In this paper we discuss the need for learning in multi-agent design systems, and the variety of forms it might take. We propose a particular method of guiding learning in these systems, describe an architecture for its implementation, and discuss how the learning should be evaluated.

Home Care is the term used to refer to any kind of care to a person at his own home. This article presents a case study of the HoCa hybrid multiagent architecture aimed at improving of dependent people in their homes. Hoca architecture uses a set of distributed components to provide a solution to the needs of the assisted people and its main components are software agents that interact with the...

Agents will adopt different strategies in the multiagent systems. However, the strategies of agents may produce conflicts. While agents coordinate with each other in the operations, they will negotiate about their strategies to reduce conflicts. This paper models the agent strategy negotiation mechanism in three kinds of agent coordination forms: order, cooperation and non-cooperation. In the o...

Multi-Agent Systems are suitable to provide a framework that allows to perform collaborative processes in distributed environments. Furthermore, argumentation is a natural way of reaching agreements between several parties. We propose an infrastructure to develop and execute argumentative agents in an open MAS. It offers the tools to develop agents with argumentation capabilities. It also offer...

In the absence of pre-established coordination structures, what can a self-governed entity – i.e. an entity that chooses on its own between its possible actions and cannot be controlled externally – do to evoke another self-governed entity’s cooperation? In this paper, the motivating conditional self-commitment is conceived to be the basic mechanism to solve coordination problems of this kind. ...

Coordination infrastructures have played a central role in the engineering of multi-agent systems (MAS). Although MAS research has produced a number of notable coordination infrastructures of varying features, these have been mainly conceived to host software agents and to facilitate multi-agent programming. Thus, human agents have been mostly kept out of the picture, hence hindering the use of...

Traditional wholesale fresh fish markets carry out their sales by means of the Dutch auction protocol, with the buyers physically present in the market hall. In this paper we present the MultiAgent System for FIsh Trading (MASFIT) which allows buyers to participate remotely in several fish markets simultaneously with the help of software agents, while maintaining the traditional auction procedu...