This paper deals with some fundamental questions regarding the concept of concept in the context of autonomous agents. The most basic of these is defining what it actually means for someone to have a concept. Rather than trying to state a number of conditions that should be satisfied in order to have the concept, it is concluded that having a concept is a matter of degree, which can be defined ...

A number of protocols based on the formal dialogue games of philosophy have recently been proposed for interactions between autonomous agents. Several of these proposals purport to assist agents engaged in the same types of interactions, such as persuasions and negotiations, and are superficially different. How are we to determine whether or not these proposals are substantially different? This...

This paper investigates the skills of autonomous agents to reorganise their society as answer to environmental changes. The reor-ganisation of an agent society can be motivated by the desire to reduce connicts within inter-agent cooperation and to increase the eeciency in achieving goals. Our interest is centered on situations where new agents want to join an existing agent society which has es...

If agents are able to exploit the resources available in a multi-agent domain they must make use of other agents to help them in their tasks. In order to do this it is important that we first of all have an understanding of agency, and then of how goals are generated and subsequently adopted by other agents. In this paper we build upon a three-tiered hierarchy which has been constructed to defi...

This thesis presents the development and implementation of approximate dynamic programming methods used to manage multi-agent systems. The purpose of this thesis is to develop an architectural framework and theoretical methods that enable an autonomous mission system to manage real-time multi-agent operations. To meet this goal, we begin by discussing aspects of the real-time multi-agent missio...

this paper describes how multi-agent system technology can be used as the underpinning platform for voltage control in power systems. in this study, some facts (flexible ac transmission systems) devices are properly designed to coordinate their decisions and actions in order to provide a coordinated secondary voltage control mechanism based on multi-agent theory. each device here is modeled as ...

Autonomy is a fundamental property for an intelligent virtual agent. The problem in the design of an autonomous IVA is that the respective models approach the interactive, environmental and representational aspects of the agent as separate to each other, while the situation in biological agents is quite different. A theoretical framework indicating the fundamental properties and characteristics...

We describe an architectural approach to autonomous systems that not only provides generality and verifiability, but also flexibility through self-awareness and self-reconfiguration. This is an agent-based approach where the core rational agent oversees a range of feedback control systems (within a modular architecture) handling adaptive interaction with the system’s environment. The rational a...

Multi-agent systems are autonomous decentralized platform software on which application programs such as business transactions, network provisioning and manufacturing control are deployed. In order for the applications to be truly autonomous and decentralized, however, heterogeneous multi-agent systems themselves must communicate and interoperate with each other. To solve the problem, we take a...

Multiple, highly autonomous, satellite systems are envisioned in the near future because they are capable of higher performance, lower cost, better fault tolerance, reconfigurability and upgradability. This paper presents an architecture and multi-agent design and simulation environment that will enable agent-based multi-satellite systems to fulfill their complex mission objectives, termed Obje...