GoCo: planning expressive commitment protocols

Acknowledgements We gratefully thank those who shared their code with us. Special thanks to Ugur Kuter. We thank the anonymous reviewers, and also acknowledge with gratitude the reviewers at ProMAS’11, AAMAS’13, AAAI’13, and AAMAS’15, where preliminary parts of this work appeared. FM thanks the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) for the support within process numbers 306864/2013-4 under the PQ fellowship and 482156/2013-9 under the Universal project programs. NYS acknowledges support of the AUB University Research Board Grant Number 102853 and the OSB Grant OFFER_C1_2013_2014.Peer reviewe

Misure sperimentali delle prestazioni di caldaie a condensazione per il riscaldamento centralizzato

The condensing boiler technology has been known for at least two decades and its energy saving potential is nowadays acknowledged. Taking advantage from the additional heat recovered from the condensation of the water vapour contained in the exhaust flow, condensing boilers achieve, during test operations, efficiencies up to 108% on the LHV of natural gas. However, the yearly global performance of such boilers strongly depends on the type of heating system installed downstream. Due to the operating temperature ranges of the device, the radiant floor seems to be the most suitable heating system for such boilers. The present study evaluates the experimental data collected from a centralised plant, coupled to radiator and fan coil heating systems, over two years of operation. Although these medium/high temperature devices are not expected to fit at best to the condensing boiler, the yearly average performance reaches very high values

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Misure sperimentali per il riscaldamento centralizzato. Il presente lavoro valuta le prestazioni di un impianto di riscaldamento centralizzato che opera con terminali a radiatore. Lo schema idraulico adottato consente un funzionamento del sistema che da un lato ottimizza la resa dei corpi scaldanti e dall\u2019altro minimizza la temperatura di ritorno in caldaia, requisito fondamentale per un buon funzionamento di quest\u2019ultima

GoCo: Planning Expressive Commitment Protocols

This article addresses the challenge of planning coordinated activities for a set of autonomous agents, who coordinate according to social commitments among themselves. We develop a multi-agent plan in the form of a commitment protocol that allows the agents to coordinate in a flexible manner, retaining their autonomy in terms of the goals they adopt so long as their actions adhere to the commitments they have made. We consider an expressive first-order setting with probabilistic uncertainty over action outcomes. We contribute the first practical means to derive protocol enactments which maximise expected utility from the point of view of one agent. Our work makes two main contributions. First, we show how Hierarchical Task Network planning can be used to enact a previous semantics for commitment and goal alignment, and we extend that semantics in order to enact first-order commitment protocols. Second, supposing a cooperative setting, we introduce uncertainty in order to capture the reality that an agent does not know for certain that its partners will successfully act on their part of the commitment protocol. Altogether, we employ hierarchical planning techniques to check whether a commitment protocol can be enacted efficiently, and generate protocol enactments under a variety of conditions. The resulting protocol enactments can be optimised either for the expected reward or the probability of a successful execution of the protocol. We illustrate our approach on a real-world healthcare scenario.Algorithmic