Wednesday, October 11, 2006, Arenbergkasteel, Leuven, Belgium
The DistriNet Research Group of the Department of Computer Science, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium organizes the Symposium "Engineering Decentralized Multiagent Systems." The Symposium will take place in the Auditorium of the Arenbergkasteel, Heverlee, Leuven. Attendance is free, but registration is required (September 29 at the latest).
After the Symposium, at 14.00 pm, there is the PhD Defense of Danny Weyns: "An Architecture-Centric Approach for Software Engineering with Situated Multiagent Systems"
[Program | Registration | Roadmap | Abstracts]
9.30 am "Polyagents: Rationale, Results, and Recommendations"
Van Parunak, Chief Scientist NewVectors LLC, USA
10.30 am Coffee
10.45 am "Delegate MAS: Beliefs, Desires and Intentions Through the Environment"
Tom Holvoet, Professor Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
11.45 am "Autonomic Communication Services for Browsing the World"
Franco Zambonelli, Professor University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italia
12.45 pm Lunch
Afternoon PhD Defense Danny Weyns (PhD website)
To register for the Symposium, please send an email with your name and affiliation to danny.weyns[at]cs.kuleuven.be
Attendance is free, but registration is required. Registration closes on September 30th.
The symposium and the PhD defense will take place in the Auditorium of the Arenbergkasteel. A description and a map can be found here (wegbeschrijving).
Polyagents: Rationale, Results, and Recommendations
Van Parunak, Chief Scientist NewVectors LLC, Ann Arbor USA
It has recently become clear to engineers of multi-agent systems that sometimes it is worthwhile to represent each domain entity, not by a single agent, nor by a set of functionally decomposed agents, but by multiple agents, each representing the entire entity but exploring alternatives that are open to the entity. We call this collection of agents a "polyagent." This talk will present a rationale for polyagents in terms of sampling theory, then summarize several systems in which polyagents have been deployed, and finally outline a research agenda that will enable the further refinement and exploitation of this new modeling construct.
Delegate MAS: Beliefs, Desires and Intentions Through the Environment
Tom Holvoet, Professor Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
BDI-based agent architectures have proven their usefulness in building MASs for complex systems - their explicit attention for coping with dynamic environments is one obvious explanation for this. For the family of applications called "coordination and control applications", however, the complexity of the individual agents using traditional BDI-approaches is overwhelming. Coordination and control applications are characterized (1) by their large scale in terms of number of agents and physical distribution, (2) by their very dynamic nature and (3) by their complex functional and non-functional requirements. This family includes a.o. manufacturing control, traffic control and web service coordination. This presentation discusses an approach to Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents which alleviates agent complexity through so-called “delegate MASs”. The BDI agents use the environment and its resources to obtain BDI functionality. Delegate MASs consist of light-weight agents, which are issued either by resources for building and maintaining information on the environment, or by task agents in order to explore the options on behalf of the agents and to coordinate their intentions. We describe the approach, and validate it in a case study of manufacturing control. The evaluation in this case study shows the feasibility of the approach in coping with the large scale of the application and shows that the approach elegantly achieves flexibility in highly dynamic environments.
Autonomic Communication Services for Browsing the World
Franco Zambonelli, Professor University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italia
The continuous growth in ubiquitous and mobile network connectivity, together with the increasing number of networked computational devices populating our everyday environments (e.g., PDAs, sensor networks, tags, etc.), will soon make available an incredible amount of information about the physical and social worlds and their processes. This opens up the possibility of exploiting all such information for the provisioning of pervasive context-aware services for “browsing the world”, i.e., for facilitating users in gathering information about the world, interacting with it, and understanding it. However, for this to occur, proper models and infrastructures must be developed for both (i) organizing the increasing amount of information about the physical world in a sort of engineered "world model"; and (ii) making available a suitable “component” model for the design and development of effective, self-organizing and self-healing, browsing the world services. In this talk, I touch both the above issues by shortly surveying the state of the art in the area and by the presenting the research activities currently undertaken within the "Agent and Pervasive Computing Group" of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.