OperA/ALIVE/OperettA

Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

"Exhibitionists" and "voyeurs" do it better: A shared environment for flexible coordination with tacit messages

Coordination between multiple autonomous agents is a major issue for open multi-agent systems. This paper proposes the notion of Behavioural Implicit Communication (BIC) originally devised in human and animal societies as a new and critical coordination mechanism also for artificial agents. BIC is a parasitical form of communication that exploits both some environmental properties and the agents? capacity to interpret their actions. In this paper we abstract from the agents? architecture to focus on the interaction mediated by the environment. Observability of the environment ? and in particular of agents? actions ? is crucial for implementing BIC-based form of coordination in artificial societies. Accordingly in this paper we introduce an abstract model of environment providing services to enhance observation power of agents, enabling BIC and other form of observation-based coordination. Also, we describe a typology of environments and examples of observation based coordination with and without implicit communication

Co-fields: Towards a unifying approach to the engineering of swarm intelligent systems

Abstract. Swarm intelligent systems, in which the paths to problem solving emerge as the result of interactions between simple autonomous components (agents or ants) and between them and their environment, appear very promising to develop robust and flexible software application. However, the variety of swarm-based approaches that have been proposed so far still lacks a common modeling and engineering methodology. In the attempt to overcome this problem, this paper presents a general coordination methodology in which swarm’s components are simply driven by abstract computational force fields (Co-Fields), generated either by agents, or by the environment. By having agents be driven in their activities by such fields, globally coordinated behaviors can naturally emerge. Although this model still does not offer a complete engineering methodology, it can provide a unifying abstraction for swarm intelligent systems and it can also be exploited to formalize these systems in terms of dynamical systems whose behavior can be described via differential equations. Several example of swarm systems modeled with Co-Fields are presented to support our thesis.

Manufacturing over the Internet and into Your Living Room: Perspectives from the AARIA Project

Consumer demand and current computational capabilities are driving the manufacturing complex from mass production to mass customization. Current barriers to mass customization have less to do with manufacturing machinery and more to do with the manual and computerized information systems currently used to control that machinery. On-line commerce offers potential benefits and functionality far beyond the automated catalogs that characterize today's cybermarkets. The AARIA project (Autonomous Agents for Rock Island Arsenal) demonstrates how agent technologies and Internet communications can support this expanded vision. This paper outlines new directions that we expect trade on the Internet to take, and shows how AARIA's architecture, scheduling approach, and simulation capabilities support these new directions