Proceedings of the 11th European Agent Systems Summer School Student Session

This volume contains the papers presented at the Student Session of the 11th European Agent Systems Summer School (EASSS) held on 2nd of September 2009 at Educatorio della Providenza, Turin, Italy. The Student Session, organised by students, is designed to encourage student interaction and feedback from the tutors. By providing the students with a conference-like setup, both in the presentation and in the review process, students have the opportunity to prepare their own submission, go through the selection process and present their work to each other and their interests to their fellow students as well as internationally leading experts in the agent field, both from the theoretical and the practical sector. Table of Contents: Andrew Koster, Jordi Sabater Mir and Marco Schorlemmer, Towards an inductive algorithm for learning trust alignment . . . 5; Angel Rolando Medellin, Katie Atkinson and Peter McBurney, A Preliminary Proposal for Model Checking Command Dialogues. . . 12; Declan Mungovan, Enda Howley and Jim Duggan, Norm Convergence in Populations of Dynamically Interacting Agents . . . 19; Akın Günay, Argumentation on Bayesian Networks for Distributed Decision Making . . 25; Michael Burkhardt, Marco Luetzenberger and Nils Masuch, Towards Toolipse 2: Tool Support for the JIAC V Agent Framework . . . 30; Joseph El Gemayel, The Tenacity of Social Actors . . . 33; Cristian Gratie, The Impact of Routing on Traffic Congestion . . . 36; Andrei-Horia Mogos and Monica Cristina Voinescu, A Rule-Based Psychologist Agent for Improving the Performances of a Sportsman . . . 39; --Autonomer Agent,Agent,Künstliche Intelligenz

Case-Based Argumentation Framework. Strategies

In agent societies, agents perform complex tasks that require different levels of intelligence and give rise to interactions among them. From these interactions, conflicts of opinion can arise, specially when MAS become adaptive and open with heterogeneous agents dynamically entering in or leaving the system. Therefore, software agents willing to participate in this type of systems will require to include extra capabilities to explicitly represent and generate agreements on top of the simpler ability to interact. In addition, agents can take advantage of previous argumentation experiences to follow dialogue strategies and easily persuade other agents to accept their opinions. Our insight is that CBR can be very useful to manage argumentation in open MAS and devise argumentation strategies based on previous argumentation experiences. To demonstrate the foundations of this suggestion, this report presents the work that we have done to develop case-based argumentation strategies in agent societies. Thus, we propose a case-based argumentation framework for agent societies and define heuristic dialogue strategies based on it. The framework has been implemented and evaluated in a real customer support application.Heras Barberá, SM.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Julian Inglada, VJ. (2011). Case-Based Argumentation Framework. Strategies. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1109

Case-Based strategies for argumentation dialogues in agent societies

[EN] In multi-agent systems, agents perform complex tasks that require different levels of intelligence and give rise to interactions among them. From these interactions, conflicts of opinion can arise, especially when these systems become open, with heterogeneous agents dynamically entering or leaving the system. Therefore, agents willing to participate in this type of system will be required to include extra capabilities to explicitly represent and generate agreements on top of the simpler ability to interact. Furthermore, agents in multiagent systems can form societies, which impose social dependencies on them. These dependencies have a decisive influence in the way agents interact and reach agreements. Argumentation provides a natural means of dealing with conflicts of interest and opinion. Agents can reach agreements by engaging in argumentation dialogues with their opponents in a discussion. In addition, agents can take advantage of previous argumentation experiences to follow dialogue strategies and persuade other agents to accept their opinions. Our insight is that case-based reasoning can be very useful to manage argumentation in open multi-agent systems and devise dialogue strategies based on previous argumentation experiences. To demonstrate the foundations of this suggestion, this paper presents the work that we have done to develop case-based dialogue strategies in agent societies. Thus, we propose a case-based argumentation framework for agent societies and define heuristic dialogue strategies based on it. The framework has been implemented and evaluated in a real customer support application.This work is supported by the Spanish Government Grants [CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00022, and TIN2012-36586-C03-01] and by the GVA project [PROMETEO 2008/051].Heras Barberá, SM.; Jordan Prunera, JM.; Botti, V.; Julian Inglada, VJ. (2013). Case-Based strategies for argumentation dialogues in agent societies. Information Sciences. 223:1-30. doi:10.1016/j.ins.2012.10.007S13022

Case-Based Argumentation in Agent Societies

Hoy en día los sistemas informáticos complejos se pueden ven en términos de los servicios que ofrecen y las entidades que interactúan para proporcionar o consumir dichos servicios. Los sistemas multi-agente abiertos, donde los agentes pueden entrar o salir del sistema, interactuar y formar grupos (coaliciones de agentes u organizaciones) de forma dinámica para resolver problemas, han sido propuestos como una tecnología adecuada para implementar este nuevo paradigma informático. Sin embargo, el amplio dinamismo de estos sistemas requiere que los agentes tengan una forma de armonizar los conflictos que surgen cuando tienen que colaborar y coordinar sus actividades. En estas situaciones, los agentes necesitan un mecanismo para argumentar de forma eficiente (persuadir a otros agentes para que acepten sus puntos de vista, negociar los términos de un contrato, etc.) y poder llegar a acuerdos. La argumentación es un medio natural y efectivo para abordar los conflictos y contradicciones del conocimiento. Participando en diálogos argumentativos, los agentes pueden llegar a acuerdos con otros agentes. En un sistema multi-agente abierto, los agentes pueden formar sociedades que los vinculan a través de relaciones de dependencia. Estas relaciones pueden surgir de sus interacciones o estar predefinidas por el sistema. Además, los agentes pueden tener un conjunto de valores individuales o sociales, heredados de los grupos a los que pertenecen, que quieren promocionar. Las dependencias entre los agentes y los grupos a los que pertenecen y los valores individuales y sociales definen el contexto social del agente. Este contexto tiene una influencia decisiva en la forma en que un agente puede argumentar y llegar a acuerdos con otros agentes. Por tanto, el contexto social de los agentes debería tener una influencia decisiva en la representación computacional de sus argumentos y en el proceso de gestión de argumentos.Heras Barberá, SM. (2011). Case-Based Argumentation in Agent Societies [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/12497Palanci

KEMNAD: A Knowledge Engineering Methodology for Negotiating Agent Development

Automated negotiation is widely applied in various domains. However, the development of such systems is a complex knowledge and software engineering task. So, a methodology there will be helpful. Unfortunately, none of existing methodologies can offer sufficient, detailed support for such system development. To remove this limitation, this paper develops a new methodology made up of: (1) a generic framework (architectural pattern) for the main task, and (2) a library of modular and reusable design pattern (templates) of subtasks. Thus, it is much easier to build a negotiating agent by assembling these standardised components rather than reinventing the wheel each time. Moreover, since these patterns are identified from a wide variety of existing negotiating agents(especially high impact ones), they can also improve the quality of the final systems developed. In addition, our methodology reveals what types of domain knowledge need to be input into the negotiating agents. This in turn provides a basis for developing techniques to acquire the domain knowledge from human users. This is important because negotiation agents act faithfully on the behalf of their human users and thus the relevant domain knowledge must be acquired from the human users. Finally, our methodology is validated with one high impact system

A multi-agent system with application in project scheduling

The new economic and social dynamics increase project complexity and makes scheduling problems more difficult, therefore scheduling requires more versatile solutions as Multi Agent Systems (MAS). In this paper the authors analyze the implementation of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) considering two scheduling problems: TCPSP (Time-Constrained Project Scheduling), and RCPSP (Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling). The authors propose an improved BDI (Beliefs, Desires, and Intentions) model and present the first the MAS implementation results in JADE platform.multi-agent architecture, scheduling, project management, BDI architecture, JADE.

A Computational Argumentation Framework for Agent Societies

Starting from the idea that the social context of agents determines the way in which agents can argue and reach agreements, this context should have a decisive influence in the computational representation of arguments. In this report, we advance research in the area of computational frameworks for agent argumentation by proposing a new argumentation framework (AF) for the design of open MAS in which the participating software agents are able to manage and exchange arguments between themselves taking into account the agents¿ social context. In order to do this, we have analysed the necessary requirements for this type of framework 1 and taken into account them in the design of our framework. Also, the knowledge resources that the agents can use to manage arguments in this framework are presented in this work. In addition, if heterogeneous agents can interact in the framework, they need a common language to represent arguments and argumentation processes. To cope with this, we have also designed an argumentation ontology to represent arguments and argumentation concepts in our framework.Heras Barberá, SM.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Julian Inglada, VJ. (2011). A Computational Argumentation Framework for Agent Societies. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1103