Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In agent systems, meta-level reasoning is commonly used in enforcing rationality in the choice of goals and actions performed by an agent, ensuring that an agent behaves as effectively and efficiently as possible. Through meta-reasoning an agent is able to explicitly consider goals before committing to them, and consider courses of action before executing plans. In this paper, we argue that although seldom considered, a flexible meta-level reasoning component is a valuable addition to any agent architecture. We describe such a component for use in BDI architectures, underpinned by a model of motivation and a motivation-based description language, and demonstrate its effectiveness empirically.

Software-Engineering provides techniques to ease handling the essential complexity of software. A number of engineering paradigms and architectures have been devised and each generation claims to relieve future development efforts. But to date little is known about how different development approaches affect the underlying implemenation structures, making their contributions arguable. Recently, the statistical analysis of large–scale modular software systems – represented as directed graphs – revealed complex system characteristics, namely and phenomena. In this paper, we argue that the exhibited network characteristics reflect utilized design approaches and apply graph analysis to examine the structural differences imposed by the utilization of Agent–Oriented Software Engineering. As this novel development paradigm proposes autonomous and pro–active entities as an atomic design and development metaphor for complicated and inherently distributed software systems, an initial analysis and comparison of graphs abstracting both agent– and object–oriented system designs reveals structural differences which suggest that agent autonomy influences the resulting underlying implementation structures.

We are interested in understanding and simulating how humans elaborate plans in situations where knowledge is incomplete and how they interact to obtain missing information. Our human interaction model is based on the speech act theory to model the utterances and it uses timed automata to describe the dynamics of the dialogs. Our human planning model is implemented as a hierarchical blackboard architecture which manages opportunistic planning. The system we propose, is a concurrent implementation of the planning model and the interaction model through the BDI concept. This system is used to simulate the human processes during cooperative problem solving.

Organizational Theory concepts have been adapted to improve, extend and facilitate Agent Organizations modeling. Thus, three basic organizational topologies from which other more complex organizations can be composed have been identified. Moreover, this organizational modeling has been implemented in a specific MAS platform (SPADE) making use of Multiuser Conference technology. We have also defined several services for SPADE that ease the implementation of organization dynamics, such as member access and agent interaction control.

In this paper we present an experimental analysis of a fuzzy constraint based framework for automated purchase negotiations in competitive trading environments. The main goal of this work is to show by experimental analysis which combination of different agents’ negotiation attitudes allows buyer and seller agents to improve the multi-attribute bilateral negotiation processes. Agents’ attitudes are related to the agents’ strategic behaviour in the negotiation process, where strategic behaviours are described in terms of expressiveness and receptiveness.

We propose a new multi-agent development method, named MDAD (). It is based on the MDA () paradigm. The aim of MDAD method is to reduce the cost of building MAS applications by starting from abstract specification of system thanks to MAS meta-models, and producing the final system by means of transformations of this specification into computational entities. We present in this paper the application of MDAD to the INAF framework. First we give an overview of MDA approach and its application to MAS. Thus, several abstraction levels are determined and a set of meta-models is introduced. Then, we give the transformation rules used to produce INAF compliant models. MDAD method is illustrated with the timetable management benchmark.

In this paper, we propose a logic for reasoning about probabilistic belief, called . Our language introduces formulas that express “agent believes that the probability of is at least ”. We first provide an inference system of , and then introduce a probabilistic semantics for . The soundness and finite model property of are proved, which ensure the weak completeness and decidability of .

This paper focuses on modelling perception and vague concepts in the context of multiagent B ( and ) systems. The starting point is the multimodal formalization of such systems. Then we make a shift from Kripke structures to similarity structures, allowing us to model perception and vagueness in an uniform way, “compatible” with the multimodal approach. As a result we introduce and discuss , which can also be viewed as a way to implement multimodal specifications of B systems in the context of perception.

Future agent mediated eCommerce will involve open systems of agents interoperating between different institutions, where different auction protocols may be in use. We argue that in order to achieve this agents will need a method to automatically verify the properties of a previously unseen auction protocol; for example, they may wish to verify that it is fair and robust to deception. We are therefore interested in the problem of automatically verifying the game-theoretic properties of a given auction mechanism, especially the property of strategyproofness. In this paper we show how the model checker can be used to automatically verify such properties. We illustrate the approach via two examples: a simple two player Vickrey auction and a quantity restricted multi-unit auction using the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism.

Distributed join calculus can be used to formally reason about concurrent systems. This paper introduces notion of an environment where agents interact. Based on the introduced formalisms a notion of knowledge which is exchanged by facts and common to all agents is presented. Introduction of the environment and knowledge extends number of agent system which can be expressed using join calculus algebra.