A large-scale multi-agent system for navy personnel distribution

In the US Navy, at the end of each sailor's tour of duty, he or she is assigned to a new job. The Navy employs some 280 people, called detailers, full time to effect these new assignments. The intelligent distribution agent (IDA) prototype was designed and built to automate, in a cognitively plausible manner, the job of the human detailers. That model is being redesigned to function as a multi-agent system. This is not a trivial matter due to the fact that there would need to be approximately 350 ‐ 000 individual agents. There are also many issues relating to how the agents interact and how all entities involved, including humans, exercise their autonomy. This paper describes both the IDA prototype and the multi-agent IDA system being created from it. We shall also discuss several of the major issues regarding the design, interaction and autonomy of the various agents involved.

[1]  Stan Franklin,et al.  Realizing consciousness in software agents , 1999 .

[2]  Melanie Mitchell,et al.  The Copycat project: a model of mental fluidity and analogy-making , 1995 .

[3]  John V. Jackson.  Idea for a mind , 1987, SGAR.

[4]  Arthur C. Graesser,et al.  Is it an Agent, or Just a Program?: A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents , 1996, ATAL.

[5]  T. Kellam,et al.  Artificial Minds , 1996, Inf. Process. Manag..

[6]  Lee McCauley,et al.  IDA: a cognitive agent architecture , 1998, SMC'98 Conference Proceedings. 1998 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (Cat. No.98CH36218).

[7]  Alfred R. Mele,et al.  Autonomous agents : from self-control to autonomy , 1999 .

[8]  Henry Hexmoor,et al.  A Cognitive Model of Situated Autonomy , 2000, PRICAI Workshops.

[9]  Deliberative Decision Making in “ Conscious ” Software Agents , 2000 .

[10]  B. Baars.  In the Theater of Consciousness , 1997 .

[11]  B. Baars.  A cognitive theory of consciousness , 1988 .

[12]  Alfred R. Mele,et al.  Springs Of Action , 1992 .

[13]  L. Barsalou,et al.  Whither structured representation? , 1999, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[14]  Stan Franklin,et al.  Deliberation and Voluntary Action in "Conscious" Software Agents , 2000 .

[15]  Michael R. Genesereth,et al.  Software agents , 1994, CACM.

[16]  Luc Steels,et al.  When are robots intelligent autonomous agents? , 1995, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[17]  Tuomas Sandholm,et al.  Power, Dependence and Stability in Multiagent Plans , 1999, AAAI/IAAI.

[18]  Cristiano Castelfranchi,et al.  Founding Agents' "Autonomy" on Dependence Theory , 2000, ECAI.

[19]  M. Minsky.  The Society of Mind , 1986 .

[20]  Cristiano Castelfranchi,et al.  Guarantees for Autonomy in Cognitive Agent Architecture , 1995, ECAI Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages.

[21]  Pentti Kanerva,et al.  Sparse Distributed Memory , 1988 .

[22]  James F. Allen.  Natural language understanding , 1987, Bejnamin/Cummings series in computer science.

[23]  Aaron Sloman,et al.  What Sort of Architecture is Required for a Human-Like Agent? , 1999 .

[24]  Stan Franklin,et al.  Consciousness and conceptual learning in a socially situated agent , 2000 .