On agent mediated coordination strategies and its application in disaster management system

Multi-agent System (MAS) formulations have been developed and explored in the past in a variety of domains, ranging from optimization problems to game theory. However, there are certain issues that are common across all the domains. Cooperation and coordination of agents in MAS is one such important area. In this paper, we have first presented a very brief survey characterizing the cooperation and coordination strategies that have been frequently used. Thereafter the paper progresses to explore the applicability of MAS formulations in disaster management domain. We have identified the characteristics and requirements of disaster management domain; described the ways in which MAS formulations can be used in this domain; and presented the preliminary results of our simulation experiment of a greedy approach to disaster recovery.

[1]  Sarvapali D. Ramchurn,et al.  The ALADDIN project : intelligent agents for disaster management , 2008 .

[2]  Y. Shoham Introduction to Multi-Agent Systems , 2002 .

[3]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  A Roadmap of Agent Research and Development , 2004, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

[4]  H. P Nii,et al.  Blackboard Systems , 1986 .

[5]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  The Use of Meta-Level Control for Coordination in a Distributed Problem Solving Network , 1983, IJCAI.

[6]  Milind Tambe,et al.  Agent-Based Simulations for Disaster Rescue Using the DEFACTO Coordination System , 2005, Emergent Information Technologies and Enabling Policies for Counter-Terrorism.

[7]  Barbara Hayes-Roth,et al.  A Blackboard Architecture for Control , 1985, Artif. Intell..

[8]  Afsaneh Haddadi,et al.  Application of multi-agent systems in traffic and transportation , 1997, IEE Proc. Softw. Eng..

[9]  D. Corkill Blackboard Systems , 1991 .

[10]  Alan H. Bond,et al.  Distributed Artificial Intelligence , 1988 .

[11]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Commitments and conventions: The foundation of coordination in multi-agent systems , 1993, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[12]  Randall Davis,et al.  Report on the Workshop on Distributed AI , 1980 .

[13]  Carlos Ramos,et al.  A distributed architecture and negotiation protocol for scheduling in manufacturing systems , 1999 .

[14]  Reid G. Smith,et al.  The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver , 1980, IEEE Transactions on Computers.

[15]  Yang Gao,et al.  Distributed Artificial Intelligence: Second International Conference, DAI 2020, Nanjing, China, October 24–27, 2020, Proceedings , 2020, DAI.

[16]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Kasbah: An Agent Marketplace for Buying and Selling Goods , 1996, PAAM.

[17]  Guillermo Ricardo Simari,et al.  Multiagent systems: a modern approach to distributed artificial intelligence , 2000 .

[18]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Agent-Based Business Process Management , 1996, Int. J. Cooperative Inf. Syst..

[19]  Randall Steeb,et al.  Strategies of Cooperation in Distributed Problem Solving , 1983, IJCAI.

[20]  Gul A. Agha,et al.  ACTORS - a model of concurrent computation in distributed systems , 1985, MIT Press series in artificial intelligence.

[21]  Edmund H. Durfee,et al.  Coordination of distributed problem solvers , 1988 .

[22]  Stephen Potter,et al.  FireGrid: Integrated emergency response and fire safety engineering for the future built environment , 2005 .

[23]  Ana L. C. Bazzan,et al.  A Distributed Approach for Coordination of Traffic Signal Agents , 2005, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

[24]  Klaus Fischer,et al.  Cooperative Transportation Scheduling: An Application Domain for DAI , 1996, Appl. Artif. Intell..

[25]  Sarvapali D. Ramchurn,et al.  Agent-Based Coordination Technologies in Disaster Management (Demo Paper) , 2008 .

[26]  Dipti Srinivasan,et al.  An Introduction to Multi-Agent Systems , 2010 .

[27]  Reid G. Smith,et al.  The Contract Net: A Formalism for the Control of Distributed Problem Solving , 1977, IJCAI.

[28]  Nalini Venkatasubramanian,et al.  DrillSim: A Simulation Framework for Emergency Response Drills , 2006, ISI.

[29]  Oren Etzioni,et al.  A scalable comparison-shopping agent for the World-Wide Web , 1997, AGENTS '97.