Social Coordination with Architecture for Ubiquitous Agents-CONSORTS

Abstract

We propose a social coordination mechanism that is realized with CONSORTS, a new kind of multi-agent architecture for ubiquitous agents. By social coordination, we mean mass users’ decision making in their daily lives, such as the mutual concession of spatial-temporal resources achieved by automatic negotiation of software agents, rather than by verbal and explicit communication directly done by human users. The prerequisite infrastructure for such an electronic negotiation mechanism is a multi-agent architecture for ubiquitous agents that are grounded in the physical world, by which software agents can trace users’ moving history, understand their intentions and preferences, and negotiate each other, all while protecting users’ privacy through temporal identifiers. The functionality of social coordination is realized in the agent architecture, where three kinds of agents work cooperatively, i.e., a personal agent that serves as proxy of the user; a social coordinator working as a service agent; and a spatio-temporal reasoner. We also summarize some basic mechanisms of social coordination functionality, including stochastic distribution and market mechanisms.