This paper provides an overview of research and development activities in the field of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. It aims to identify key concepts and applications, and to indicate how they relate to one-another. Some historical context to the field of agent-based computing is given, and contemporary research directions are presented. Finally, a range of open issues and future challenges are highlighted.

this article--- suggest a paradigm for software development that emphasizes autonomy both at design time and runtime, adaptivity, and cooperation. This approach seems appealing in a world of distributed, heterogeneous systems. Languages for communicating agents promise to play the role that natural languages played for their human counterparts. An agent communication language that allows agents to interact while hiding the details of their internal workings will result in agent communities that tackle problems no individual agent could.

The allocation of resources within a system of autonomous agents, that not only have preferences over alternative allocations of resources but also actively participate in computing an allocation, is an exciting area of research at the interface of Computer Science and Economics. This paper is a survey of some of the most salient issues in Multiagent Resource Allocation. In particular, we review various languages to represent the preferences of agents over alternative allocations of resources as well as different measures of social welfare to assess the overall quality of an allocation. We also discuss pertinent issues regarding allocation procedures and present important complexity results. Our presentation of theoretical issues is complemented by a discussion of software packages for the simulation of agent-based market places. We also introduce four major application areas for Multiagent Resource Allocation, namely industrial procurement, sharing of satellite resources, manufacturing control, and grid computing.

In the MAS/DAI community, most current work on speech acts focuses on formalizing individual utterances. The next stage will exploit the theory's power to explicate relationships within conversations, or groups of utterances. Computer scientists naturally seek to visualize these relationship in terms of graphs, focusing either on the identities of the individual agents involved or the states through which participating agents move. This paper introduces an alternative formalism, the Dooley Graph. It reviews the kinds of relations that can exist among individual communicative actions (including both speech acts and nonspeech acts), shows the strengths and weaknesses of participant and state graphs, explains the derivation of Dooley Graphs, and suggests their value for designing agents and analyzing the behavior of communities of agents.

Agent architectures need to organize themselves and adapt dynamically to changing circumstances without top-down control from a system operator. Some researchers provide this capability with complex agents that emulate human intelligence and reason explicitly about their coordination, reintroducing many of the problems of complex system design and implementation that motivated increasing software localization in the first place. Naturally occurring systems of simple agents (such as populations of insects or other animals) suggest that this retreat is not necessary. This paper summarizes several studies of such systems, and derives from them a set of general principles that artificial multi-agent systems can use to support overall system behavior significantly more complex than the behavior of the individuals agents. 1.

Despite the substantial number of multi-agent systems that use an Agent Communication Language (ACL) the dust has not settled yet over the landscape of ACLs. The semantic specification issues have monopolized the debate at the expense of other important pragmatic issues that must be adequately resolved in the immediate future if ACLs are going to support the development of robust agent systems. After introducing some of the basic concepts relating to Agent Communication Languages, we cover KQML and FIPA ACL, the two existing fully-specified ACLs. We give a brief introduction to their semantics and the issues relating to semantic descriptions of ACLs. We then shift our focus beyond the semantics and point to problems and limitations shared by both ACLs. Questions such as the nature of conformance of an agent system with an ACL specification and issues such as naming, registration, authentication, basic facilitation services, etc., may or may not be (technically speaking) part of an ACL ...

The production management system used by most manufacturers today is comprised of disconnected planning and execution processes, and lacks the support for interoperability for enterprise wide integration. This situation often prevents the manufacturer from fully exploring market opportunities in a timely fashion. To address this problem, we propose an agent-based framework for intelligent enterprise integration. A set of agents with specialized expertise can be quickly assembled to help with the gathering of relevant information and knowledge, to cooperate with each other and with other management systems and human managers and analysts to arrive at timely decisions in dealing with various enterprise scenarios. The proposed multi-agent system, including its theoretical foundation, architecture, and implementation are presented. The work of this system is demonstrated through an integration scenario involving real management software systems.

Manufacturing enterprises are now moving towards open architectures for integrating their activities with those of their suppliers, customers and partners within wide supply chain networks. Agent-based technology provides a natural way to design and implement such environments. This paper presents an agent-based manufacturing enterprise infrastructure. After a brief review of recent advancements in this domain, we describe the main features of the proposed infrastructure and the functions of its components. A machine-centered dynamic scheduling/rescheduling mechanism is then detailed and a prototype implementation is presented.

A Holonic Manufacturing System HMS is a manufacturing system where key elements, such as machines, cells, factories, parts, products, operators, teams, etc., are modeled as `holons' having autonomous and cooperatie properties. The decentralized information structure, the distributed decision-making authority, the integration of physical and informational aspects, and the cooperative relationship among holons, make the HMS a new paradigm, with great potential for meeting today's agile manufacturing challenges. Critical issues to be investigated include how to define holons for a given problem context, what should be the appropriate system architecture, and how to design effective cooperation mechanisms for good system performance. In this paper, holonic scheduling is developed for a factory consisting of multiple cells. Relevant holons are identified, and their relationships are delineated through a novel modeling of the interactions among parts, machines, and cells. The cooperation mechanisms among holons are established based on the pricing concept of market economy following `Lagrangian relaxation' of mathematical optimization, and cooperation across cells is performed without accessing individual cells' local information nor intruding on their decision authority. The system also possesses structural recursivity and extendibility. Numerical testing shows that the method can generate near-optimal schedules with quantifiable quality in a timely fashion, and has comparable computational requirements and performance as compared to the centralized method following single-level Lagrangian relaxation. The method thus provides a theoretical foundation for guiding the cooperation among holons, leading to globally near-optimal performance.

Manufacturing scheduling is a difficult problem, particularly when it takes place in an open, dynamic environment. Agent-based technology has recently been used in attempts to resolve this problem. A bidding mechanism based on Contract Net protocol is often proposed as a key solution component. Our approach is to combine a bidding mechanism based on Contract Net protocol with a mediation mechanism based on Mediator architecture, for dynamic manufacturing scheduling and rescheduling. A machine-centered scheduling mechanism and related concepts and mechanisms are also described. Keywords: Agents, scheduling, distributed manufacturing systems, bidding mechanism, Contract Net, mediator. 1. Introduction Manufacturing scheduling is a difficult problem, particularly when it takes place in an open, dynamic environment. In a job shop manufacturing system, rarely do things go as expected. The set of things to do is generally dynamic. The system may be asked to do additional tasks that were no...