Multi-platform coordination and resource management in command and control

Depuis plusieurs années, nous constatons l'augmentation de l'utilisation des techniques d'agents et multiagent pour assister l'humain dans ses tâches. Ce travail de maîtrise se situe dans la même voie. Précisément, nous proposons d'utiliser les techniques multiagent de planification et de coordination pour la gestion de ressources dans les systèmes de commande et contrôle (C2) temps réel. Le problème particulier que nous avons étudié est la conception d'un système d'aide à la décision pour les opérations anti-aérienne sur les frégates canadiennes. Dans le cas où plusieurs frégates doivent se défendre contre des menaces, la coordination est un problème d'importance capitale. L'utilisation de mécanismes de coordination efficaces permet d'éviter les actions conflictuelles et la redondance dans les engagements. Dans ce mémoire, nous présentons quatre mécanismes de coordination basés sur le partage de tâche. Trois sont basés sur les communications : la coordination centrale, le Contract Net, la coordination similaire à celle proposée par Brown; tandis que la défense de zone est basée sur les lois sociales. Nous exposons enfin les résultats auxquels nous sommes arrivés en simulant ces différents mécanismes.The use of agent and multiagent techniques to assist humans in their daily routines has been increasing for many years, notably in Command and Control (C2) systems. This thesis is is situated in this domain. Precisely, we propose to use multiagent planning and coordination techniques for resource management in real-time \acs{C2} systems. The particular problem we studied is the design of a decision-support for anti-air warfare on Canadian frigates. In the case of several frigates defending against incoming threats, multiagent coordination is a complex problem of capital importance. Better coordination mechanisms are important to avoid redundancy in engagements and inefficient defence caused by conflicting actions. In this thesis, we present four different coordination mechanisms based on task sharing. Three of these mechanisms are based on communications: central coordination, Contract Net coordination and Brown coordination, while the zone defence coordination is based on social laws. Finally, we expose the results obtained while simulating these various mechanisms

Analysis and design of multiagent systems using MAS-CommonKADS

This article proposes an agent-oriented methodology called MAS-CommonKADS and develops a case study. This methodology extends the knowledge engineering methodology CommonKADSwith techniquesfrom objectoriented and protocol engineering methodologies. The methodology consists of the development of seven models: Agent Model, that describes the characteristics of each agent; Task Model, that describes the tasks that the agents carry out; Expertise Model, that describes the knowledge needed by the agents to achieve their goals; Organisation Model, that describes the structural relationships between agents (software agents and/or human agents); Coordination Model, that describes the dynamic relationships between software agents; Communication Model, that describes the dynamic relationships between human agents and their respective personal assistant software agents; and Design Model, that refines the previous models and determines the most suitable agent architecture for each agent, and the requirements of the agent network

Task-Based Information Compression for Multi-Agent Communication Problems with Channel Rate Constraints

A collaborative task is assigned to a multiagent system (MAS) in which agents are allowed to communicate. The MAS runs over an underlying Markov decision process and its task is to maximize the averaged sum of discounted one-stage rewards. Although knowing the global state of the environment is necessary for the optimal action selection of the MAS, agents are limited to individual observations. The inter-agent communication can tackle the issue of local observability, however, the limited rate of the inter-agent communication prevents the agent from acquiring the precise global state information. To overcome this challenge, agents need to communicate their observations in a compact way such that the MAS compromises the minimum possible sum of rewards. We show that this problem is equivalent to a form of rate-distortion problem which we call the task-based information compression. We introduce a scheme for task-based information compression titled State aggregation for information compression (SAIC), for which a state aggregation algorithm is analytically designed. The SAIC is shown to be capable of achieving near-optimal performance in terms of the achieved sum of discounted rewards. The proposed algorithm is applied to a rendezvous problem and its performance is compared with several benchmarks. Numerical experiments confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithm.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figure

Multiagent cooperation for solving global optimization problems: an extendible framework with example cooperation strategies

This paper proposes the use of multiagent cooperation for solving global optimization problems through the introduction of a new multiagent environment, MANGO. The strength of the environment lays in itsflexible structure based on communicating software agents that attempt to solve a problem cooperatively. This structure allows the execution of a wide range of global optimization algorithms described as a set of interacting operations. At one extreme, MANGO welcomes an individual non-cooperating agent, which is basically the traditional way of solving a global optimization problem. At the other extreme, autonomous agents existing in the environment cooperate as they see fit during run time. We explain the development and communication tools provided in the environment as well as examples of agent realizations and cooperation scenarios. We also show how the multiagent structure is more effective than having a single nonlinear optimization algorithm with randomly selected initial points

A survey of agent-oriented methodologies

This article introduces the current agent-oriented methodologies. It discusses what approaches have been followed (mainly extending existing object oriented and knowledge engineering methodologies), the suitability of these approaches for agent modelling, and some conclusions drawn from the survey