Infrastructure for Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Scalable Multi-Agent Systems: International Workshop on Infrastructure for Scalable Multi-Agent Systems Barcelona, Spain, June 3–7, 2000 Revised Papers

320 Pages·2001·13 MB·English

by  Les Gasser (auth.)

Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 1887
SubseriesofLectureNotesinComputerScience
EditedbyJ.G.CarbonellandJ.Siekmann
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
EditedbyG.Goos,J.HartmanisandJ.vanLeeuwen
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Berlin
Heidelberg
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Barcelona
HongKong
London
Milan
Paris
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Tom Wagner Omer Rana (Eds.)
Infrastructure for Agents,
Multi-Agent Systems, and
Scalable Multi-Agent Systems
International Workshop on Infrastructure
for Scalable Multi-Agent Systems
Barcelona, Spain, June 3-7, 2000
Revised Papers
1 3
SeriesEditors
JaimeG.Carbonell,CarnegieMellonUniversity,Pittsburgh,PA,USA
Jo¨rgSiekmann,UniversityofSaarland,Saabru¨cken,Germany
VolumeEditors
TomWagner
UniversityofMaine,DepartmentofComputerScience
228NevilleHall,Orono,ME04469-5752,USA
E-mail:[email protected]
OmerF.Rana
CardiffUniversity,DepartmentofComputerScience
Queen’sBuilding,NewportRoad,CardiffCF243XF,Wales,UK
E-mail:[email protected]
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Infrastructureforagents,multi-agentsystems,andscalablemulti-agent
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OmerRana(ed.).-Berlin;Heidelberg;NewYork;Barcelona;HongKong;
London;Milan;Paris;Singapore;Tokyo:Springer,2001
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Preface
Building research grade multi-agent systems requires a large amount of soft-
ware infrastructure. Many systems require planning, scheduling, coordination,
communication, transport, simulation, and module integration technologies and
often the research interest pertains to only a portion of the technology or to ag-
gregatesystemperformance.Toadvancescientificprogress,we,asacommunity,
need to share this infrastructure wherever possible – reuse in this context may
enable more researchers to build functioning experimental systems and to test
their theoretical ideas in actual software environments.
When these research ideas are translated to commercial systems, scalability is-
suesbecomesignificant.Commercialsuccessformulti-agentsystemswillrequire
scalable solutions – in infrastructure and software design approaches, to enable
re-use and effective deployment of both mobile and intelligent agents.
This volume contains papers of two topics that are joined under the common
umbrella of addressing questions that will make deployed and large scale multi-
agent systems a reality. The first topic focuses on available infrastructure and
requirements for constructing research-grade agents and multi-agent systems.
The second topic aims to consider support in infrastructure and software de-
sign methods for multi-agent systems that can directly support coordination
and management of large multi-agent communities. Study of performance and
scalability techniques are necessary to make some of the multi-agent systems
being developed at research institutions usable in commercial environments.
The papers presented here are derived from the Workshop on Infrastructure for
ScalableMulti-AgentSystemsthatwasheldatthe4th InternationalConference
onAutonomousAgents,June3–7,2000,inBarcelona,Spain.Therewereover80
registeredparticipantsattheworkshopandlivelydiscussionsandpanelsessions
contributed to the refinement of these ideas. The organizers and panelists are
credited below.
Wewouldliketothankthecontributorstothisvolume,theworkshoporganizers,
the workshop participants, and the panelists.
We hope that this volume proves to be a valuable resource in furthering re-
search in agents and multi-agent systems and to helping this paradigm realize
its potential.
March 2001 Tom Wagner and Omer Rana
TopicA:InfrastructureandRequirementsforBuilding
Research-GradeMulti-AgentSystems
Topic Areviewcommittee &organizers:
TomWagnerUniversityofMaine
K.SuzanneBarberUniversityofTexasatAustin
Keith Decker University of Delaware
Tim Finin University of Maryland Baltimore County
Les Gasser University of Illinois
Marcus Huber Intelligent Reasoning Systems and
Oregon Graduate Institute
Victor Lesser University of Massachusetts
Richard Metzger Air Force Research Lab
Topic B: Infrastructure Scalability
Topic B review committee:
Omer F. Rana University of Wales, Cardiff, UK
Lyndon Lee and Steve Corley BT Labs, UK
David Walker Oak Ridge National Lab, USA
Murray Woodside Carleton University, Canada
Roy Williams CACR, Caltech, USA
Kate Stout Sun Microsystems, USA
Peter Harrison Imperial College, London, UK
Craig Thompson OBJS, USA
Jan Treur Vrije University, Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
Denis Caromel INRIA, France
Michael Luck University of Warwick, UK
Mark d’Inverno University of Westminster, UK
Michael Shroeder City University, UK
The Panel Session
Panelists:
K. Suzanne Barber University of Texas at Austin
Keith Decker University of Delaware
Tim Finin University of Maryland Baltimore County
Katia Sycara Carnegie Mellon
David Wolpert NASA Ames
Table of Contents
Infrastructure and Requirements
for Building Research-Grade Multi-Agent Systems
MAS Infrastructure Definitions, Needs, and Prospects .................. 1
Les Gasser
Tools for Developing and Monitoring Agents
in Distributed Multi-agent Systems................................... 12
John R. Graham, Daniel McHugh, Michael Mersic, Foster McGeary,
M. Victoria Windley, David Cleaver, Keith S. Decker
Agora: An Infrastructure for Cooperative Work Support
in Multi-agent Systems ............................................. 28
Mihhail Matskin, Ole Jørgen Kirkeluten, Svenn Bjarte Krossnes,
Øystein Sæle
Sensible Agent Testbed Infrastructure for Experimentation.............. 41
K.S. Barber, D.N. Lam, C.E. Martin, R.M. McKay
The MadKit Agent Platform Architecture............................ 48
Olivier Gutknecht, Jacques Ferber
An Architecture for Modeling Internet-Based
Collaborative Agent Systems ........................................ 56
Roberto A. Flores, Rob C. Kremer, Douglas H. Norrie
Frameworks for Reasoning about Agent Based Systems ................. 64
Leon J. Osterweil, Lori A. Clarke
Integrating High-Level and Detailed Agent Coordination
into a Layered Architecture ......................................... 72
XiaoQin Zhang, Anita Raja, Barbara Lerner, Victor Lesser,
Leon Osterweil, Thomas Wagner
Adaptive Infrastructures for Agent Integration......................... 80
David V. Pynadath, Milind Tambe, Gal A. Kaminka
The RoboCup Soccer Server and CMUnited:
Implemented Infrastructure for MAS Research......................... 94
Itsuki Noda, Peter Stone
An Agent Infrastructure to Build and Evaluate Multi-Agent Systems:
The Java Agent Framework and Multi-Agent System Simulator.......... 102
Regis Vincent, Bryan Horling, Victor Lesser
VIII Table of Contents
Design-to-Criteria Scheduling: Real-Time Agent Control ................ 128
Thomas Wagner, Victor Lesser
Integrating Conversational Interaction and Constraint Based Reasoning
in an Agent Building Shell .......................................... 144
Mihai Barbuceanu, Wai-Kau Lo
An Enabling Environment for Engineering Cooperative Agents .......... 157
Soe-Tsyr Yuan
Agent Mobility and Reification of Computational State:
An Experiment in Migration ........................................ 166
Werner Van Belle, Theo D’Hondt
As Strong as Possible Agent Mobility................................. 174
Tim Walsh, Paddy Nixon, Simon Dobson
An Architecture for Adaptive Web Stores ............................. 177
Giovanna Petrone
Performance Issues and Infrastructure Scalability
in Building Multi-Agent Systems
A Performance Analysis Framework for Mobile Agent Systems........... 180
Marios D. Dikaiakos, George Samaras
A Layered Agent Template for Enterprise Computing................... 188
Carmen M. Pancerella, Nina M. Berry
A Community of Agents for User Support
in a Problem-Solving Environment ................................... 192
Line Pouchard, David W. Walker
Scalable Mobile Agents
Supporting Dynamic Composition of Functionality ..................... 199
In-GyuKim,Jang-EuiHong,Doo-HwanBae,Ik-JooHan,CheongYoun
A Formal Development and Validation Methodology
Applied to Agent-Based Systems..................................... 214
Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo
A Proposal for Meta-Learning through a Multi-Agent System............ 226
Juan A. Bot´ıa, Antonio F. Go´mez-Skarmeta, Juan R. Velasco,
Mercedes Garijo
Scalability Metrics and Analysis of Mobile Agent Systems............... 234
Murray Woodside
Table of Contents IX
Improving the Scalability of Multi-Agent Systems ...................... 246
Phillip J. Turner, Nicholas R. Jennings
Mobile Agents for Distributed Processing ............................. 263
Penny Noy, Michael Schroeder
Scalability of a Transactional Infrastructure for Multi-agent Systems ..... 266
Khaled Nagi
Towards a Scalable Architecture for Knowledge Fusion.................. 279
Alex Gray, Philippe Marti, Alun Preece
Towards Validation of Specifications by Simulation ..................... 293
Ioan Alfred Letia, Florin Craciun, Zoltan Ko¨pe
Open Source, Standards and Scaleable Agencies ....................... 296
Stefan Poslad, Phil Buckle, Rob Hadingham
Infrastructure Issues and Themes for Scalable Multi-Agent Systems ...... 304
Omer F. Rana, Tom Wagner, Michael S. Greenberg, Martin K. Purvis
Author Index ................................................. 309