This chapter identifies challenges in managing resources in a Grid computing environment and proposes computational economy as a metaphor for effective management of resources and application scheduling. It identifies distributed resource management challenges and requirements of economybased Grid systems, and discusses various representative economy-based systems, both historical and emerging, for cooperative and competitive trading of resources such as CPU cycles, storage, and network bandwidth. It presents an extensible, service-oriented Grid architecture driven by Grid economy and an approach for its realization by leveraging various existing Grid technologies. It also presents commodity and auction models for resource allocation. The use of commodity economy model for resource management and application scheduling in both computational and data grids is also presented.

Advances in Information Technology have created opportunities for business enterprises to redesign their information and process management systems. The redesigned systems will likely employ some form of workflow management system. Workflow management systems exactly enact business processes described in a process description language. Unfortunately, such strict adherence to the prescribed workflow makes it impossible for the system to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. We firmly believe that the historic trajectory of software development paradigms and IT advancements will establish multiagent systems as the workflow enactment mechanism of the future. In this paper we provide a critical survey of workflow, workflow description languages, web services and agent technologies. We propose that workflow description languages and their associated design tools can be used to specify a multiagent system. Specifically, we advance the idea that the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) can be used as a specification language for expressing the initial social order of the multiagent system, which can then intelligently adapt to changing environmental conditions.

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This paper presents and evaluates a decision making framework that enables autonomous agents to dynamically select the mechanism they employ in order to coordinate their inter-related activities. Adopting this framework means coordination mechanisms move from the realm of something that is imposed upon the system at design time, to something that the agents select at run-time in order to fit their prevailing circumstances and their current coordination needs. Using this framework, agents make informed choices about when and how to coordinate and when to respond to requests for coordination. The framework is empirically evaluated, in a grid world scenario, and we highlight those types of environments in which it is e#ective.

We describe a technique for providing agent software with dynamically configured capabilities. These capabilities, described with DAML-S, can represent atomic or orchestrated Web Services. The DAML-S specification will be transformed into an executable program written in a composition language named Piccola. When executed, the composite service will be available as a semantically described behavior within a FIPA compliant agent.

When a supply chain is established supply chain management (SCM) needs supporting tools for the tasks of operative planning, scheduling, and coordination. These tasks have to be performed not only on the level of the enterprises involved but also within their established business entities (e.g. plants, areas, resource groups, resources) in which the high level schedules have to be put into operation. Most approaches of SCM favor a hierarchical coordination of the supply chain together with powerful algorithmic solutions for the mainly predictive scheduling tasks. These approaches are lacking the incorporation of feedback from lower levels and possibilities of reactive scheduling. Thus flexibility and reactivity are main issues to be improved. In this

In this paper we present a Colored Petri Net (CPN) for a multi-agent application. In particular we modeled the Packet-World. In our research we use the packet-world as a case to study the fundamentals of agents' social behavior. Our approach is to combine experiments with conceptual modeling. We start from a very basic model and then add social skills in a modular way. Integrating new social skills by means of adding new modules offers us a clear conceptual view on the evolution of agents and the environment. With a conceptual view we mean: (i) which concepts does an agent need in order to acquire a new kind of social ability, (ii) which infrastructure is necessary in the environment to support these abilities, (iii) how do these concepts relate to each other? With the insights we learn from the case study, we gradually develop a generic conceptual model for social agents situated in a MAS. In this paper we first present a CPN for a basic model of the packet-world. This model consists of agents that can only interact through passive objects in the environment. Because interaction is the central issue of multi-agent systems, we have incorporated basic infrastructure for agent coordination straight away into our basic model. Then we extend the model, making it possible for the agents to communicate information with each other. Communication is the basis for social organization. Besides the concrete realization of a CPN for a multiagent application, the model we present in this paper has the potential to support our future research of agents' social behavior. Our major motives for using CPNs as modeling tool are (i) CPNs gives a clear conceptual view on agents and the environment wherein they live, and (ii) CPNs support neat verification and formalization.

The aim is to improve the monitoring and control of district heating systems through the use of agent technology. In order to increase the knowledge about the current and future state in a district heating system at the producer side, each substation is equipped with an agent that makes predictions of future consumption and monitors current consumption. The contributions to the consumers, will be higher quality of service, e.g., better ways to deal with major shortages of heat water, which is facilitated by the introduction of redistribution agents, and lower costs since less energy is needed for the heat production. Current substations are purely reactive devices and have no communication capabilities.

Software architectures of large multi-agent systems (MASs) are inherently complex and have to cope with an increasing number of system-wide properties and their corresponding control policies. With the openness and increasing size and complexity of these systems a more sophisticated software architectural approach becomes necessary. In this context, we propose the Reflective Blackboard architectural pattern, which is the result of the composition of two other wellknown architectural patterns: the Blackboard pattern and the Reflection pattern. The proposed pattern provides, early in the architectural design stage, the context in which more detailed decisions related to systemic properties and associated policies can be made in late stages of MAS development. The pattern allows a better separation of concerns, supporting the separate handling of control strategies by means of the computational reflection technique. Moreover these control activities are handled independently from the application data and agents, providing a better architecture for real-life multi-agent systems. An electronic marketplace architecture, with the goal of interconnecting providers and consumers of goods and services to find one another and transact business electronically, is assumed as a case study through the paper to clarify all the expressed concepts and to show the applicability of our proposal.

Once the decision is made of using agents in your software application you should decide how these agents are going to be implemented and integrated in your application. There are basically two options to implement agents. Either you use a dedicated agent platform or you implement the agents from scratch in some standard programming language. The choice between these options impacts the architecture of your application. This article will briefly discuss both options and will present object-oriented models to integrate agents in your application in case of the latter option being used. The presented models can be used as guidelines to integrate software agents in object-oriented software applications.