A baseline for non-linear bilateral negotiations: the full results of the agents competing in ANAC 2014

In the past few years, there is a growing interest in automated negotiation in which software agents facilitate negotiation on behalf of their users and try to reach joint agreements. The potential value of developing such mechanisms becomes enormous when negotiation domain is too complex for humans to find agreements (e.g. e-commerce) and when software components need to reach agreements to work together (e.g. web-service composition). Here, one of the major challenges is to design agents that are able to deal with incomplete information about their opponents in negotiation as well as to effectively negotiate on their users’ behalves. To facilitate the research in this field, an automated negotiating agent competition has been organized yearly. This paper introduces the research challenges in Automated Negotiating Agent Competition (ANAC) 2014 and explains the competition set up and results. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the best performing five agents has been examined

An agent-based approach to intelligent manufacturing network configuration

The participation of small and medium enterprises in inter-firm collaboration can enhance their market reach while maintaining production lean. The conventional centralised collaboration approach is believed to be unsustainable, in today’s complex environment. The research aimed to investigate manufacturing network collaborations, where manufacturers maintain control over their scheduling activities and participate in a market-based event, to decide which collaborations are retained. The work investigated two pairing mechanisms where the intention was to capture and optimise collaboration at the granular level and then build up a network from those intermediate forms of organisation. The research also looked at two bidding protocols. The first protocol involves manufacturers that bid for operations from the process plan of a job. The second protocol is concerned with networks that bid for a job in its entirety. The problem, defined by an industrial use case and operation research data sets, was modelled as decentralised flow shop scheduling. The holonic paradigm identified the problem solving agents that participated in agent-based modelling and simulation of the pairing and the bidding protocols. The protocols are strongly believed to achieve true decentralisation of scheduling, with good performance on scalability, conflict resolution and schedule optimisation, for the purpose of inter-firm collaboration

Interactions, improvisations and arrangements in the process of informing.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D42580/82 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Weary Warriors

As seen in military documents, medical journals, novels, films, television shows, and memoirs, soldiers’ invisible wounds are not innate cracks in individual psyches that break under the stress of war. Instead, the generation of weary warriors is caught up in wider social and political networks and institutions—families, activist groups, government bureaucracies, welfare state programs—mediated through a military hierarchy, psychiatry rooted in mind-body sciences, and various cultural constructs of masculinity. This book offers a history of military psychiatry from the American Civil War to the latest Afghanistan conflict. The authors trace the effects of power and knowledge in relation to the emotional and psychological trauma that shapes soldiers’ bodies, minds, and souls, developing an extensive account of the emergence, diagnosis, and treatment of soldiers’ invisible wounds