Multi-agent systems are a new computational approach for solving real world, dynamic and open system problems. Problems are conceptualized as a collection of decentralised autonomous agents that collaborate to reach the overall solution. Because of the agents autonomy, their limited rationality, and the distributed nature of most real world problems, the key issue in multi-agent system research...

A model for autonomy based multi agent systems aimed at exhibiting emerging prop erties is proposed Then the prerequisites for a distributed implementation are dis cussed A preliminary distributed imple mentation illustrated by an application to a robotics simulation is consequently sketched with a strong emphasis on STL our coordi nation model whose aim is to provide pow erful coordination mec...

Definition of an accurate system model for Automated Planner (AP) is often impractical, especially for real-world problems. Conversely, off-the-shelf planners fail to scale up and are domain dependent. These drawbacks are inherited from conventional transition systems such as Finite State Machines (FSMs) that describes the action-plan execution generated by the AP. On the other hand, Behavior T...

PAGODA (Probabilistic Autonomous GOalDirected Agent) is an autonomous intelligent agent that explores a novel environment, building a model of the world and using the model to plan its actions [desJardins, 1992b]. PAGODA incorporates solutions to the problems of selecting learning tasks, choosing a learning bias, classifying observations, and performing induetire learning of world models under ...

Autonomous scheduling deals with the problem how to enable agents to schedule a set of interdependent tasks in such a way that whatever schedule they choose for their tasks, the individual schedules always can be merged into a global feasible schedule? Unlike the traditional approaches to distributed scheduling we do not enforce a fixed schedule to every participating agent. Instead we guarante...

This paper is a survey study of the research that has been done in designing control system architectures for autonomous mobile robots. The architectures are discussed with respect to properties such as robustness, learning ability, processing speed and organization. A number of deliberative, blackboard, hierarchical, reactive and hybrid architectures will be taken as examples and given a short...

As agents move into ever more important applications, there is a natural growth in interest in techniques for synthesizing multiagent systems. We describe an approach for engineering the coordination requirements of a multiagent system based on an analysis of conversation instances extracted from usage scenarios. This approach exploits the notion of Dooley graphs that were recently introduced t...

In order to verify reconfiguration of interacting autonomous agents to be exclusively beneficial and never hazardous to cyber-physical systems, this article suggests a systematic approach based on incremental model-based testing and illustrates its application to cooperating mobile robots.

Abstract Agent-based technologies can be applied to many aspects of manufacturing. The need for responsive, flexible agents is pervasive in manufacturing environments due to the complex, dynamic nature of manufacturing problems. One critical aspect of agent flexibility is the ability to adapt problem-solving roles to various situations during system operation. This issue is addressed by researc...

This thesis considers the coordinated control of autonomous agents. The agents are modeled as double integrators, one for each Cartesian dimension. The goal is to force the agents to converge to a formation specified by their desired relative positions. To this end a pair of one-step-ahead optimization based control laws are developed. The control algorithms produce a communication topology tha...