Run-time mission evolution in mobile multiagent systems

Abstract

In this paper, we present our approach to developing a multiagent system based on the proposed complex concept of the mission. The mission is a high-level abstraction that combines the overall goal of a system, the means, and the process of achieving that goal, from which agents can be automatically generated. We propose a mechanism to generate agents on-demand and at run-time rather than at the design stage. Functionalities are given to the agents at run-time also. Programmatically, a mission is a live object where it maintains not only the various revisions of the plan but also the state and data for each revision. By doing so, our system is able to suspend and resume the mission. Furthermore, we envisage that the mission execution history is useful for the planner so that it can learn from it and hence produce a better plan in the future. We discuss the concept of the mission object, our programmatic model as well as our prototype system, which we call eHermes.

Use of Buying Behavioural Characteristics as General Stereotypes in User Models

“…THE LAYERED USER MODEL ARCHITECTURE This work is the personalisation component of a larger project called e-Hermes [1,9]. This component consists of a personalised interactive user interface, a layered user model that has the ability to be used in multiple application domains and a domain hierarchy supporting such information reuse.…”

An Assembly and Execution Shell for MultiAgent Systems

“…TDG is a Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) where the nodes represent the tasks that need to be performed and the links represent the interrelationships between tasks. Our formal full formal definition of the TDG is presented in [8], the following summary is presented to help the reader to understand the discussion on this paper: Definition 1. A task t is a tuple of the form (u, n, y, s, o) where: U is a set of unique IDs and u U ∈ , N is a set of locations at which a task must be performed and n N ∈ , Y is a set of task types, which is {Primitive, Compound} and y Y ∈ , S is a set of task statuses, which is {Completed, Pending, InProgress, Failed, Aborted, Assigned}, O is a set of functions that a task will execute and o O ∈ A task has a status Completed when it has been successfully executed, Pending when it has not been executed nor assigned to any agent, InProgress when it is being executed, Failed when it has failed being executed, Aborted when it is stop in the middle of execution and Assigned when it has been assigned to an agent but the agent has not started the execution.…”