The robotic researchers all agree that control architectures should be deliberative, reactive, robust, modular, and multi-robot. The HARPIC architecture that was developed with these ideas by GIP to show modular autonomy functionalities, had an” attention” feature that allowed the architecture to automatically switch from one algorithm to another according to the circumstances. Using the return...

Several trends in society in general, and manufacturing in particular, have changed the way business was made in the last decades of the 20th century, setting new requirements for companies and individuals. The research question being addressed in this paper is concerned with the ability to build computer-supported manufacturing systems able to cope with current and future requirements. For thi...

In a collaborative workflow environment, interaction protocol is adopted as a contract, which every peer process must comply with. In order to verify the compliance, we develop a joint model of Open Workflow Net (oWFN) and Global Calculus by establishing a connection between their grammars, and denote the joint model Dynamic oWFN (DoWFN). We construct the Reachability Graph (RG) of DoWFN, and w...

Contract-Linda is a novel programming architecture for heterogeneous parallel machines particularly suited to image processing. Previous research has concentrated on static and predetermined scheduling of computation and on ne grain parallelism. Predetermined scheduling is satisfactory in cases where the computational process is fully deter-ministic. However with many image interpretation schem...

Reliability is a key concern in the current state of software industry. Producing software without defects is still very difficult. Therefore it is crucial to benefit from high-level language mechanisms such as assertions. Nevertheless contracts are mostly a specificity of the Eiffel language. This observation convinced ISE to build a new product, the Contract Wizard, which aims at providing .N...

A contract is a non-repudiable agreement on a given contract text, i.e., it can be used to prove unanimous agreement between its signatories to any veri er. A contract signing protocol is used to fairly compute a contract so that, even if n 1 of the n signatories misbehave, either all or none of them obtain a contract. Optimistic contract signing protocols use a third party to ensure fairness, ...

This paper describes the communication load reduction on the task negotiation with Cont.rart Net Protor~d for multiph: autonomou~ lnobilc robots. Wc have dcvek)pe(l LEMMING. a task negotiation system with low ~xmnmtnication load for nmltiple atttonomolts mobile robots. For controlling multiple robots, Contract Net Protocol(CNP) is useful, but the broadcast of the Task Announcement messages on C...

The process of cooperative problem solving can be divided into four stages. First, finding potential team members, then forming a team followed by constructing a plan for that team. Finally, the plan is executed by the team. Traditionally, very simple protocols like the Contract Net protocol are used for performing the first two stages of the process. And often the team is already taken for gra...

In this paper we use a contract net protocol in order to compare various delegation strategies. We have implemented some different agents, having a set of tasks to delegate (or to perform by themselves); the tasks are performed by the agents in a dynamic environment, that can help or worse their activity. The agent rely upon different strategies in order to choose whom to delegate. We implement...

Coordination in multi-agent planning systems aims at ensuring that the plans of the participating agents do not conflict and the individual as well as the common goals of the agents can be achieved. In the multi-agent planning literature, one can distinguish three main approaches to coordination. In the first approach coordination between the agents is established after the completion of the in...