The transport sector needs to go through an extended process of decarbonisation to counter the threat of climate change. Unfortunately, the International Energy Agency forecasts an enormous growth in the number of cars and greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Two issues can thus be identified: (1) the need for a new methodology that could evaluate the policy performances ex-ante and (2) the need f...

This report provides an overview of the existing approaches to logic and rule-based system behavior specification in the light of the peculiar needs of business and security rules. It identifies usage scenarios for rule based policies in a semantic web context and it outlines the possible directions of future research. Keyword List semantic web, reasoning, security, trust, reputation, action la...

Adaptation to changes in organizational procedures and business rules is a sine qua non for workflow management systems, if they have to be useful to organizations. This paper describes an approach based on workflow agents capable of managing dynamic changes in business policies. The two key aspects of our approach are (i) the agentification of the process engine, in the sense that this is view...

Electronic consultation through the Internet has become an important means of eparticipation in order to enable interaction and discussion among government agencies and citizens on public policies and decisions. Tools that enhance the quality of electronic consultations need therefore to be designed in a way that better opinions and arguments are produced. Well designed ICT tools can contribute...

In striking contrast to the legislatures in most modern democracies, Congress retains an important place in American politics and policy making. Especially in recent years, this has led many observers to question the importance of the presidency and bureaucracy to the real work of American governance and the extent to which political actors in the executive branch generally exercise power. This...

In this paper, we develop an agent-based model of a market game in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the U.K. government’s 2008–2010 policy on promoting smart metering in the U.K. retail electricity market. We break down the policy into four possible policy options. With the model, we study the impact of the four policy options on the dynamics of smart metering diffusion and suggest policy...

The problem of analysing operational policies for transhipping containers in a port container terminal is studied using an agent-based simulation approach. The decision makers involved in transhipment operations, i.e., the terminal manager, the port captain, the stevedores and the ship captains, as well as some of the operators of the physical resources, such as cranes and straddle carriers, ar...

Bayesian methods for reinforcement learning are promising because they allow model uncertainty to be considered explicitly and offer a principled way of dealing with the exploration/exploitation tradeoff. However, for multiagent systems there have been few such approaches, and none of them apply to problems with state uncertainty. In this paper we fill this gap by proposing two frameworks for B...

Abstraction is a valuable tool for dealing with scalability in large state space contexts. This paper addresses the design, using abstraction, of good policies for minimal autonomous agents applied within a situation-graph-framework. In this framework an agent’s policy is some function that maps perceptual inputs to actions deterministically. A good policy disposes the agent towards achieving o...

An imponant aspect of the ongoing debate on rural health policy is how to deliver inpatient care in sparsely populated rural areas. One alternative is to create a new classification of rural inpatient facility that would deliver more limited services than available in a rural hospital, have more flexibility in staffing requirements, and possibly be reimbursed differently. The support of the Hea...