Agent organisations: from independent agents to virtual organisations and societies of agents

Real world applications using agent-based solutions can include many agents that needs to communicate and interact with each other in order to meet their objectives. In organisations; Agent open multi-agent systems, problems can include not only the organisation of a large number of agents, but can also be heterogeneous and of unpredictable provenance or behavior. An overview of the alternatives for dealing with these problems is presented, highlighting the way they try to solve or mitigate them. This approach allows the development of complex systems in which there are agents that show very different behaviours and that are able to adapt to unforeseen changes in the environment. This makes it possible to simulate socio-technical or natural environments and observe their possible evolution without the ethical considerations involved in experimenting in real environments.This work has been developed as part of “Virtual-Ledgers-Tecnologías DLT/Blockchain y Cripto-IOT sobre organizaciones virtuales de agentes ligeros y su aplicación en la eficiencia en el transporte de última milla”, ID SA267P18, project financed by Junta Castilla y León, Consejería de Educación, and FEDER funds. It has been partially supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Interreg Spain-Portugal V-A Program (POCTEP) under grant 0631_DIGITEC_3_E (Smart growth through the specialization of the cross-border business fabric in advanced digital technologies and blockchain.)

A MAS for Teaching Computational Logic

In this paper, an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for teaching computational logic called SIAL is described. Several basic topics in computational logic are covered. The more complex part in SIAL is the module in charge of the diagnosis, which performs model-based diagnosis although sometimes, a knowledge-based (expertise) model is necessary in order to yield a more accurate diagnosis. The inherent complexity of the ITS is approached using a Multi-Agent System (MAS). The classical approach in ITS, which divides them into four independent modules, is adapted to a MAS creating an agent for each module and other agent for any other subsystem needed. The results obtained from an experiment of usage of SIAL are presented