1,721,106 research outputs found
Special issue "multi-agent systems": Editorial
Full text linkMulti-agent systems (MAS) allow and promote the development of distributed and intelligent applications in complex and dynamic environments. Applications of this kind have a crucial role in our everyday life, as witnessed by the broad range of domains they are deployed to-such as manufacturing, management sciences, e-commerce, biotechnology, etc. Despite heterogeneity, those domains share common requirements such as autonomy, structured interaction, mobility, and openness-which are well suited for MAS. Therein, in fact, goal-oriented processes can enter and leave the system dynamically and interact with each other according to structured protocols. This special issue gathers 17 contributions spanning from agent-based modelling and simulation to applications of MAS in situated and socio-technical systems
Co-ordination of mobile information agents in TuCSoN
No full textThe increasing need to access and elaborate dynamic and heterogeneous information sources distributed over the Internet calls for new models and paradigms for application design and development. The mobile agent paradigm promotes the design of applications where agents roam through Internet sites to locally access and elaborate information and resources, possibly co-operating with each other. Focuses on mobile agent co-ordination, and presents the TuCSoN co-ordination model for Internet applications based on mobile information agents. TuCSoN exploits a notion of local tuple-based interaction space, called a tuple centre. A tuple centre is a tuple space enhanced with the capability of programming its behaviour in response to communication events. This enables properties to be embedded into the interaction space, and a mobile agent to be designed independently of the peculiarities of the information sources. Several issues critical to Internet applications can then be charged on tuple centres transparently to agents. The effectiveness of the TuCSoN model is first shown by means of an application example in the area of Internet information retrieval, then discussed in the context of workflow management and electronic commerce
From tuple spaces to tuple centres
No full textA tuple centre is a tuple space whose behaviour can be defined by means of reactions to communication events. In this paper, we motivate and define the notion of tuple centre, both conceptually and formally. Then, we show how adopting a tuple centre for the coordination of a multiagent system can benefit both the system design and the overall system performance. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved
Formal ReSpecT
No full textLogic-based languages have already proved to be effective to build individual agents and to enable inter-agent communication in multi-agent systems. Also, logic tuple centres have shown that logic-based languages can be effectively exploited to rule inter-agent communication so as to build social behaviours. In this paper, we formally define the notion of logic tuple centre as well as the operational semantics of the logic-based language ReSpecT for the behaviour specification of logic tuple centres. For this purpose, we exploit a formal framework for asynchronous systems allowing coordination media to be represented in a separate and independent way with respect to the coordinated entities. As a by-product, this shows that a logic-based approach may be effectively exploited for the coordination of heterogeneous agents of different sorts and technologies. ©2001 Published by Elsevier Science B. V
LuCe: A Tuple-based Coordination Infrastructure for Prolog and Java Agents
No full textThe engineering of an application as a multi-agent system (MAS henceforth) calls
for models, languages, and tools specifically tailored to the metaphors of agent and
agent society. In these systems, agents are typically required to interact and interoperate, yet this is not enough to guarantee that the MAS operates towards the
accomplishments of its global goals: what is needed is the ability of constraining
interaction so as to ensure that the social rules of the MAS, intended as an agent
society, are respected and enforced. This is what coordination is for. In order to provide standard metaphors and abstractions to build agent societies,
coordination should be one of the basic services supplied by an effective infrastructure for MAS design, development and run-time support. LuCe is a coordination infrastructure providing MAS engineers with tuple-based coordination technology for both Prolog and Java agents. Based on logic tuple centres, LuCe enables the definition of (reusable) intelligent coordination components, and effectively supports the MAS construction process by model-specific tools, which bring the model metaphors to action
An architecture for tuple-based coordination of multi-agent systems
No full textMulti-agent system development calls for powerful and expressive coordination models and languages, as well as for an effective coordination technology. A good deal of the current research effort focuses on tuple-based coordination, exploiting its well-known advantages, such as agent uncoupling and associative access to information, and addressing its limitations in terms of flexibility and control capabilities. In particular, the behaviour of a Linda-like tuple space is fixed once and for all by the coordination model, and cannot be tailored to the specific application needs. Tuple centres are tuple spaces whose behaviour can be programmed by defining transactional reactions to the basic communication events, allowing coordination laws to be explicitly defined and embedded into the coordination medium. This paper presents the architecture of a run-time system for tuple-based coordination, where tuple centres work as an extensible kernel, around which multi-agent systems can be designed and deployed. After sketching the implementation, the paper shows the advantages that can be achieved from both the design and the performance viewpoints
Agent-based Modelling in Multicellular Systems Biology
No full textThis chapter aims at discussing the content of multi-agent based simulation (MABS) applied to computational biology i.e., to modelling and simulating biological systems by means of computational models, methodologies, and frameworks. In particular, the adoption of agent-based modelling (ABM) in the field of multicellular systems biology is explored, focussing on the challenging scenarios of developmental biology. After motivating why agent-based abstractions are critical in representing multicellular systems behaviour, MABS is discussed as the source of the most natural and appropriate mechanism for analysing the self-organising behaviour of systems of cells. As a case study, an application of MABS to the development of Drosophila Melanogaster is finally presented, which exploits the ALCHEMIST platform for agent-based simulation
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