Advances on Practical Applications of Agents and Multiagent Systems

9th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multiagent Systems, PAAMS 2011, Salamanca,Spain, 6-8 April 2011 (http://www.paams.net/paams2011/) - Proceedings: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-642-19875-5International audienceno abstrac

Adaptive multi-agent system for a washing machine production line

This paper describes the implementation of a multi-agent system in a real industrial washing machine production line aiming to integrate process and quality control, allowing the establishment of feedback control loops to support adaptation facing condition changes. For this purpose, the agent-based solution was implemented using the JADE framework, being the shared knowledge structured using a proper ontology, edited and validated in Protégé and posteriorly integrated in the multi-agent system. The solution was intensively tested using historical real production data and it is now being installed in the real production line. The preliminary results confirm the initial expectations in terms of improvement of process performance and product quality

A survey on factors that impact industrial agent acceptance

Although the agent technology has been with us some decades now, its acceptance in industry is still limited. As such, we conducted a survey and investigated the main factors that impact it. Thus, key industrial agent aspects are investigated-i.e., design, technology, intelligence/algorithms, standardization, hardware, challenges, applications, and cost. The results are analyzed and discussed, confirming that a decision on agent utilization in productive industrial systems is a complex undertaking, and there are still many issues to be resolved in order to lead to a wider acceptance of industrial agents.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Planning and Choosing: Augmenting HTN-Based Agents with Mental Attitudes.

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.This paper describes a new agent framework that fuses an HTN planner, through its underlying conceptual model, with the mental attitudes of the BDI agent architecture, thus exploiting the strengths of each. On the one hand, the practical and proven ability to reason about actions that is the strength of HTN planning fleshes out the option generation function in the inference loop of the BDI model; on the other hand, the mental attitudes make explicit the knowledge that plays an essential role in plan selection, an important aspect that is not considered in the traditional formulation of the planning problem. The result is a coherent framework that allows for the design and implementation of activity-centric rational agents

Bilateral negotiation in a multi-agent supply chain system

A supply chain is a set of organizations directly linked by flows of services from suppliers to customers. Supply chain activities range from the ordering and receipt of raw materials to the production and distribution of finished goods. Supply chain management is the integration of key activities across a supply chain for the purposes of building competitive infrastructures, synchronizing supply with demand, and leveraging worldwide logistics. This paper addresses the challenges created by supply chain management towards improving long-term performance of companies. It presents a multi-agent supply chain system composed of multiple software agents, each responsible for one or more supply chain activities, and each interacting with other agents in the execution of their responsibilities. Additionally, this paper presents the key features of a negotiation model for software agents. The model handles bilateral multi-issue negotiation and incorporates an alternating offers protocol, a set of logrolling strategies, and a set of negotiation tactics

Knowledge discOvery And daTa minINg inteGrated (KOATING) Moderators for collaborative projects

This article was published in the serial, International Journal of Production Research [© Taylor and Francis]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2010.532166A major issue in any multidiscipline collaborative project is how to best share and simultaneously exploit different types of expertise, without duplicating efforts or inadvertently causing conflicts or loss of efficiency through misunderstanding of individual or shared goals. Moderators are knowledge based systems designed to support collaborative teams by raising awareness of potential problems or conflicts. However, the functioning of a Moderator is limited by the knowledge it has about the team members. Knowledge acquisition, learning and updating of knowledge are the major challenges for a Moderator's implementation. To address these challenges a Knowledge discOvery And daTa minINg inteGrated (KOATING) framework is presented for Moderators to enable them to continuously learn from the operational databases of the company and semi-automatically update their knowledge about team members. This enables the reuse of discovered knowledge from operational databases within collaborative projects. The integration of knowledge discovery in database (KDD) techniques into the existing Knowledge Acquisition Module of a moderator enables hidden data dependencies and relationships to be utilised to facilitate the moderation process. The architecture for the Universal Knowledge Moderator (UKM) shows how Moderators can be extended to incorporate a learning element which enables them to provide better support for virtual enterprises. Unified Modelling Language diagrams were used to specify the ways to design and develop the proposed system. The functioning of a UKM is presented using an illustrative example