Multi-agent systems and their role in future energy grids

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 14181 “Multi-agent systems and their role in future energy grids”. A number of recent events (e. g. Fukushima, Japan, and the largest blackout in history, India) have once again increased global attention on climate change and resource depletion. The evaluation of the feasibility of current approaches for future energy generation, distribution, transportation, and consumption has become an important requirement for most countries. There is a general consensus on the need for a fundamental transformation of future energy grids. The development of an information and communication technology (ICT) support infrastructure was identified as the key challenge in the design of an end-to-end smart grid. A multiagent system, with agents located at th

Recent advances in negotiation agents for electronic trading

Abstract not available

Supporting electronic negotiation for intelligent trading

Intelligent negotiation agents are software agents, which can negotiate the terms of transactions on behalf of purchasers and vendors on the Internet. Current solutions are mostly limited to single attribute negotiations, and are typically used to determine price. Moreover they typically assume information to be precisely defined and shared between the parties. Bargaining situations are, in most cases, characterised by conflicting interests among the agents that don't cater for common interests and possibility for collaboration to improve the outcomes of the parties. Another limitation of existing on-line negotiation agents is that their negotiation is usually taking place in a centralised market place where the agents meet and negotiate following a set of protocols that don't cater for more open and direct party to party negotiations. This paper reports on solutions for addressing the issues of negotiations with incomplete and imprecise information, dynamic coalition formation, and negotiation ontologies. The negotiation with incomplete and imprecise information uses fuzzy constraint based reasoning and the principle of utility theory. The formation of coalition is based on negotiation over the distribution of the coalition value and the agent level of resources. The negotiation ontologies make use of shared ontologies as well as individual ontologies to avoid misunderstanding and make data exchange meaningful

Pure exchange markets for resource sharing in federated clouds

Cloud Computing is the latest paradigm proposed toward fulfilling the vision of computing being delivered as an utility such as phone, electricity, gas and water services. It enables users to have access to computing infrastructure, platform and software as services over the Internet. The services can be accessed on demand and from anywhere in the world in a quick and flexible manner, and charged for based on their usage, making the rapid and often unpredictable expansion demanded by nowadays' business environment affordable also for small spin-off and start-up companies. In order to be competitive, however, Cloud providers need to be able to adapt to the dynamic loads from users, not only optimizing the local usage and costs but also engaging into agreements with other Clouds so as to complement local capacity. The infrastructure in which competing Clouds are able to cooperate to maximize their benefits is called a Federated Cloud. Just as Clouds enable users to cope with unexpected demand loads, a Federated Cloud will enable individual Clouds to cope with unforeseen variations of demand. The definition of the mechanism to ensure mutual benefits for the individual Clouds composing the federation, however, is one of its main challenges. This paper proposes and investigates the application of market-oriented mechanisms based on the General Equilibrium Theory of Microeconomics to coordinate the sharing of resources between the Clouds in the Federated Cloud