The Multi-Agent Programming Contest, MAPC, is an annual, community-serving competition that attracts groups from all over the world. Its aim is to facilitate advances in programming multiagent systems (MAS) by (1) developing benchmark problems, (2) enabling head-to-head comparison of MAS’s and (3) supporting educational efforts in the design and implementation of MAS’s. We report about its eigh...

Multiuser museum interactives are computer systems installed in museums or galleries which allow several visitors to interact together with digital representations of artefacts and information from the museum’s collection. WeCurate is such a system, providing a multiuser curation workflow where the aim is for the users to synchronously view and discuss a selection of images, finally choosing a ...

Despite relevant insights from socio-economics, little research in multiagent systems has addressed the interconnections between trust and normative notions such as contracts and sanctions. Focusing our attention on scenarios of betrayal, in this paper we combine the use of trust and sanctions in a negotiation process. We describe a scenario of dyadic relationships between truster agents, which...

The aim of this work is to provide a logical analysis of moral agency. Although this concept has been extensively studied in social philosophy and in social sciences, it has been far less studied in the field of deontic logic and multi-agent systems (MASs). We discuss different aspects of moral agency such as the distinction between desires and moral values and the concept of moral agent. All t...

There has been a large and rapid evolution in terns of the paradigms and technologies to support the development of distributed manufacturing systems and real-time applications. This paper starts with a survey of the main proposals in the area based on the experience gained by the authors in various fields pertaining to manufacturing device modelling, control and supervision, industrial messagi...

The technology of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems seems set to radically alter the way in which complex, distributed, open systems are conceptualized and implemented. The purpose of this paper is to consider the problem of building a multi-agent system as a software engineering enterprise. The article focuses on three issues: (i) how agents might be specified; (ii) how these specific...

In the current global market, traditional hierarchical approaches for manufacturing scheduling and control don’t produce the desired results. It occurs especially in Job-Shop manufacturing configurations. In order to overcome the limitations that hierarchical and centralized architectures show in new manufacturing systems, many decentralized schemes have been proposed. Most of those proposals a...