Implementation of Autonomous Supply Chains for Digital Twinning: a Multi-Agent Approach

Trade disruptions, the pandemic, and the Ukraine war over the past years have adversely affected global supply chains, revealing their vulnerability. Autonomous supply chains are an emerging topic that has gained attention in industry and academia as a means of increasing their monitoring and robustness. While many theoretical frameworks exist, there is only sparse work to facilitate generalisable technical implementation. We address this gap by investigating multi-agent system approaches for implementing autonomous supply chains, presenting an autonomous economic agent-based technical framework. We illustrate this framework with a prototype, studied in a perishable food supply chain scenario, and discuss possible extensions.Comment: This paper includes 7 Pages, 4 Figures, and has been accepted by the IFAC World Congress 2023, 9 July - 14 July, 2023, Yokohama, Japan and will be published in IFAC-PapersOnLin

Trading Agent Competition with Autonomous Economic Agents

In this demonstration, we introduce a system that facilitates trading agent competitions. Competitions mirror a Walrasian Exchange Economy. Each agent is endowed with a set of digital assets and preferences over them. Agents then trade these assets with each other to increase their respective utilities. They negotiate one-on-one to arrive at an optimal trade, and if successful, settle their transaction trustlessly on an emulated permissionless blockchain. This system is a precursor to a trading platform for digital assets and crypto-tokens in which agents trade on behalf of their users

A Practical Framework for General Dialogue-Based Bilateral Interactions

For autonomous agents and services to cooperate and interact in multi-agent environments they require well-defined protocols. A multitude of protocol languages for multi-agent systems have been proposed in the past, but they have mostly remained theoretical or have limited prototypical implementations. This work proposes a practical realisation of a general framework for defining dialogue-based bilateral interaction protocols which supports arbitrary agent-based interactions. Crucially, this work is tightly integrated with a modern framework for the creation of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, making it possible to go from protocols’ specification to their implementation and usage by agents, and enables evaluation of protocols’ effectiveness and applicability in real-world use cases

Trading Agent Competition with Autonomous Economic Agents

We provide a case study for the Autonomous Economic Agent (AEA) framework; a toolkit for the development and deployment of autonomous agents with a focus on economic activities. The use case is the trading agent competition (TAC). It is a competition between autonomous agents with customisable strategies and market parameters. The competition is facilitated by the AEA framework’s native support for decentralised ledger technologies, i.e. permissionless blockchains and smart contract functionality, for immutable transaction recording and trade settlement. We provide an open-source implementation, study the result of the competitions we ran, and compare it to theoretical results in the economics literature. We conclude by discussing its real-world applications in crypto-currency, digital assets and token trading

Autonomous Economic Agent Framework

The Internet and the services delivered via it are increasingly centralised on a few monopolistic platforms. Today’s web frameworks are conceived to cater for increasing returns to scale and winner-takes-all business models with a built-in asymmetry between users and services. Existing multi-agent and agent architectures have seen no significant adoption outside niche applications. We propose a novel agent framework which is designed to allow for a decentralised digital economy to manifest where each individual and organisation is represented by an autonomous economic entity with its own agency. The framework bridges the old and new web and employs distributed ledger technologies as core parts of its construction. We introduce the framework, discuss the performance characteristics of its current implementation and demonstrate several application areas