Deliberate Evolution in Multi-Agent Systems

This paper presents an architecture for an agent capable of deliberation about the creation of new agents, and of actually creating a new agent in the multi-agent system, on the basis of this deliberation. The agent architecture is based on an existin

Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities

International audienceThe environment has been recognized as an explicit and exploitable element to design multi-agent systems (MAS). It can be assigned a number of responsibilities that would be more difficult to design with the sole notion of agents. To support the engineering of these responsibilities, we identify a set of mechanisms that offer solutions to software designers. We describe the mechanisms, their usage in representative projects, and potential opportunities for further research and applications. The purpose of this article is to clarify the notion of environment in terms of mechanisms, from their abstract description to their practical exploitation. Mechanisms are expected to provide agent-based software designers with a set of design elements to build MAS that take advantage of the environment

Design of Collaborative Information Agents

. Effective development of nontrivial systems of collaborative information agents requires that an in-depth analysis is made resulting in (1) specification of requirements at different levels of the system, (2) specification of design structures, and (3) a systematic verification. To support a widespread use of intelligent information agents for the Internet, the challenges are (1) to identify and classify a variety of instances of the different types of reusable (requirement, design and proof) patterns, (2) build libraries of them, and (3) provide corresponding easy-to-use plug-in information agent components to the common user. In a simplified example it is shown which types of reusable requirements patterns, design patterns, and proof patterns can be exploited, and how these patterns relate to each other. 1 Introduction The domain of collaborative information agents (cf. [27]) imposes specific requirements on the functionality and behaviour of the agents and their inter..