Towards next generation coordination infrastructures
Tipo de Publicación:
Journal ArticleOrigen:
Knowledge engineering review, Cambridge (En prensa)Resumen:
Coordination infrastructures play a central role in the engineering of multiagent systems. Since the
advent of agent technology, research on coordination infrastructures has produced a signi?cant
number of infrastructures with varying features. In this paper, we review the the state of the
art coordination infrastructures with the purpose of identifying open research challenges that
next generation coordination infrastructures should address. Our analysis concludes that next
generation coordination infrastructures must address a number of challenges: (i) to become
socially aware, by facilitating human interaction within a MAS; (ii) to assist agents in their
decision making by providing decision support that helps them reduce the scope of reasoning and
facilitates the achievement of their goals; and (iii) to increase openness to support on-line, fully
decentralised design and execution. Furthermore, we identify some promising approaches in the
literature, together with the research issues worth investigating, to cope with such challenges.
An Assistance Infrastructure for open MAS
Tipo de Publicación:
Conference PaperOrigen:
14th International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Volumen232, Lleida, Catalonia, Spain, p.1-10 (2011)ISBN:
978-1-60750-841-0Palabras clave:
coordination support; organisations and institutions; self-organisation; agent assistanceResumen:
Organisations are an effective mechanism to define the coordination model that structure agent interactions in Open MAS. Execution infrastructures mediate agents interactions while enforcing the rules imposed by the organisation. Although infrastructures usually provide open specifications to agents, understanding this specification and participating in the organisation could result a difficult task to agents, specially when the system is hybrid (i.e participants can be both human and software agents) and its specification becomes more and more complex. In this paper, we formalize an Assistance Infrastructure for Hybrid open MAS that helps agents to pursue their particular goals and, when they are aligned with global goals, lead to a better system’s global performance. With this aim, we propose four advanced services (offered by the assistance infrastructure in a distributed way): (1) refined information, (2) justification, (3) advice and (4) estimation. We define two types of assistant agents. A Personal Assistant provides direct and sole support to one agent while a Group Assistant performs those complex processes which affect a group of participants with common services of interest.
