132 research outputs found

    Executable specication of open multi-agent systems

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    Multi-agent systems where the agents are developed by parties with competing interests, and where there is no access to an agent's internal state, are often classi ed as `open'. The members of such systems may inadvertently fail to, or even deliberately choose not to, conform to the system speci cation. Consequently, it is necessary to specify the normative relations that may exist between the members, such as permission, obligation, and institutional power. We present a framework being developed for executable speci cation of open multi-agent systems. We adopt a bird's eye view of these systems, as opposed to an agent's perspective whereby it reasons about how it should act. This paper is devoted to the presentation of various examples from the NetBill protocol formalised in terms of institutional power, permission and obligation. We express the system speci cation in the Event Calculus and execute the speci cation by means of a logic programming implementation. We also give several example formalisations of sanctions for dealing with violations of permissions and obligations. We distinguish between an open multi-agent system and the procedure by which an agent enters and leaves the system. We present examples from the speci cation of a role-management protocol for NetBill, and demonstrate the interplay between such a protocol and the corresponding multi-agent system

    The Axiomatisation of Socio-Economic Principles for Self-Organising Systems

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    An Agent Architecture for Concurrent Bilateral Negotiations

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    Abstract. We present an architecture that makes use of symbolic decision-making to support agents participating in concurrent bilateral negotiations. The architecture is a revised version of previous work with the KGP model [23, 12], which we specialise with knowledge about the agent’s self, the negotiation opponents and the environment. Our work combines the specification of domain-independent decision-making with a new protocol for concurrent negotiation that revisits the well-known alternating offers protocol [22]. We show how the decision-making can be specialised to represent the agent’s strategies, utilities and prefer-ences using a Prolog-like meta-program. The work prepares the ground for supporting decision-making in concurrent bilateral negotiations that is more lightweight than previous work and contributes towards a fully developed model of the architecture

    Minimizing efforts in validating crowd answers

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    In recent years, crowdsourcing has become essential in a wide range of Web applications. One of the biggest challenges of crowdsourcing is the quality of crowd answers as workers have wide-ranging levels of expertise and the worker community may contain faulty workers. Although various techniques for quality control have been proposed, a post-processing phase in which crowd answers are validated is still required. Validation is typically conducted by experts, whose availability is limited and who incur high costs. Therefore, we develop a probabilistic model that helps to identify the most beneficial validation questions in terms of both, improvement of result correctness and detection of faulty workers. Our approach allows us to guide the experts work by collecting input on the most problematic cases, thereby achieving a set of high quality answers even if the expert does not validate the complete answer set. Our comprehensive evaluation using both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrates that our techniques save up to 50% of expert efforts compared to baseline methods when striving for perfect result correctness. In absolute terms, for most cases, we achieve close to perfect correctness after expert input has been sought for only 20% of the questions
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