Agent Organizations Research Articles

Combination of Multi-Agent Systems and Wireless Sensor Networks for the Monitoring of Cattle.

Precision breeding techniques have been widely used to optimize expenses and increase livestock yields. Notwithstanding, the joint use of heterogeneous sensors and artificial intelligence techniques for the simultaneous analysis or detection of different problems that cattle may present has not been addressed. This study arises from the necessity to obtain a technological tool that faces this state of the art limitation. As novelty, this work presents a multi-agent architecture based on virtual organizations which allows to deploy a new embedded agent model in computationally limited autonomous sensors, making use of the Platform for Automatic coNstruction of orGanizations of intElligent Agents (PANGEA). To validate the proposed platform, different studies have been performed, where parameters specific to each animal are studied, such as physical activity, temperature, estrus cycle state and the moment in which the animal goes into labor. In addition, a set of applications that allow farmers to remotely monitor the livestock have been developed.

An agent-based inter-vehicle cooperative robust car-following model for longitudinal control under uncertainty

Uncertainty is common challenge facing system modelling and simulation in uncertain environments where the outcome of control actions is unknown. In this paper, an agent-based robust car-following model is proposed to handle uncertainty in the longitudinal control system based on inter-vehicle cooperation where an organisation of heterogeneous agents communicate and cooperate in a vehicular ad hoc network to provide reliable and collision-free control policies. We used agent-based modelling to model the inter-vehicle cooperative longitudinal control system while integrating human drivers in the multi-agent system to assume specific roles and cooperate with other agents to accomplish the task at hand. For behavioural analysis and comparison with other car-following models, microscopic agent-based simulations conducted using JADE and SUMO showed that the proposed model offers collision-free control of vehicle speed under different conditions including uncertainty. Also, we used the proposed model to investigate the effect of uncertainty on both vehicle's speed and its control actions.

An agent-based inter-vehicle cooperative robust car-following model for longitudinal control under uncertainty

Uncertainty is common challenge facing system modelling and simulation in uncertain environments where the outcome of control actions is unknown. In this paper, an agent-based robust car-following model is proposed to handle uncertainty in the longitudinal control system based on inter-vehicle cooperation where an organisation of heterogeneous agents communicate and cooperate in a vehicular ad hoc network to provide reliable and collision-free control policies. We used agent-based modelling to model the inter-vehicle cooperative longitudinal control system while integrating human drivers in the multi-agent system to assume specific roles and cooperate with other agents to accomplish the task at hand. For behavioural analysis and comparison with other car-following models, microscopic agent-based simulations conducted using JADE and SUMO showed that the proposed model offers collision-free control of vehicle speed under different conditions including uncertainty. Also, we used the proposed model to investigate the effect of uncertainty on both vehicle's speed and its control actions.

The Men Behind the Stars: Hollywood's Big Uncles

The Men Behind the StarsHollywood's Big Uncles Alfred Hitchcock The film agent stretches out an arm and flicks the switch of his desk phone. Without leaning forward he says to the microphone, "Get Joe at Gigantic." "Okay, Mr. Burnberg," replies the cracked voice of the secretary from the loud-speaker of the instrument, and almost before the agent can move the cigar to the other side of his mouth the telephone bell on the other side of his desk rings. Without any preliminary, even without identifying himself, he says, "Joe, how many days more do you want Su Scarlett? I must have her for Colossal." [End Page 82] The answer is apparently satisfactory, for the agent rings off with a laconic, "Oke." While one hand replaces the receiver the other flicks the desk phone again. "Get Sam at Colossal." . . . "Okay, Mr. Burnberg." Ting-a-ling! "Sam, it's all set about Su for Flaming Lips. I'll deliver her on Tuesday week. Oke." Film agents always "deliver" their clients. That is why they are called "flesh-peddlers." To the uninitiated it sounds rather like a farmer promising the butcher to send over half an ox. I was told of one agent who is in a big way of business because "he owns a piece of Clark Gable," meaning that he shares the star with other agents. They call them "Ten-percenters" as well. For supposing that Su Scarlett is in the £500 a week class and that her film for Colossal will need her services for three weeks. Mr. Burnberg will have made himself £150 by those two telephone calls. He takes ten percent of what his clients earn. They Take 10 Percent The development of the agent system in Hollywood was the thing that impressed me more than anything else. I was making a deal myself and so saw a lot of the workings of the agent organization. It was part of the system that I only took part in the proceedings when it was absolutely necessary. Indeed on an occasion when I was discussing my deal to make the film Titanic for David O. Selznick with Mr. Selznick himself, he told me frankly that it embarrassed him to have to talk money details with me direct. The stars seldom talk business with their bosses; they go to their mentors, confidantes, guides—their agents. These Big Uncles, who often act as though their clients were children, "iron out" all problems, "fix" jobs and act as nurse, valet, secretary and helper in general to their stars. Ten percent of the large salaries of film stars may sound a lot for fixing a business deal, but an agent is usually worth it; and the expenses of his elaborate organization are heavy. [End Page 83] Quite apart from the fact that artists of all kinds are generally bad business people, the stars get their full value from their agents. Agents get the star's money and look after it; they pay all bills; they buy anything from a railway ticket to a house or a car; if the poodle needs a shampoo the agent will send a man round to collect the dog; the star decides on a "European" holiday and the agent plans an itinerary, arranges suitable interviews in London and on the Continent, gets the tickets and sees the star safely on the plane for New York: he may even fly with her to the east coast of America. Even Love Affairs! To the agent the star goes with her love affairs, with her complaint if she does not like her present director or is dissatisfied with her part. I have no doubt that when Myrna Loy was fed up with being restricted to "oriental" roles, she took her problem to her agent at that time, just as William Powell must have talked over his repeated "villain" parts with his agent. And I have no doubt that the agents "ironed out" the problems. The agent also deals in directors, writers, photographers and all major employees of the studio. He buys stories and so, altogether, is in the position of universal provider for the producers. In every respect except...

Towards a Hybrid MAS Organizational Model

The organizational aspects are currently getting a great attention within the multi-agent systems (MAS) community. The motivation towards this trend is finding a way to handle the increasing complexity and distribution of modern agent-based applications using higher order abstractions such as agent organizations. It is a transition from concerning the micro level (individual agents) to concerning the macro level (the whole system) to handle complexity. A large number of MAS organizational models can be found in MAS literature. Some of them adopt the ACMAS (Agent-Centered MAS) viewpoint and others adopt the OCMAS (Organizational-Centered MAS) viewpoint. Each of the ACMAS and OCMAS viewpoints has its advantages and disadvantages; therefore, combining them into a hybrid model is expected to give us the chance to take benefit of their advantages and avoid their disadvantages. This chapter presents our recent work towards the conceptual design of a hybrid MAS organizational model that combines both of the ACMAS and OCMAS viewpoints.

Combining Multi-Agent Systems and Wireless Sensor Networks for Monitoring Crop Irrigation.

Monitoring mechanisms that ensure efficient crop growth are essential on many farms, especially in certain areas of the planet where water is scarce. Most farmers must assume the high cost of the required equipment in order to be able to streamline natural resources on their farms. Considering that many farmers cannot afford to install this equipment, it is necessary to look for more effective solutions that would be cheaper to implement. The objective of this study is to build virtual organizations of agents that can communicate between each other while monitoring crops. A low cost sensor architecture allows farmers to monitor and optimize the growth of their crops by streamlining the amount of resources the crops need at every moment. Since the hardware has limited processing and communication capabilities, our approach uses the PANGEA architecture to overcome this limitation. Specifically, we will design a system that is capable of collecting heterogeneous information from its environment, using sensors for temperature, solar radiation, humidity, pH, moisture and wind. A major outcome of our approach is that our solution is able to merge heterogeneous data from sensors and produce a response adapted to the context. In order to validate the proposed system, we present a case study in which farmers are provided with a tool that allows us to monitor the condition of crops on a TV screen using a low cost device.

MAS-based self-adaptive architecture for controlling and monitoring Cloud platforms

The theory of agents and multiagent systems can provide a new model for managing Cloud Computing systems based on the distribution of responsibilities, flexibility and autonomy. Managing the functions of the nucleus of a CC system through an agent-based model allows the resulting platforms to be much more efficient, scalable and adaptable than they currently are. This article presents an architecture to model the control and monitoring system of a Cloud Computing platform by using a Virtual Organization of intelligent agents that self-adapt and reorganize according to the needs of the surrounding environment.

Virtual organization with fusion knowledge in odor classification

E-nose systems are becoming increasingly important instruments across all industries, especially the fields of food and beverages and biomedicine. Given the inaccurate, unsafe and unreliable dependency on the human nose to detect smells that are highly risky and hazardous to human health, e-nose systems offer a tremendous advantage. E-noses are convenient, highly efficient and can be used in real life to detect various types of odors. This paper presents a virtual organization of agents that integrates different classification techniques and neural networks to perform information fusion from parameters retrieved by the E-nose. The integral brain in e-noses is the data processing system, which classifies odors that have been detected by the detection part of its system. The system mimics how a human brain classifies odors.

Trust-Based Decision Making in a Self-Adaptive Agent Organization

Interaction between agents is one of the key factors in multiagent societies. Using interaction, agents communicate with each other and cooperatively execute complex tasks that are beyond the capability of a single agent. Cooperatively executing tasks may endanger the success of an agent if it attempts to cooperate with peers that are not proficient or reliable. Therefore, agents need to have an evaluation mechanism to select peers for cooperation. Trust is one of the measures commonly used to evaluate the effectiveness of agents in cooperative societies. Since all interactions are subject to uncertainty, the risk behavior of agents as a contextual factor needs to be taken into account in decision making. In this research, we propose the concept of adaptive risk and agent strategy along with an algorithm that helps agents make decisions in an self-adaptive society utilizing an agent’s own experience and recommendation-based trust. Trust-based decision making increases the profit of the system along with lower task failure in comparison to a no-trust model in which agents do not utilize evaluation mechanisms for choosing their cooperation peers.

Group Norms for Multi-Agent Organisations

Normative multi-agent systems offer the ability to integrate social and individual factors to provide increased levels of fidelity with respect to modelling social phenomena, such as cooperation, coordination, group decision making, and organization, in both human and artificial agent systems. An important open research issue refers to group norms, that is, norms that govern groups of agents. Depending on the interpretation, group norms may be intended to affect the group as a whole, each member of a group, or some members of the group. Moreover, upholding group norms may require coordination among the members of the group. We have identified three sets of agents affected by group norms, namely, (i) the addressees of the norm, (ii) those that will act on it, and (iii) those that are responsible for ensuring norm compliance. We present a formalism to represent these, connecting it to a minimalist agent organisation model. We use our formalism to develop a reasoning mechanism that enables agents to identify their position with respect to a group norm to further support agent autonomy and coordination when deciding on possible courses of action.

Multi-Agent System Development MADE Easy

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is an emerging software engineering paradigm that advocates the application of best practices in the development of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) through the use of agents and organizations of agents. This paper outlines the MADE system, which provides an interactive platform for people who are not well-versed in AOSE to contribute to the rapid prototyping of MASs with ease.

Organization of change agents during care process redesign in Swedish health care

Background: Swedish health care organizations (HCOs) are changing using management concepts such as Lean, in attempts of improving efficiency, quality of care and work environment. Since there are pre-conditional challenges for operative managers to engage in change, HCOs tend to assign supportive functions such as change agents (CAs) to facilitate change. Research on the use of CAs in HCOs is sparse, thus the aim of this study explores role assignments and conditions of formally appointed CAs contributing to care process redesign.Methods: A purposive sample of three Swedish hospitals initiating Lean-inspired care process redesign during 2010–2011 was done. In-depth interviews were held with fifty-one key functions during change. Focus group interviews were conducted with thirty-eight health care professionals. Data were analysed by content analysis.Results: Top managers’ goal was to have operative management responsible for change during care process redesign, with support from assigned CAs. Organizing of CAs varied concerning, e.g. their hierarchical positions, job descriptions and practices, and conditions to act as driving forces towards change. Being granted formal power, having earned legitimacy and credibility, clarity regarding roles and responsibilities in change; a good sense of timing and ability to build relationships and trust, were identified as beneficial for CAs to support change.Conclusions: Role assignment and organizing of CAs varies. A position closer to the operative levels, formalized and clarified responsibilities, earned legitimacy and timing support adaptation and alignment of planned change, such as Lean-inspired care process redesign.

MUSIC-MAS: Modeling a harmonic composition system with virtual organizations to assist novice composers

Many music students today experience difficulties in composing melodies without a prior harmonical guide. While harmony can be helpful in creating a melody the generation of harmony is challenging due to the many factors that must be taken into account, such as style, harmonic functions, musical consonance or aesthetics. Although various solutions have been proposed in the past, our study employs a different expert solution based on virtual organizations to make musical harmonies, which can assist novice improvisers and/or composers. The virtual organizations are implemented with Multi-Agent System (MAS) using PANGEA (Platform for Automatic coNstruction of orGanizations of intElligent Agents), a platform to develop different multiagent systems. The main goal is to simulate an expert multiagent system that can compose harmony following specific rules. To do so, the Harmony Search Algorithm is implemented as the main behavior of the composer agent, and adapted to a Belief-Desire-Intention architecture. The application of a VO has not been previously used in the development of this kind of expert system in music. We measured the quality of the music obtained, by minimizing a mathematical function. Additionally, we developed an evaluation test that positively validates the musical results from the perspective of consonance and usefulness of the composers.

A roadmap for scalable agent organizations in the Internet of Everything

Computing is increasingly ubiquitous, with everyday items including smartphones, cars, clothes and household appliances gaining increasingly sophisticated computing and communication capacities. With the development of the Internet of Things, it is just a matter of time before devices have to collaborate and compete with each other, in order to provide better services to mankind.These embedded software systems are increasingly autonomous and connected, and can thus be modeled as multiagent systems (MAS). Only 30 years ago it was science fiction that over a billion people will exchange billions of e-mails on a daily basis. Today a scenario of millions of collaborating agents sometimes embedded in gadgets and appliances, sometimes in form of networked and big data services, may also sound futuristic. However given the current rate of development in electronics, we will soon have to manage large scale MAS where millions of agents exist, collaborate and compete. Organization theory provides the necessary methodology to approach complex systems in order to design, implement and strategically manage them towards success.In this paper a state-of-the-art on organizational design techniques for large-scale MAS will be presented, missing advancements will be identified and a roadmap for future developments and application scenarios will be provided.

Agent-based modeling of ancient societies and their organization structure

Some of the most interesting questions one can ask about early societies, are about people and their relations, and the nature and scale of their organization. In this work, we attempt to answer such questions with approaches introduced by multiagent systems. Specifically, we developed a generic agent-based model (ABM) for simulating ancient societies. Unlike most existing ABMs used in archaeology, our model includes agents that are autonomous and utility-based. Our model can (and does) also incorporate different social organization paradigms and technologies used in ancient societies. Equipped with such paradigms, our model allows us to explore the transition from a simple to a more complex society by focusing on the historical social dynamics--i.e., the flexibility and evolution of power relationships depending on social context and time. As a case study, we employ our model to evaluate the impact of the implemented social and technological paradigms on an artificial Early Bronze Age "Minoan" society located at a particular region of the island of Crete. Model parameter choices are based on archaeological evidence and studies, but are not biased towards any specific assumption. Results over a number of different simulation scenarios demonstrate an impressive sustainability for settlements consisting of and adopting a socio-economic organization model based on self-organization, and which was inspired by a recent framework for modern self-organizing agent organizations. This is the first time a self-organization approach is incorporated in an archaeology ABM system.

JOUR-MAS: a multi-agent system approach to help journalism management

Nowadays, the vertiginous progress of technology has led society to demand lower response times in general, but in press in particular. For this reason, media groups have to face a big challenge in order to facilitate their employees the technical means that enable professionals in the media sector to face the new communication models. In this article, we face this problem and present a novel system based on Virtual Organizations of agents and Cloud Computing in order to improve the organization, management and distribution of media contents.

Dialogue strategy for horizontal communication in MAS organization

A multi agent organization model defines the structure, roles, interaction ways and coordination styles of a multi agent system. Multi agent organizations may constrain the communication between included members. Organizations' communication is the process of sending or receiving all the messages through a group of agents in order to achieve common goals. In a dialogue, agents follow some rules that define the permissive speech acts called dialogue protocol. Aiming for common goals, the dialogue strategy is the policy of agents to choose a particular speech act among the allowed ones by the protocol. In this paper a formal model for dialogue strategy for a group of agents in an organization is proposed in order to choose the most preferable speech acts. The argumentation theory is applied to the proposed method to define the values of plausible speech acts and to rank them. The algorithm finds the best option to utter and also it decreases the volume of exchanging messages. The proposed dialogue strategy is illustrated via a deliberation dialogue example in a group of agents.

Conceptual Design of Multi-agent System for Suramadu Bridge Structural Health Monitoring System

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is small embedded devices deployed in large scale network with capability to sense, compute, and communicate. It combines modern sensor, microelectronic, computation, communication, and distributed processing technology. WSN has been taking an important contribution in structural health monitoring system, especially in Suramadu Bridge, one of the longest span bridges in Indonesia connecting Surabaya (East Java) and Madura Island. Due to subjected by environmental circumstance, it is necessary to implement intelligent and autonomous WSN to monitor the bridge condition, detect the bridge damage, and send warning message to bridge users when unsafe condition occurs. The multi-agent system is a promising approach to be implemented on intelligent and autonomous WSN, especially in the bridge structural health monitoring system. In this approach agents are empowered to have several intelligent learning capabilities for structural monitoring, damage detection, and prediction. This paper describes multi-agent system conceptual design that will be implemented as model of long span bridge structural health monitoring system considering system architecture and agent organization.

Privacy preserving existence recognition and construction of hypertree agent organization

Decentralized probabilistic reasoning, constraint reasoning, and decision theoretic reasoning are some essential tasks of cooperative multiagent systems. Several frameworks for these tasks organize agents into a junction tree (JT). We show that existing techniques for JT existence recognition and construction leak information on private variables, shared variables, agent identities and adjacency, that can potentially be protected. We present a scheme to quantify these privacy losses. We develop two novel algorithms for JT existence recognition and for JT construction when existing, that provide strong guarantee of agent privacy. Our experimental comparison shows that the proposed algorithms out-perform existing techniques, one of them having the lowest privacy loss and the other having no privacy loss, while being more efficient than most alternatives.

Multi-agent systems with decaying confidence and commensurate time-delays

In this paper we consider a class of discrete-time multi-agent systems modeling opinion dynamics with decaying confidence in presence of delay in the communication channels. Delays arise naturally in such dynamics and they must be taken into account in the analysis. In the model under consideration, the delay presence results in a certain heterogeneous time repartition of the influence of one agent on the collective behavior of the network. The decaying confidence leads to reconfigurations of the communication topology due to the vanishing of some interactions. The initial conditions and the dynamics of the confidence determine the organization of agents in different groups in which the agreement is reached. The main result states that the agents which agree are those which are persistently connected. Some simulations illustrates the delay influence on the network pattern.