Towards self-organized service-oriented multi-agent systems

The demand for large-scale systems running in complex and even chaotic environments requires the consideration of new paradigms and technologies that provide flexibility, robustness, agility and responsiveness. Multiagents systems is pointed out as a suitable approach to address this challenge by offering an alternative way to design control systems, based on the decentralization of control functions over distributed autonomous and cooperative entities. However, in spite of their enormous potential, they usually lack some aspects related to interoperability, optimization in decentralized structures and truly self-adaptation. This paper discusses a new perspective to engineer adaptive complex systems considering a 3-layer framework integrating several complementary paradigms and technologies. In a first step, it suggests the integration of multi-agent systems with service-oriented architectures to overcome the limitations of interoperability and smooth migration, followed by the use of technology enablers, such as cloud computing and wireless sensor networks, to provide a ubiquitous and reconfigurable environment. Finally, the resulted service-oriented multi-agent system should be enhanced with biologically inspired techniques, namely self-organization, to reach a truly robust, agile and adaptive system

Utility-Based Mechanism for Structural Self-Organization in Service-Oriented MAS

Structural relations established among agents influence the performance of decentralized service discovery process in multiagent systems. Moreover, distributed systems should be able to adapt their structural relations to changes in environmental conditions. In this article, we present a service-oriented multiagent systems, where agents initially self-organize their structural relations based on the similarity of their services. During the service discovery process, agents integrate a mechanism that facilitates the self-organization of their structural relations to adapt the structure of the system to the service demand. This mechanism facilitates the task of decentralized service discovery and improves its performance. Each agent has local knowledge about its direct neighbors and the queries received during discovery processes. With this information, an agent is able to analyze its structural relations and decide when it is more appropriate to modify its direct neighbors and select the most suitable acquaintances to replace them. The experimental evaluation shows how this self-organization mechanism improves the overall performance of the service discovery process in the system when the service demand changesThis work is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through grants CSD2007-0022 (CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010), TIN2012-36586-C03-01, TIN2012-36586-C03-01, TIN2012-36586-C03-02, PROMETEOII/2013/019, and FPU grant AP-2008-00601 awarded to E. Del Val.Del Val Noguera, E.; Rebollo Pedruelo, M.; Vasirani, M.; Fernández, A. (2014). Utility-Based Mechanism for Structural Self-Organization in Service-Oriented MAS. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems. 9(3):1-24. https://doi.org/10.1145/2651423S12493Sherief Abdallah and Victor Lesser. 2007. 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Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview

In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level (micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level (macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models, and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page

Special Session on Industry 4.0

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Towards adaptive multi-robot systems: self-organization and self-adaptation

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.The development of complex systems ensembles that operate in uncertain environments is a major challenge. The reason for this is that system designers are not able to fully specify the system during specification and development and before it is being deployed. Natural swarm systems enjoy similar characteristics, yet, being self-adaptive and being able to self-organize, these systems show beneficial emergent behaviour. Similar concepts can be extremely helpful for artificial systems, especially when it comes to multi-robot scenarios, which require such solution in order to be applicable to highly uncertain real world application. In this article, we present a comprehensive overview over state-of-the-art solutions in emergent systems, self-organization, self-adaptation, and robotics. We discuss these approaches in the light of a framework for multi-robot systems and identify similarities, differences missing links and open gaps that have to be addressed in order to make this framework possible