Abstract
In Distributed Problem-solving (DPS) systems a group of purpose-fully designed computational agents interact and co-ordinate their activities so as to jointly achieve a global goal. Social co-ordination is a decentralised mechanism, that sets out from non-benevolent agents that interact primarily to improve the degree of attainment of their local goals. One way of ensuring the effectivity of social co-ordination with respect to global problem-solving is to rely on self-interested agents and to coerce their behaviour in a desired direction. In this paper we describe the decentralised co-ordination mechanism of structural co-operation that follows this approach, and present its formalisation within bargaining theory. We then show how this theoretical model is trans-ferred to a practical real-world application: within the experimental TRYSA2 system autonomous traffic control agents co-ordinate their activities by means of structural co-operation, so as to jointly perform road traffic management in an urban motorway network.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Barceló, J.; Ferrer, J.; Grau, R.: “AIMSUN2 and the GETRAM Simulation Environment”. 13. EURO Conf, 1994
Conte, R.; Castelfranchi, C.: Cognitive and Social Action. UCL Press, 1995.
Cuena J., Ossowski S.: “Distributed Models for Decision Support”. To appear in: Introduction to Distributed Artificial Intelligence (Weiß & Sen, editors). AAAI/MIT Press, 1998
Cuena, J.; Hernández, J.; Molina, M.: “An Intelligent Model for Road Traffic Management in the Motorway Network around Barcelona”. Proc. 14th IFIP World Congress, Chapman & Hall, 1996, pp. 173–180
Demazeau, Y.: “Decentralised A.I. 2”. North Holland, 1991
Durfee, E.; Rosenschein, J: “Distributed Problem-solving and Multi-agent Systems: Comparisons and Examples”. Proc. 13th DAI Workshop, 1994, pp. 94–104
Jennings, N.; Campos, J.: “Towards a Social Level Characterisation of Socially Responsible Agents.” IEE Proc. on Software Engineering, 144(1), 1997
Nash, J.: “The bargaining problem”. Econometrica 20, 1950, pp. 155–162
Ossowski S. On the Functionality of Social Structure in Artificial Agent Societies. Monograph to appear in the LNAI series, Springer, 1998
Ossowski, S.; García Serrano, A.: “Social Co-ordination Among Autonomous Problem-solving Agents”. To appear in: Proc. 3rd Australian DAI Workshop, Springer, 1997.
Ossowski, S.; García Serrano, A.: “Social Structure in Artificial Agent Societies: Implications for Autonomous Problem-solving Agents”. To appear in: Proc. ATAL-98, 1998
Ossowski, S.; García Serrano, A.; Cuena, J.: “Emergent Co-ordination of Flow Control Actions Through Functional Co-operation of Social Agents”. Proc. 12. European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-96), Wiley & Sons, 1996, pp. 539–543
Owen, G.: Game Theory, 3rd edition, 1995
Rosenschein, J.; Zlotkin, G.: Rules of Encounter: Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation among Computers. AAAI/MIT Press, 1994
Shoham, Y.; Tennenholz, M.: “On Social Laws for Artificial Agent Societies: Off-line Design”, Artificial Intelligence 73, 1995, pp. 231–252
Sichman, J.; Demazeau, Y.; Conte, R.; Castelfranchi, C.: “A Social Reasoning Mechanism Based On Dependence Networks”. Proc. ECAI-94, 1994, pp. 188–192
Thomson, W.: “Cooperative Models of Bargaining”. Handbook of Game Theory (Auman & Hart, eds.), 1994, pp. 1238–1284
Yokoo, M.: “Asynchronous Weak-commitment Search for Solving Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems”. Proc. Constraint Logic Programming, 1995, pp. 88–102.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ossowski, S., García-Serrano, A., Cuena, J. (1998). From theory to practice in multiagent system design: The case of structural co-operation. In: Herzog, O., Günter, A. (eds) KI-98: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1504. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0095432
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0095432
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65080-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49656-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive