Synchronization among autonomous agents via local interactions is one of the benchmark problems in multi-agent control. Whereas synchronization algorithms for identical agents have been thoroughly studied, synchronization of heterogeneous networks still remains a challenging problem. The existing algorithms primarily use the internal model principle, assigning to each agent a local copy of some...

This paper describes how a set of autonomous computational agents can cooperate in providing coherent management of transaction workflows in environments where there are many diverse information resources. The agents use models of themselves and of the resources that are local to them. Resource models may be the schemas of databases, frame systems of knowledge bases, domain models of business e...

In order for multi-robot systems to efficiently assist in saving lives and infrastructures in the RoboCup Rescue Simulation, any strategy designed to allocate tasks and coordinate agents must adapt to the dynamic nature of the environment. In this work, we describe how to form teams of agents that take advantage of synergies among the different types of agents and we evaluate the effectiveness ...

We introduce a generic simulation framework suitable for agent-based simulations featuring the support of heterogeneous agents, hierarchical scheduling and flexible specification of design parameters. One key aspect of this framework is the design specification: we use an XML-based format which is simple-structured yet still enables the design of flexible models. Another issue in agent-based si...

Social storage systems [1], [2], [3] are becoming increasingly popular compared to the existing data backup systems like local, centralized and P2P systems. An endogenously built symmetric social storage model and its aspects like the utility of each agent, bilateral stability, contentment, and efficiency have been extensively discussed in [4]. We include heterogeneity in this model by using th...

When considering the agents mediated electronic marketplace, agents play an active role in both sellers and buyers sides. A seller agent may advertise its products in the market, placing the selling price and looking for the potential buyers in the market. On the other hand, a buyer agent would look for the desired goods or services requested by its user and it has a task to bargain about the p...

Members of multi-robot teams may need to collaborate to accomplish a task due to differences in capabilities. This paper describes an extension of the ALLIANCE architecture that enables agent recruitment within a decentralized UAV-UGV robot team without task preemption but 1) uses a formal model of emotions and 2) handles heterogeneity. Affective computing allows recruitment to be robust under ...

We consider the problem of delivering m messages between specified source-target pairs in an undirected graph, by k mobile agents initially located at distinct nodes of the graph. Each edge has a designated length and each agent consumes energy proportional to the distance it travels in the graph. We are interested in optimizing the total energy consumption for the team of agents. Unlike previo...