A review of the negotiation protocol for agent based manufacturing system control

An investigation in traditional approach to manufacturing system control based on centralized or hierarchical control structures presents good characteristics in terms of productivity due to its inherent optimization capabilities. However, it does not possess the dynamic and adaptive response to change which is currently the key to competitiveness in global market. Agent-based manufacturing system control fits into this gap left by the traditional approach and it is potentially beneficial due to the need for automated decision-making, reaction to disturbances and the parallel computation. This paper reviews the negotiation protocol in agent based manufacturing systems control and also explore negotiation mechanisms. While there are other interesting artificial intelligence techniques that have already been employed in manufacturing system controls for more than two decades, however, recent developments in multi-agent technique will bring new and interesting possibilities

Parrondo Strategies for Artificial Traders

On markets with receding prices, artificial noise traders may consider alternatives to buy-and-hold. By simulating variations of the Parrondo strategy, using real data from the Swedish stock market, we produce first indications of a buy-low-sell-random Parrondo variation outperforming buy-and-hold. Subject to our assumptions, buy-low-sell-random also outperforms the traditional value and trend investor strategies. We measure the success of the Parrondo variations not only through their performance compared to other kinds of strategies, but also relative to varying levels of perfect information, received through messages within a multi-agent system of artificial traders.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Implementing an Agent Trade Server

An experimental server for stock trading autonomous agents is presented and made available, together with an agent shell for swift development. The server, written in Java, was implemented as proof-of-concept for an agent trade server for a real financial exchange.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, intended for B/W printin

Investigating the Challenges of Data, Pricing and Modelling to Enable Agent Based Simulation of the Credit Default Swap Market

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 is considered by three top economists the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s [Pendery, 2009]. The crisis played a major role in the failure of key businesses, declines in consumer wealth, and significant downturn in economic activities leading to the 2008-2012 global recession and contributing to the European sovereign-debt crisis [Baily and Elliott, 2009] [Williams, 2012]. More importantly, the serious limitation of existing conventional tools and models as well as a vital need for developing complementary tools to improve the robustness of existing overall framework immediately became apparent. This thesis details three proposed solutions drawn from three main subject areas: Statistic, Genetic Programming (GP), and Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to help enable agent-based simulation of Credit Default Swap (CDS) market. This is accomplished by tackling three challenges of lack of sufficient data to support research, lack of efficient CDS pricing technique to be integrated into agent based model, and lack of practical CDS market experimental model, that are faced by designers of CDS investigation tools. In particular, a general data generative model is presented for simulating financial data, a novel price calculator is proposed for pricing CDS contracts, and a unique CDS agent-based model is designed to enable the investigation of market. The solutions presented can be seen as modular building blocks that can be applied to a variety of applications. Ultimately, a unified general framework is presented for integrating these three solutions. The motivation for the methods is to suggest viable tools that address these challenges and thus enable the future realistic simulation of the CDS market using the limited real data in hand. A series of experiments were carried out, and a comparative evaluation and discussion is provided. In particular, we presented the advantages of realistic artificial data to enable open ended simulation and to design various scenarios, the effectiveness of Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) as a bio-inspired evolutionary method for a complex real-world financial problem, and capability of Agent Based (AB) models for investigating CDS market. These experiments demonstrate the efficiency and viability of the proposed approaches and highlight interesting directions of future research

A Common Protocol for Agent-Based Social Simulation

Traditional (i.e. analytical) modelling practices in the social sciences rely on a very well established, although implicit, methodological protocol, both with respect to the way models are presented and to the kinds of analysis that are performed. Unfortunately, computer-simulated models often lack such a reference to an accepted methodological standard. This is one of the main reasons for the scepticism among mainstream social scientists that results in low acceptance of papers with agent-based methodology in the top journals. We identify some methodological pitfalls that, according to us, are common in papers employing agent-based simulations, and propose appropriate solutions. We discuss each issue with reference to a general characterization of dynamic micro models, which encompasses both analytical and simulation models. In the way, we also clarify some confusing terminology. We then propose a three-stage process that could lead to the establishment of methodological standards in social and economic simulations.Agent-based, simulations, methodology, calibration, validation.