The use of digital pheromones for controlling and coordinating swarms of unmanned vehicles is studied under various conditions to determine their effectiveness in multiple military scenarios. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of these pheromone algorithms for surveillance, target acquisition, and tracking. The algorithms were demonstrated on hardware platforms and the results from the demonstration are reported

Modeling roles as sets of normative behavior that agents can assume has been found to be a useful development technique. An important characteristic of real-world agent systems is that the roles played by an agent may change over time. These changes can be of several different kinds. We describe an illustrative application where such role changes are important, analyze and classify the various kinds of role changes over time that may occur, and show how this analysis is useful in developing a more formal description of the application.

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This paper addresses multi agent system (MAS) environments from an application perspective. It presents a structured view on environment-centric MAS applications. This comprises three base configurations, which MAS applications may apply directly or combine into a composite configuration. For each configuration, the paper presents key issues, requirements and opportunities (e.g. time management issues, real-world augmentation opportunities and state snapshot requirements). Thus, the paper delineates what environment technology may implement to serve MAS applications. Sample applications illustrate the configurations. Next, electronic institutions provide an example of an environment technology, addressing norms and laws in an agent society, already achieving some maturity. In comparison, applicationdomain specific environment technologies still are in embryonic stages.

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