An Agent Infrastructure Implementation for Leveraging and Collaboration in Operational and Experimental Environments

Sensible Agents have been engineered to solve distributed problems in complex, uncertain, and dynamic domains. Each Sensible Agent is composed of four modules (the Action Planner, Perspective Modeler, Conflict Resolution Advisor, and Autonomy Reasoner). These modules endow Sensible Agents with the ability to plan, model, resolve individual conflicts, and change agent system organization. Two components provide a variety of user-oriented features: the Sensible Agent Testbed and the Sensible Agent Run-Time Environment (SARTE). The SARTE provides facilities for instantiating Sensible Agents, deploying a Sensible Agent system and monitoring run-time operations. The capabilities of each module, each Sensible Agent, and the multi-agent system must be tested and evaluated. The Sensible Agent Testbed provides a solid infrastructure for easily configurable and repeatable multi-agent experiments. Experimentation is a crucial step in gaining insight into the behavior of agents, as well as proving or disproving hypotheses. Additionally, the described infrastructure facilitates the inclusion of the 3 party implementations at any level of the architecture. This allows other researchers with specific algorithms and/or implementations to “plug in” their work while leveraging the remainder of the infrastructure for agent operation.