Variable Sociability in Agent-Based Decision Making

Multi-agent system research is concerned with the issues surrounding the performance of collections of interacting agents. A major concern, therefore, is with the design of the decision making mechanism that the individual agents employ in order to determine which actions to take to achieve their goals. An attractive and much sought after property of this mechanism is that it produces decisions that are rational from the perspective of the individual agent. However, agents are also inherently social. Moreover, individual and social concerns often conflict, perhaps leading to inefficient performance of the individual and the system. To address these problems we propose a formal decision making framework, based on social welfare functions, that combines social and individual perspectives in a unified and flexible manner. The framework is realised in an exemplar computational setting and an empirical analysis is made of the relative performance of varying sociable decision making functions in a range of environments

Atmospheric environment

The basic concepts in agent negotiation are negotiation object, negotiation protocol and reasoning process. While aiming to transfer sociological concepts into multi-agent systems, where agents coordinate themselves by negotiation, we recognized the need for a more detailed structure. Therefore we developed C-IPS, which is presented in this article

Incorporating Uncertainty in Agent Commitments

. Commitments play a central role in multi-agent coordination. However, they are inherently uncertain and it is important to take these uncertainties into account during planning and scheduling. This paper addresses the problem of handling the uncertainty in commitments. We propose a new model of commitment that incorporates the uncertainty, the use of contingency analysis to reduce the uncertainty, and a negotiation framework for handling commitments with uncertainty. 1 Introduction In a multi-agent system, each agent can only have a partial view of other agents' behavior. Therefore, in order to coordinate the agents' activities, the agents need to have a mechanism to bridge their activities based on the partial knowledge. Commitments has emerged, among many research groups [1--3, 8], as the bridge for multi-agent coordination and planning. By definition, a commitment specifies a pledge to do a certain course of action [9]. A number of commitment semantics have been proposed, for ex..

SPARC Open Access Newsletter 111

Other Research Uni

Deliberative Normative Agents: Principles and Architecture

In this paper norms are assumed to be useful in agent societies. It is claimed that not only following norms, but also the possibility of `intelligent' norm violation can be useful. Principles for agents that are able to behave deliberatively on the basis of explicitly represented norms are identified and an architecture is introduced. Using this agent architecture, norms can be communicated, adopted and used as meta-goals on the agent's own processes. As such they have impact on deliberation about goal generation, goal selection, plan generation and plan selection