TOKEN-BASED APPROACH FOR SCALABLE TEAMCOORDINATION

To form a cooperative multiagent team, autonomous agents are required to harmonize activities and make the best use of exclusive resources to achieve their common goal. In addition, to handle uncertainty and quickly respond to external environmental events, they should share knowledge and sensor in formation. Unlike small team coordination, agents in scalable team must limit the amount of their communications while maximizing team performance. Communication decisions are critical to scalable-team coordination because agents should target their communications, but these decisions cannot be supported by a precise model or by complete team knowledge.The hypothesis of my thesis is: local routing of tokens encapsulating discrete elements of control, based only on decentralized local probability decision models, will lead to efficient scalable coordination with several hundreds of agents. In my research, coordination controls including all domain knowledge, tasks and exclusive resources are encapsulated into tokens. By passing tokens around, agents transfer team controls encapsulated in the tokens. The team benefits when a token is passed to an agent who can make use of it, but communications incur costs. Hence, no single agent has sole responsible over any shared decision. The key problem lies in how agents make the correct decisions to target communications and pass tokens so that they will potentially benefit the team most when considering communication costs.My research on token-based coordination algorithm starts from the investigation of random walk of token movement. I found a little increase of the probabilities that agents make the right decision to pass a token, the overall efficiency of the token movement could be greatly enhanced. Moreover, if token movements are modeled as a Markov chain, I found that the efficiency of passing tokens could be significantly varied based on different network topologies.My token-based algorithm starts at the investigation of each single decision theoretic agents. Although under the uncertainties that exist in large multiagent teams, agents cannot act optimal, it is still feasible to build a probability model for each agents to rationally pass tokens. Specifically, this decision only allow agent to pass tokens over an associate network where only a few of team members are considered as token receiver.My proposed algorithm will build each agent's individual decision model based on all of its previously received tokens. This model will not require the complete knowledge of the team. The key idea is that I will make use of the domain relationships between pairs of coordination controls. Previously received tokens will help the receiver to infer whether the sender could benefit the team if a related token is received. Therefore, each token is used to improve the routing of other tokens, leading to a dramatic performance improvement when more tokens are added. By exploring the relationships between different types of coordination controls, an integrated coordination algorithm will be built, and an improvement of one aspect of coordination will enhance the performance of the others

Agents and E-commerce: Beyond Automation

The fast-growing information and communication technologies have shifted the contemporary commerce in both its information and market spaces. Businesses demand a new generation of agile and adaptive commerce systems. Towards this end, software agents, a type of autonomous artifacts, have been viewed as a promising solution. They have been taking an increasingly important part in facilitating e-commerce operations in the last two decades. This article presents a systematized overview of the diversity of agent applications in commerce. The paper argues that agents start playing more substantial role in determining social affairs. They also have a strong potential to be used to build the future highly responsive and smart e-commerce systems. The opportunities and challenges presented by proliferation of agent technologies in e-commerce necessitate the development of insights into their place in information systems research, as well as practical implications for the management

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.

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications