Design and Applications of Intelligent Agents

The organization structure of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) constrains the mechanisms that may be used for coordinating the agents’ decision-making process. As researchers develop MAS that allow agents to dynamically re-organize how to interact with each other, the design of the agents must provide the ability to operate under different organizations. This paper investigates the issues involved in increasing the flexibility of agents’ coordination capabilities. Applying the concepts of encapsulation and polymorphism, a representation of coordination strategies is presented as an abstraction that allows agents to easily switch coordination mechanisms and that allows coordination mechanisms to be applied to different domains.

[1]  Kazuhiro Kuwabara,et al.  Shine: a Cyber-community Application Platform | a Proposal | , 2001 .

[2]  Gil A. Tidhar.  Team-Oriented Programming: Preliminary Report , 1993 .

[3]  Chen K. Tham,et al.  Reinforcement learning of multiple tasks using a hierarchical CMAC architecture , 1995, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[4]  Xun Yi,et al.  Secure Information Gathering Agent for Internet Trading , 1998, DAI.

[5]  Dirk Westhoff,et al.  Methods for Protecting a Mobile Agent's Route , 1999, ISW.

[6]  Kazuhiro Kuwabara,et al.  Gleams of People: Monitoring the Presence of People with Multi-Agent Architecture , 1999, PRIMA.

[7]  Theo D'Hondt,et al.  Location transparent routing in mobile agent systems merging name lookups with routing , 1999, Proceedings 7th IEEE Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems.

[8]  Gerhard Weiß,et al.  Distributed reinforcement learning , 1995, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[9]  Terry Winograd,et al.  Understanding computers and cognition - a new foundation for design , 1987 .

[10]  Moshe Tennenholtz,et al.  Co-Learning and the Evolution of Social Acitivity , 1994 .

[11]  Christoph Bussler,et al.  A new generation of workflow-management-systems: beyond Taylorism with MOBILE , 1996, SIGO.

[12]  John K. Debenham.  Knowledge engineering - unifying knowledge base and database design , 1998, Artificial intelligence.

[13]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  Online learning about other agents in a dynamic multiagent system , 1998, AGENTS '98.

[14]  S. Clearwater.  Market-based control: a paradigm for distributed resource allocation , 1996 .

[15]  Jörg P. Müller,et al.  The Design of Intelligent Agents , 1996, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[16]  Timothy W. Finin,et al.  KQML as an agent communication language , 1994, CIKM '94.

[17]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Intelligent agents: theory and practice , 1995, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[18]  Martin K. Purvis,et al.  The NZDIS project: an agent-based distributed information systems architecture , 2000, Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[19]  G. Tidhar,et al.  Guided Team Selection * , 1996 .

[20]  Edmund H. Durfee,et al.  Distributed Problem Solving and Planning , 2001, EASSS.

[21]  John K. Debenham,et al.  Three Intelligent Architectures for Business Process Management , 2000 .

[22]  Markus Straßer,et al.  A fault-tolerant protocol for providing the exactly-once property of mobile agents , 1998, Proceedings Seventeenth IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (Cat. No.98CB36281).

[23]  Liz Sonenberg,et al.  An Approach to Specifying Coordinated Agent Behaviour , 2000, PRIMA.

[24]  Ron Sun,et al.  Bidding in reinforcement learning: a paradigm for multi-agent systems , 1999, AGENTS '99.

[25]  Shigeo Matsubara,et al.  CommunityBoard 2: mediating between speakers and an audience in computer network discussions , 1999, AGENTS '99.

[26]  Craig Boutilier,et al.  The Dynamics of Reinforcement Learning in Cooperative Multiagent Systems , 1998, AAAI/IAAI.

[27]  Anand S. Rao,et al.  BDI Agents: From Theory to Practice , 1995, ICMAS.

[28]  Weiming Shen,et al.  MetaMorph II: an agent-based architecture for distributed intelligent design and manufacturing , 2000, J. Intell. Manuf..

[29]  Frank Dignum,et al.  Towards socially sophisticated BDI agents , 2000, Proceedings Fourth International Conference on MultiAgent Systems.

[30]  Deepinder P. Sidhu,et al.  A scalable location tracking and message delivery scheme for mobile agents , 1998, Proceedings Seventh IEEE International Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastucture for Collaborative Enterprises (WET ICE '98) (Cat. No.98TB100253).

[31]  Eugene H. Spafford,et al.  An architecture for intrusion detection using autonomous agents , 1998, Proceedings 14th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (Cat. No.98EX217).

[32]  Michael McGill,et al.  Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval , 1983 .

[33]  Fred P. Brooks,et al.  The Mythical Man-Month , 1975, Reliable Software.

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

[35]  Dieter K. Hammer,et al.  A reliable mobile agents architecture , 1998, Proceedings First International Symposium on Object-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC '98).

[36]  H. Van Dyke Parunak,et al.  The AARIA agent architecture: an example of requirements-driven agent-based system design , 1997, AGENTS '97.

[37]  D. Hindman.  The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier , 1996 .

[38]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Social information filtering: algorithms for automating “word of mouth” , 1995, CHI '95.

[39]  Ben J. A. Kröse,et al.  Learning from delayed rewards , 1995, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[40]  Michael L. Littman,et al.  Markov Games as a Framework for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning , 1994, ICML.

[41]  Ariel Rubinstein,et al.  A Course in Game Theory , 1995 .

[42]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Pitfalls of agent-oriented development , 1998, AGENTS '98.

[43]  Michael I. Jordan,et al.  Reinforcement Learning with Soft State Aggregation , 1994, NIPS.

[44]  Henning Maaß.  Location-Aware Mobile Applications Based on Directory Services , 1997, MobiCom.

[45]  H. Van Dyke Parunak,et al.  Representing Agent Interaction Protocols in UML , 2000, AOSE.

[46]  Igor Hawryszkiewycz.  Supporting Teams in Virtual Organizations , 1999, DEXA.

[47]  William E. Lorensen,et al.  Object-Oriented Modeling and Design , 1991, TOOLS.

[48]  Sandip Sen,et al.  Individual learning of coordination knowledge , 1998, J. Exp. Theor. Artif. Intell..

[49]  Michael N. Huhns,et al.  An intelligent system for document retrieval in distributed office environments , 1986, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[50]  Stephen Cranefield,et al.  Extending Agent Messaging to Enable OO Information Exchange , 2000 .

[51]  Frédéric Koriche.  Approximate Reasoning about Combined Knowledge , 1997, ATAL.

[52]  Paul Dourish,et al.  Using metalevel techniques in a flexible toolkit for CSCW applications , 1998, TCHI.

[53]  Randall Davis,et al.  Negotiation as a Metaphor for Distributed Problem Solving , 1988, Artif. Intell..

[54]  Sandip Sen,et al.  Co-adaptation in a Team , 1997 .

[55]  Ron Sun,et al.  Multi-agent reinforcement learning: weighting and partitioning , 1999, Neural Networks.