Humans and software agents alike spend considerable time and effort in searching. Search enables finding the things that better fit and agent’s goals. But search can also be a costly process. Search costs can either come in the form of direct monetary payments, or in the form of time and resources spent. In general, the searcher must balance between the benefits provided by longer and broader s...

This paper presents work carried out within the ‘ExPlanTech’ project (IST-199920171) funded in part by the European Commission's Information Technologies Programme. The mission of the ExPlanTech technology transfer project is to introduce, customize and exploit the multi-agent production planning technology (ProPlanT multi-agent system research prototype) in two specific industrial enterprises....

Agent technology has recently been proposed as an enabling technology to model and design heterogeneous distributed systems. Unfortunately, most of the research and development of software agents is currently based on proprietary design architectures. This has two main drawbacks: new agent systems are invented from scratch each time and distributed agents are usually not able to interoperate. T...

Large product variety in mass customization involves a high internal complexity level inside a company’s operations, as well as a high external complexity level from a customer’s perspective. To cope with both complexity problems, an information system based on agent technology is able to be identified as a suitable solution approach. The mass customized products are assumed to be based on a mo...

This paper describes a proposal on intelligent wearable sensor suit intended for being used by firemen. The main purpose of the suit is to monitor an internal health state of the fireman who wears the suit as well as parameters of external environment where the fireman is situated. As external parameters, inflammable and toxic gases are mainly considered thus the fireman can avoid danger from b...

Although the success of automatic speech recognition (ASR)-based Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems is increasing, little is known about the pedagogical effectiveness of these systems. This is particularly regrettable because ASR technology still suffers from limitations that may result in the provision of erroneous feedback, possibly leading to learning breakdowns. To stud...

This paper explores the relation between consistency of social cues and persuasion by an artificial agent. Including (minimal) social cues in Persuasive Technology (PT) increases the probability that people attribute human-like characteristics to that technology, which in turn can make that technology more persuasive (see e.g., Nass, Steuer, Tauber, & Reeder, 1993). PT in the social actor role ...

In multi-agent setting agent teams often encounter conflicts in agents' plans and actions. This paper presents a cooperative negotiation model (ABeON) that allows agents in a team to appropriately negotiate various options in a hostile and dynamic fire world. It shows that negotiations explore the attitudes and behaviors that help agents to manage conflict constructively. It says that cooperati...

In multi-agent setting agent teams often encounter conflicts in agents’ plans and actions. This paper presents a cooperative negotiation model (ABCON) that allows agents in a team to appropriately negotiate various options in a hostile and dynamic fire world. It shows that negotiations explore the attitudes and behaviors that help agents to manage conflict constructively. It says that cooperati...

This paper presents an ontology and a filtering algorithm used in an agent-based system to support communication in case of incidents in the mobile human surveillance domain. In that domain reaching the right people as soon as possible is of the essence when incidents occur. The main goal of our efforts is to significantly reduce the response time in case of incidents by proposing and setting u...