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What Is a Conversation Policy?
- IN PROCEEDINGS OF THE WORKSHOP ON SPECIFYING AND IMPLEMENTING CONVERSATION POLICIES, AUTONOMOUS AGENTS ’99
"... In this paper we define the concept of conversation policies: declarative specifications that govern communications between software agents using an agent communication language. We discuss the role that conversation policies play in agent communication, and suggest several subtypes of conversa ..."
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Cited by 106 (6 self)
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In this paper we define the concept of conversation policies: declarative specifications that govern communications between software agents using an agent communication language. We discuss the role that conversation policies play in agent communication, and suggest several subtypes of conversation policy. Our reasoning suggests, contrary to current transition net approaches to specifying conversation policies that conversation policies are best modeled as sets of fine-grained constraints on ACL usage. These constraints then define the computational process models that are implemented in agents.
The Adaptive Agent Architecture: Achieving FaultTolerance Using Persistent Broker Teams
- In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems
, 2000
"... Brokers are used in many multi-agent systems for locating agents, for routing and sharing information, for managing the system, and for legal purposes, as independent third parties. However, these multi-agent systems can be incapacitated and rendered non-functional when the brokers become inacces ..."
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Cited by 88 (8 self)
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Brokers are used in many multi-agent systems for locating agents, for routing and sharing information, for managing the system, and for legal purposes, as independent third parties. However, these multi-agent systems can be incapacitated and rendered non-functional when the brokers become inaccessible due to failures such as machine crashes, network breakdowns, and process failures that can occur in any distributed software system. We propose that the theory of teamwork can be used to create robust brokered architectures that can recover from broker failures, and we present the Adaptive Agent Architecture (AAA) to show the feasibility of this approach. The AAA brokers form a team with a joint commitment to serve any agent that registers with the broker team as long as the agent remains registered with the team. This commitment enables the brokers to substitute for each other when needed. A multiagent system based on the AAA can continue to work despite broker failures as long...
Negotiating Complex Contracts.
- Proceedings of the ACM International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems,
, 2002
"... Abstract Work to date on computational models of negotiation has focused almost exclusively on defining contracts consisting of one or a few independent issues and tractable contract spaces. Many real-world contracts, by contrast, are much more complex, consisting of multiple inter-dependent issues ..."
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Cited by 50 (8 self)
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Abstract Work to date on computational models of negotiation has focused almost exclusively on defining contracts consisting of one or a few independent issues and tractable contract spaces. Many real-world contracts, by contrast, are much more complex, consisting of multiple inter-dependent issues and intractably large contract spaces. This paper describes a simulated annealing based approach appropriate for negotiating such complex contracts that achieves near-optimal social welfares for negotiations with binary issue dependencies.
Towards a fault-tolerant multiagent system architecture,”
- Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents,
, 2000
"... ABSTRACT Multi-agent systems are prone to failures typical of any distributed system. Agents and resources may become unavailable due to machine crashes, communication breakdowns, process failures, and numerous other hardware and software failures. Most of the work done in fault handling in multi-a ..."
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Cited by 38 (1 self)
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ABSTRACT Multi-agent systems are prone to failures typical of any distributed system. Agents and resources may become unavailable due to machine crashes, communication breakdowns, process failures, and numerous other hardware and software failures. Most of the work done in fault handling in multi-agent systems deals with detection and recovery from faults such as state-inconsistencies, relying on the traditional techniques for recovering from other distributed systems failure. However, the traditional faulttolerance techniques are designed for specific situations and they require special infrastructural support. We argue for faulttolerance techniques that can be readily implemented using a generic agent shell with minimal or no modification to the agent infrastructure. We propose that theories from multi-agent systems literature can be effectively combined with basic fault-tolerance principles to design robust multi-agent systems. In particular, we argue that (1) teamwork may be used to create a robust brokered architecture that can recover a multi-agent system from broker failures without incurring undue overheads, (2) teamwork may also be used to guarantee a specified number of brokers in a large multi-agent system, and (3) agent autonomy can be used to prevent thrashing and guarantee acceptable levels of quality of service by an agent. We also describe the Adaptive Agent Architecture (AAA), a faulttolerant brokered multi-agent system architecture, and present experimental evidence using the AAA to validate our approach.
An experimental evaluation of domain-independent fault handling services in open multi-agent systems
- In Proc. of the Fourth Int
, 2000
"... Abstract. A critical challenge to creating effective open multi-agent systems is allowing them to operate effectively in the face of potential failures. In this paper we present an experimental evaluation of a set of domain-independent services designed to handle the failure modes ("exceptions& ..."
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Cited by 31 (1 self)
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Abstract. A critical challenge to creating effective open multi-agent systems is allowing them to operate effectively in the face of potential failures. In this paper we present an experimental evaluation of a set of domain-independent services designed to handle the failure modes ("exceptions") that can occur in such environments, applied to the well-known "Contract Net " multi-agent system coordination protocol. We show that these services can produce substantially more effective fault handling behavior than standard existing techniques, while allowing simpler agent implementations.
Towards a systematic repository of knowledge about managing collaborative design conflicts
- MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper
, 1999
"... Abstract. Increasingly, complex artifacts such as cars, planes and even software are designed using large-scale and often highly distributed collaborative processes. A key factor in the effectiveness of these processes concerns how well conflicts are managed. Better approaches need to be developed a ..."
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Cited by 23 (3 self)
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Abstract. Increasingly, complex artifacts such as cars, planes and even software are designed using large-scale and often highly distributed collaborative processes. A key factor in the effectiveness of these processes concerns how well conflicts are managed. Better approaches need to be developed and adopted, but the lack of systematization and dissemination of the knowledge in this field has been a big barrier to the cumulativeness of research in this area as well as to incorporating these ideas into design practice. This paper describes a growing repository of conflict management expertise, built as an augmentation of the MIT Process Handbook, that is designed to address these challenges. 1. The Challenge Increasingly, complex artifacts such as cars, planes and even software are designed using large-scale and often highly distributed collaborative processes. Conflict (i.e. incompatibilities between design decisions and/or goals) is common in such highly interdependent activities. In one study, for example, half of all interactions between collaborating architectural designers were found to involve detecting and resolving conflicts (Klein and Lu 1991). Better conflict management practices are needed. Current, mainly manual practices are being
Civil agent societies: Tools for inventing open agent-mediated electronic marketplaces
- In Proceedings ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC-99
, 1999
"... . In the emerging model of 21st century electronic commerce, a variety of open agent marketplaces will be competing with one another for participants. The most successful marketplaces will be those that provide the best "quality of service" guarantees (in terms of security, fairness, ef ..."
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Cited by 19 (0 self)
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. In the emerging model of 21st century electronic commerce, a variety of open agent marketplaces will be competing with one another for participants. The most successful marketplaces will be those that provide the best "quality of service" guarantees (in terms of security, fairness, efficiency, etc.), while meeting such challenges as agent heterogeneity, limited trust, and potential for systemic dysfunctions. Civil human societies provide a useful model for designing the infrastructure needed to achieve these guarantees. Successful civil human societies build on well-designed "social contracts", i.e. agreed-upon constraints on agent behavior made in exchange for quality of service assurances backed up by social institutions. Civil Agent Societies can be defined in an analogous way. The objective of our work is to provide tools that help developers systematically explore the space of possible Civil Agent Societies, helping them invent the electronic marketplaces that work b...
Diagnosing a Team of Agents: Scaling-Up
, 2004
"... Agents in a team must be in agreement. Once a disagreement occurs we should detect the disagreement and diagnose it. Unfortunately, current diagnosis techniques do not scale well with the number of agents, as they have high communication and computation complexity. We suggest three techniques to red ..."
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Cited by 19 (4 self)
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Agents in a team must be in agreement. Once a disagreement occurs we should detect the disagreement and diagnose it. Unfortunately, current diagnosis techniques do not scale well with the number of agents, as they have high communication and computation complexity. We suggest three techniques to reduce the complexity. We examine these techniques in large-scale teams, in two domains, and show that combining the techniques provides a diagnosis method which is highly scalable in both communication and computation.
Diagnosis of the Dynamics within an Organisation by Trace Checking of Behavioural Requirements
- Proceedings of the 2 nd International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE'01. Lecture Notes in Computer Science
, 2002
"... The main question addressed in this paper is how requirements on the dynamics of an organisation model can be specified and how the dynamics of such an organisation can be formally analysed. A specification language is proposed, and a number of different types of requirements for dynamics at differe ..."
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Cited by 17 (13 self)
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The main question addressed in this paper is how requirements on the dynamics of an organisation model can be specified and how the dynamics of such an organisation can be formally analysed. A specification language is proposed, and a number of different types of requirements for dynamics at different levels in the organisation are identified. Based on a logical analysis and a software environment to check requirements against traces of the dynamics, a diagnostic method is proposed to analyse the malfunctioning of an organisation, and pinpoint causes of malfunctioning. 1.
An Exception-Handling Architecture for Open Electronic Marketplaces of Contract Net Software Agents
- In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
, 2000
"... Software agent marketplaces require the development of new architectures, which are capable of coping with unreliable computational and network infrastructures, limited trust among independently developed agents and the possibility of systemic failures. In analogy with human societies, agent marketp ..."
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Cited by 14 (0 self)
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Software agent marketplaces require the development of new architectures, which are capable of coping with unreliable computational and network infrastructures, limited trust among independently developed agents and the possibility of systemic failures. In analogy with human societies, agent marketplaces will benefit from the introduction of appropriate electronic exception handling institutions, whose role will be to help guarantee efficiency and fairness in the face of these challenges. This paper presents a research methodology for designing and evaluating such electronic institutions. It also describes how the methodology has been applied in order to design and evaluate an exception handling architecture for robust software agent marketplaces based on the contract net protocol.
