Lease-based Decentralized Resource Management in Open Multi-Agent Systems

A distributed management architecture is proposed for Internet-scale, open, distributed agent middleware systems. The management architecture presented supports the autonomy of both agents and middleware resources, incorporating an agent-initiated contract negotiation model for resource allocation and access. A leasing mechanism infrastructure designed and implemented for this purpose is presented

Monitoring and Reputation Mechanisms for Service Level Agreements

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is an electronic contract between a service user and a provider, and specifies the service to be provided, Quality of Service (QoS) properties that must be maintained by a provider during service provision (generally defined as a set of Service Level Objectives (SLOs)), and a set of penalty clauses specifying what happens when service providers fail to deliver the QoS agreed. Although significant work exists on how SLOs may be specified and monitored, not much work has focused on actually identifying how SLOs may be impacted by the choice of specific penalty clauses. A trusted mediator may be used to resolve conflicts between the parties involved. The objectives of this work are to: (i) identify classes of penalty clauses that can be associated with an SLA; (ii) define how to specify penalties in an extension of WS-Agreement; and (iii) specify to what extent penalty clauses can be enforced based on monitoring of an SLA

AgentScape Demonstration

Introduction The AgentScape framework is the current focus of research within the IIDS Group in close collaboration with the Computer Systems Group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This framework includes the AgentScape OS, a number of services including the Generative Migration Facility, and support for application developers. AgentScape Middleware: Agent Operating System The AgentScape operating system (AOS) [5] provides a platform with which mobile, autonomous agents can be managed. The rationale behind AgentScape's design is (1) to provide a platform for large-scale agent systems [1], (2) to support multiple code bases and operating systems, and (3) to support interoperability with other agent platforms. A location is a "place" in which agents and objects can reside. Agents are active entities in AgentScape that interact with each other by message-passing communication. Objects are passive entities that are only engaged into computations reactively on an agent's initiativ