This paper is about distributed scheduling where individual agents have potentially conflicting interests. It is motivated by BT’s workforce scheduling problem, where multiple service providers have to serve multiple service buyers. The service providers and buyers all attempt to maximize their own utility. The overall problem is a multi-objective optimization problem; for example, one has to m...

The Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and Atlanta convened a meeting of the Mobile Payments Industry Workgroup (MPIW) in November 2015 to discuss payments in the card-not-present (CNP) environment. Not only are consumers increasingly using mobile devices to initiate CNP payments; but the e-commerce fraud rate in the U.S. is expected to increase significantly as EMV2 chip card migration progresses...

In this paper we discuss the unusual distinctive features of Control Network Programming as a hybrid programming paradigm. We postulate the maxim “Primitives + Control Network = Control Network Program”, and use this observation in the design of programming environments for developing Control Network Programming projects. The various possible approaches to building such environments are the mai...

In this paper we investigate the logic of speech acts and groundedness. A piece of information is grounded for a group of agents if it is publicly expressed and established by all agents of the group. Our concept of groundedness is founded on the expression of the sincerity condition of speech act theory. We formalize groundedness within an extended BDI (Belief, Desire, Intention) logic where b...

In the emerging model of 21st century electronic commerce, a variety of open agent marketplaces will be competing with one another for participants. The most successful marketplaces will be those that provide the best “quality of service” guarantees (in terms of security, fairness, efficiency, etc.), while meeting such challenges as agent heterogeneity, limited trust, and potential for systemic...

Currently most software process modeling approaches are predefined, not automatically adaptive to different software projects, and provide little support for development team formation with task and resources allocation in real environments. Based on our ten-year working experience for software organizations, we propose an agent-based multilateral negotiation model MNM-PA to support dynamic sof...

Pressed by market globalization and concomitant competition, more and more manufacturers are relying on their suppliers to provide raw materials and component parts so as to focus on their core competence. As a result, the coordination of activities across a network of suppliers becomes critical to quickly respond to dynamic market conditions. In this paper, a novel framework combining mathemat...

Meeting the 20-20-20 objectives put forward by the European Commission to increase the share of renewable energy production in Belgium to 13% of the gross final energy consumption, requires the installation of large wind farms both onand offshore. Integrating these wind farms into existing distribution infrastructure is challenging because of potential congestion caused by imbalance between win...

The key to utilizing the potential of multirobot systems is cooperation. How can we achieve cooperation in systems composed of failure-prone autonomous robots operating in noisy, dynamic environments? In this paper, we present a novel method of dynamic task allocation for groups of such robots. We implemented and tested an auction-based task allocation system which we call MURDOCH, built upon a...

Real world manufacturing environments are highly dynamic because of frequently changing situations. Deterministic mechanisms using a centralized control mechanism cannot handle the system dynamics. Agent-based approaches are particularly suitable for dynamic manufacturing scheduling. This paper proposes a negotiation approach based on multiagent system for complex manufacturing systems. The loc...