In this paper, we discuss the concept ofmultia4gent systems as applied tohigh-speed n twork traffic control. In the high-speed domain, the propagation delay in a network causes ignificant problems. One of them is that any centralized control is too late to maintain normal network operations, so distributed ra~c control by autonomous agents is required. The basic idea of our traffic control for ...

Agents (hardware or software) that act autonomously in an environment have to be able to integrate three basic behaviors: planning, execution, and learning. This integration is mandatory when the agent has no knowledge about how its actions can affect the environment, how the environment reacts to its actions, or, when the agent does not receive as an explicit input, the goals it must achieve. ...

We describe an operational approach to enabling the computational perception required for automated generation of affective behaviour through inter-agent communication in multi-agent real-time environments. The research is investigating the potential of extending current agent communication languages so as they not only convey the content of knowledge exchange but also so they can communicate a...

This paper describes work undertaken in the ADEPT (Advanced Decision Environment for Process Tasks) project towards developing an agent-based infrastructure for managing business processes. We describe how the key technology of negotiating, service providing, autonomous agents was realised and demonstrate how this was applied to the BT business process of providing a customer quote for network ...

Social behaviour arises as a result of individual agents cooperating with each other so as to exploit the resources available in a rich and dynamic multi-agent domain. If agents are to make use of others to help them in their tasks, such social behaviour is critical. Underlying this cooperation is the transfer or adoption of goals from one agent to another, a subtle and complex process that dep...

The increasing number of ethical investment funds shows how the need of ethics in asset management is growing up. In the same time, in some markets, autonomous agents are managing a larger number of financial transactions than human do. If many philosophers and economists discuss the fairness of different approaches for responsible investment, there is no strong proposition today about the impl...

Optimizing the boarding process is one way for the airline industry to reduce the cost of the total air plane turn time i.e. the time between landing and take off. For this aim, boarding strategies that control when a passenger is allowed to board the plane are developed in order to reduce the overall boarding time. These strategies should be passenger friendly and robust to all kinds of distur...

Recent years are seeing a worrisome decline in the activity of roboticists within the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) community. Robotics papers, that were abundant in the early Autonomous Agents conferences, have almost disappeared in recent editions of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. To some, this trend seems natural. After al...

This paper suggests that in the context of autonomous agents and generation of intelligent behavior for such agents, a more important focus should be held on the symbolic context that forms the basis of computer programs. Basically, software agents are symbolic entities living in a symbolic world and this has an eeect on how one should think about designing frameworks for their evolution or lea...

Autonomous agents working in multi-agent environments may need to cooperate in order to ful ll tasks. Given a set of agents and a set of tasks which they have to satisfy, we consider situations where each task should be attached to a group of agents which will perform the task. The allocation of tasks to groups of agents is necessary when tasks cannot be performed by a single agent. It may also...