Recently, agent technology has been recognized as an important approach for developing distributed intelligent design and manufacturing systems. Several different architectures have been proposed in this research area. This paper discusses the concepts and main characteristics of three different approaches: facilitator, mediator and autonomous agents. It is proposed that key features of these d...

One of the fundamental tasks facing autonomous robots is to reduce the many degrees of freedom of the input space by some sorts of classiication mechanism. The sensory stimulation caused by one and the same object, for instance, varies enormously depending on lighting conditions, distance from object, orientation and so on. EEorts to solve this problem, say in classical computer vision, have on...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First to take stock of the state of the AMoC project after three years of research (funded by the Swiss National Foundation for Research) by relating to available notes that we have published. Second, to show how potential collaborations may come within the framework of our research interest (in AMoC and more generally in the PAI group). Therefore, this paper d...

This paper presents an argumentation based framework, developed as an extension of an existing framework for nonmonotonic reasoning, in order to support an agent’s self deliberation process. The framework allows the agent to draw conclusions taking into account in a natural way a given preference policy. After developing the argumentation framework we examine two general cases of such argumenta...

There is a recognized need to employ autonomous agents in domains that are not amenable to conventional automation and/or which humans find difficult, dangerous, or undesirable to perform. These include time-critical and mission-critical applications in health, defense, transportation, and industry, where the consequences of failure can be catastrophic. A prerequisite for such applications is t...

Intelligent autonomous agents (IAA) are proliferating and rapidly evolving due to the exponential growth in computational power recent advances, for instance, artificial intelligence research. Ranging from chatbots, over personal virtual assistants medical decision-aiding systems, self-driving or self-piloting whether unbeknownst users not, IAA increasingly integrated into many aspects of daily...