0950-5849/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier B.V. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2012.03.001 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J edu.tw (S.-J. Lee), [email protected] (H.-M edu.tw (C.-L. Wu). Context: Agents are considered as one of the fundamental technologies underlying open and dynamic systems that are largely enabled by the semantic web and...

Over the last few years, the success of GPS-enabled PDAs has finally instigated a breakthrough of mobile devices. Many people now already have a device that can connect to the internet and run untrusted code, typically a cell-phone or PDA. Having such a large interconnected and powerful computing base presents some new security issues. In order to counter new threats, the traditional security a...

In this paper, we present a multi-agent systems approach to distributed event data processing as it is e.g. pervasive in scientific computing environments. The matching of capability descriptions in these domains, which requires the description of constraints over streams of events, is computationally very hard. We discuss a coordination approach based on the contract net protocol in combinatio...

In this paper, a new contract signing protocol is proposed based on the RSA signature scheme. The protocol will allow two parties to sign the same contract and then exchange their digital signatures. The protocol ensures fairness in that it offers parties greater security: either both parties receive each other's signatures or neither does. The protocol is based on offline Trusted Third Party (...

In multiagent systems, achieving coordination among autonomous agents is a major problem. Generally, a high-level protocol needs to be designed to achieve effective coordination. In the field of distributed artificial intelligence, protocols for achieving coordination have been proposed, such as the contract net protocol for task allocation (Smith 1980), and the multistage negotiation protocol ...

A multi-party contract signing protocol allows a set of participants to exchange messages with each other with a view to arriving in a state in which each of them has a pre-agreed contract text signed by all the others. Garay and Mackenzie (GM) proposed such protocol based on private contract signatures, but it was later shown to be flawed by Chadha, Kremer and Scedrov (CKS); the authors CKS al...

Simultaneous contract signing is a two-party cryptographic protocol: two mutually suspicious parties wish to exchange signatures on a contract. We propose novel and efficient protocol for contract signing based on a construction by Even, Goldreich, and Lempel. We focus on the reduction of on-line computational complexity of the protocol. A significant part of the most time-consuming operations ...

A multi-agent VRP solver is presented in this paper. It utilizes the contract-net protocol based allocation and several improvement strategies. It provides the solution with the quality of 81% compared to the optimal solution on 115 benchmark instances in polynomial time. The self-organizing capability of the system successfully minimizes the number of vehicles used. The presented solver archit...

This paper presents a heterarchical scheduling approach for exible manufacturing systems. The approach adopts a multiagent cooperative problem solving paradigm by using a bidding mechanism based on the contract net protocol to generate the production plan and schedule. Overall, scheduling is implemented using a Production Reservation approach. A typical job shop testbed demonstrates the eeectiv...