The Agentcities Network Architecture

Agentcities is a worldwide initiative designed to help realize the commercial and research potential of agent-based applications by constructing an open distributed network of platforms hosting diverse agents and services. The ultimate aim of the Agentcities initiative is to enable the dynamic, intelligent and autonomous composition of services to achieve user and business goals, thereby creating compound services to address changing needs. In this paper, we present the progress and current status of the Agentcities Network, six months after the launch of the project. The architecture of the Network, consisting of agents, services and platforms, is described. Finally, the plans and challenges for enhancing the Agentcities Network in the next phase of development are also discussed

A Contract Decommitment Protocol for Automated Negotiation in Time Variant Environments

Negotiation is a fundamental mechanism in distributed multi-agent systems. Since negotiation is a time-spending process, in many scenarios agents have to take into account the passage of time and to react to uncertain events. The possibility to decommit from a contract is considered a powerful technique to manage this aspect. This paper considers interactions among self-interested and autonomous agent, each with their own utility function, and focuses on incomplete information. We define a negotiation model based on asynchronous message passing in which the negotiation doesn't end when an agreement is reached but when the consequences of the contract have happened -- i.e. the action is done. In this model the agent utility functions are time dependent. We present an extension of the contract net protocol that implements the model

Goal Delegation in Multiagent System

The organization of an event, like a conference, presents some aspects of distributed problem solving that we think can be tackled in an efficient way through goal delegation. Our application exploits the capabilities of both interface agents and collaborative agents to ease the work of negotiating a list of services, with different priorities and constraints. It shows that agents can approach even complex tasks through goal delegation and offer dynamic and flexible solutions for supply chains, especially to deal with unexpected events and chain reorganization