same notion of commitment. Therefore an agent capable of reasoning on commitments can reason both on the semantics of communicative acts and on the normative system

Populating virtual cities with diverse physiology driven crowds of intelligent agents

When conducting archaeological excavations of ancient cities, 3D reconstruction has become an important mechanism of documenting the findings and showing the results to general public in an accessible way. Most such reconstructions, however, mainly focus on visualising buildings and artefacts, while rarely simulating the actual people that populated the reconstructed city and aspects of their everyday life. Simulating such people and their lives in all their diversity is a costly and time-consuming exercise comparable in cost and efforts to development of a commercial video game, involving years of development and millions of dollars in funding. In this paper we present a novel approach that can significantly decrease the cost and effort required for simulating everyday life of ancient inhabitants of virtual cities, while still capturing enough detail to be useful in historical simulations. We show how it is possible to manually design a small number of individual avatars and then automatically generate a substantially large crowd of virtual agents, which will live their lives in the simulated city, perform choirs and rituals as well as other routine activities that are consistent with their social status. The key novelty of our approach that enables simulating such sophisticated crowds is the combination of physiological needs - for generating agent goals, emotions and personality - for choosing how to fulfil each goal and genetically informed propagation of appearance and personality traits - to propagate aspects of appearance and behaviour from a small sample of manually designed individuals to large agent groups of a desired size. The usefulness of our approach is demonstrated by applying it to simulating everyday life in the ancient city of Uruk, 3000 B.C.

Electronic institutions with normative environments for agent-based E-contracting

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Informática. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

An Approach to Operationalize Regulative Norms in Multiagent Systems

International audienc

Developing and Testing a New Technique for Assessing Human Color Acuities

This study is a continuation of the “open door” technique of color acuity determination. The open door experiment is a computer based program that tests the subject’s ability to discern a continuity break in the outline of a box. When presented with the image of a box on an LED screen, the subject is asked to indicate the location of the open door within three seconds. The addition of a joystick provides subjects with four selection options- top, bottom, left, right- for the location of the open door, as well as a fifth option if they did not believe the open door to be present. Along with varying the colors of the box and the background and the location of the open door, the computer also varied the width of the open door from 1-6 pixels, allowing for an acuity number determination at a defined criterion value within this range. The goal of this study is to determine whether color acuity differences exist among various two color combinations and whether males and females exhibit color acuity differences. This study also examines whether or not background and foreground orientations of two colors affects the ability to discriminate between them. The analyzed results from 12 male and 12 female subjects showed significant color acuity differences among four different color combinations, but suggested no significant differences between genders or background vs. foreground orientation. All subjects experienced great difficulty in discriminating between color combinations including yellow, particularly when the combination of green and yellow