Agents, Availability Awareness, and Decision Making

Despite the importance of resource availability, the inclusion of availability awareness in current agentbased systems is limited, particularly in decision support settings. This article discusses issues related to availability awareness in agent-based systems and proposes that knowledge of resources’ online status and readiness in these systems can improve decision outcomes. A conceptual model for incorporating availability and presence awareness in an agent-based system is presented, and an implementation framework operationalizing the conceptual model using JADE is proposed. Finally, the framework is developed as an agent-based decision support system (DSS) and evaluated in a decision making simulation. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-595-7.ch008