No abstract

together in this volume which, though not comprehensive, provide a snapshot of both the variety of problems which can be addressed using software agents and the novel ways in which researchers are attacking them. 1.2Communications Infrastructure for Next-Generation Services Mass production for a mass consumption service infrastructureThe start of the electronic communication and information service industry was dominated by a relatively small number of powerful service providers and service delivery channels. These faced little or no competition, were heavily regulated and licensed, and offered a relatively fixed product and service range. The product and service requirements were supplier-driven, determined and fixed by mass production, and they supported limited customisation by the end-user. A poor match between the user requirements, perceived by the suppliers before production and the actual user requirements impaired service uptake.Customers often needed to modify their business models and requirements substantially to fit them to the information and communication products on offer (McDermid, 1998).Under pressure from different market forces such as increasing privatisation, deregulation, diversification and competition, the customer beholds increasing choice, complexity and heterogeneity at a variety of infrastructure levels including types of message transport (e.g. wired-voice, wireless-voice, wired IP), portal, service and customer interfaces. The communications and information industry along with other types of industry is evolving from a predominantly mass production model towards a model that also incorporates a mass customisation service infrastructure. Consumer-driven customisable service infrastructureCustomisation can be defined as the ability of a product or service to be modified and maintained to meet particular customer requirements or profiles. Customisation can occur at multiple levels and can be customer, third-party (e.g. broker) or provider driven. Here customer (or consumer), broker, and provider, are just temporal roles played depending on an entity's position in the supply demand chain for a particular service. Mass customisation can be considered as a form of mass production, differing from it only in terms of granularity and abstraction. For example, in the late 1990s, customers became able to switch to an additional service provider for cheaper international voice calls by dialling additional access numbers at the start of a call; at this level, customisation is customerdriven. A new communication service can be synthesised from combinations of services from different vendors, resulting in a cost reduction for both long-distance and other calls. However, the complexity of integration of multiple service components may overwhelm the consumer. For example, service providers may appear or disappear overnight; lucrative service opportunities may be temporal in nature; and integration may require specialist knowledge that is not available to the customer. This seeds a growth in third-pa...

This paper presents a formal framework within which autonomous agents can dynamically select and apply different mechanisms to coordinate their interactions with one another. Agents use the task attributes and environmental conditions to evaluate which mechanism maximises their expected utility. Different agent types can be characterised by their willingness to cooperate and the relative value they place on short-vs long-term rewards. Our results demonstrate the viability of empowering agents in this way and show the quantitative benefits that agents accrue from being given the flexibility to control how they coordinate.

This paper investigates how the rules of System P might be used in order to construct proofs for default consequences which take into account the bounds on the probabilities of the consequents of the defaults. Using a knowledge base of default rules which are considered to be constraints on a probability distribution, the result of applying the rules of P gives us new constraints that were implicit in the knowledge base and their associated lower bounds. The paper defines a proof system for such constraints, shows that it is sound, and then discusses at length the completeness of the system and the kind of proofs that it can generate.

No abstract