From Analysis to Deployment: A Multi-agent Platform Survey

Abstract

This paper presents a survey on multi-agent platforms, with a particular focus on methodology. It presents the four stages of the construction of a multi-agent system and derives from these stages several criteria for comparison. These criteria are then used to evaluate four selected platforms, and lead to a discussion on the future of multi-agent platforms. 3 Criteria of examination In this part we will present the different criteria we have drawn from the development stages presented before.

Arguing Over Motivations Within the V3a-Architecture for Self-Adaptation

“…Our starting point is the Vowels approach of multiagent oriented programming (Demazeau, 1995), which has shown to be suited for developing agent platforms e.g. see (Ricordel and Demazeau, 2000) and (Vercouter, 2004). In this approach a multiagent system (MAS) is analysed across five dimensions: Users, Agents, Environments, Interactions, and Organizations.…”

“…Adaptation is obtained by replacing some components by others or just by changing the connections between components. This approach has already been adopted to build agents (Ricordel and Demazeau, 2000;Meurisse and Briot, 2001;Vercouter, 2004) to ease the modification of the internal structure of an agent. A current challenge is to automate this process in order to provide self-adaptive agents.…”

“…This approach reduces the openness of the system only to foreseen situations. Other works rely on human intervention (Ricordel and Demazeau, 2000) or they do not warranty the coherence of the resulting behaviour (Vercouter, 2004). In this paper we propose the Vowel Agent Argumentation Architecture (V3A) to design self-adaptive agents.…”

Improving Exception Handling in Multi-agent Systems

“…But the two EHS are related: an implementation level exception that causes the failure of the execution of an activity is to be transformed into an agent-level exception that can then be handled by the EHS integrated to the execution model of the agents. Among the existing MASs [19], very few provide a specific EHS. Most of the MASs limit their exception handling capabilities to those provided by the programming language.…”

Scale-up and performance studies of three agent platforms

“…In our evaluation a set of 18 platforms were initially selected for further study. Existing surveys [4,5] supplied some guidance, but the surveys are partially out-of-date with some platform projects abandoned altogether, and newer platforms not included.…”