Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In this paper, we present the latest version of our dialogue games based agent communication language (DIAGAL) which allows the agents to manipulate the public layer of social commitments through dialogue. We show that DIAGAL is complete according to the sequential creation, cancellation, update and discharge of social commitments. We also extend and refine notions of success and satisfaction previously associated with speech-acts to this new dialogical setting. Finally, we explain why DIAGAL is a good candidate for open and heterogeneous MAS development.

One of the main challenges in multi-agent systems is the coordination of autonomous agents. In order to achieve this coordination, the agents are considered to be part of what we call a group (e.g., organization, institution, team, normative society, etc.). Our goal is to enable an agent to reason about the implications of being part of a group: what does it gain or lose, what are the constraints imposed on its behaviour. The theory of social power has been proposed as a paradigm to describe the agent’s behaviour. In this paper we use this theory, we formalize it and we extend it to include group-related aspects. We then show how, using this theory, an agent is able to reason about the constraints imposed on its behaviour by the group, for example to decide whether it should enter or not a group.

This paper addresses the problem of distributing goals to individual agents inside a team of cooperative agents.

It shows that several parameters determine the goals of particular agents. The first parameter is the set of goals allocated to the team; the second parameter is the description of the real actual world; the third parameter is the description of the agents’ ability and commitments. The last parameter is the strategy the team agrees on: for each precise goal, the team may define several strategies which are orders between agents representing, for instance, their relative competence or their relative cost. This paper also shows how to combine strategies. The method used here assumes an order of priority between strategies.

This research continues a line of recent investigation resulting already in Dunin-K̨eplicz and Verbrugge theory of collective motivational attitudes as well as a formal theory of teamwork.

In this paper we aim to describe our work over a theory of collective commitments in cooperative teams basing on a software test–bed for conducting trust–based agent experiments. First, short introductions to the theories of collective commitments and trust are given. Next, the most important properties of the system are presented together with a scenario of interplay. Finally several tests are described that compare different versions of a commitment applied in various situations.

The general aim of our work is to provide tools, methods and models to adaptive multi-agent systems designers. These systems consist in several interacting agents and have to optimize problem solving in a dynamic environment. In this context, the ADELFE method, which is based on a self-organizing adaptive multi-agent system model, was developed. Cooperation is used as a local criterion to self-organize the collective in order to reach functional adequacy with the environment. One key stage during the design process is to instantiate a cooperative agent model that is an extension to classical reactive models in which cooperation subsumes any other nominal behavior. A sample implementation of the agent model in the collective robotics domain – resource transportation – will illustrate a discussion on the model.

The reactive multi-agent approach emphasizes individual simplicity over the collective complexity of the task being performed. However, to apply such an approach to a problem, the components of the multi-agent system have to be designed in such a way that the society be able to fulfill its requirements with a reasonable efficiency. Inspiration from natural self-organized systems is a way to solve this conception issue.

This article illustrates two cases of how natural self-organized systems can be transposed to engineer societies of agents that collectively solve problems. It presents two original self organized models conceived in cooperation with biologists and details how transposition principles have been used to design collective problem solving systems.

This paper aims at explaining how to follow an agent-oriented process to develop a multi-agent mechanism design system. ADELFE methodology is devoted to adaptive multi-agent systems in which adaptation is enabled by cooperative self-organization. Two main works are emphasized. First, the analysis leads to the agent identification by studying the interactions both between the system and its environment and within the system itself. Second, the different modules of the agents and their cooperative attitude are modeled during the design phase. Such an approach is promising, but raises some difficulties considering the notion of cooperation, which is discussed before concluding.

has emerged as a powerful engineering discipline that can deal with the complexity of today’s software systems (primarily in distributed and open environments) better than other more traditional approaches. However, AOSE does not provide a software development process that naturally leads, if the problem so requires, to an agent architecture. Current agent development methodologies have two separate drawbacks. One is that development processes tend to target an agent organization, which is not necessarily always the best structure, as of the requirements definition stage. The other is that the identification and design of agents are complex, and designer experience plays an essential role in their definition. In this paper, we present the SONIA methodology (Set of mOdels for a Natural Identification of Agents) in an attempt to solve these problems. Based on a generic problem-independent analysis and a bottom-up agent identification process, SONIA naturally outputs an agent-based system.

The agent metaphor has shown its usefulness for modelling as well as implementing complex and dynamic applications. Although a number of agent applications has been successfully realised and used, it must be stated that the distribution of commercial off-the-shelf applications is very scarce. For this discontenting situation, at least two reasons can be identified. On the one hand, the development of agent-based applications is difficult suffering from insufficient standards and tools and on the other hand deployment issues are little researched and supported. In this paper, several deployment-related topics are discussed and a vision for the deployment of distributed multi-agent systems is conceived. From the vision, requirements for launching and configuring agent applications are derived. According to these requirements, a platform independent reference model of the proposed deployment infrastructure is presented. The reference model provides the basis for the development of our ASCML (Agent Society Configuration Manager and Launcher) tool, which is currently implemented for the JADE and Jadex multi-agent platforms.

This contribution defines a metrics and proposes a solution for the problem of agents inaccessibility in multi-agent systems. We define the stand-in pattern for knowledge maintenance and remote presence in distributed agent systems with communication inaccessibility. Our implementation has been designed and tested in the - agent platform. We also present a set of measurements quantifying agents’ inaccessibility in our domain and comparing the usefulness of different solution in the environments with different inaccessibility.