A fair contract-signing protocol allows two potentially mistrusted parities to exchange their commitments (i.e., digital signatures) to an agreed contract over the Internet in a fair way, so that either each of them obtains the other’s signature, or neither party does. Based on the RSA signature scheme, a new digital contract-signing protocol is proposed in this paper. Like the existing RSA-bas...

This article discusses the problems of communication and information sharing in a system of mobile robots and stationary monitoring sensors. A negotiation framework based on the Contract Net approach supports communication between the distributed sensing processes. The hybrid blackboard/message based architecture has been defined to manage the communication within the agents and at the inter-ag...

To an increasing extent, large-scale information processing is a distributed phenomenon. As the trend in computing moves further towards distributed networks of powerful workstations and information servers, we see the growing importance of solutions to dynamic distributed scheduling problems. In these domains, resource providers are distributed both geographicany and bureaucratically, so that ...

The implementation process of complex agent and multiagent systems (AMAS) can benefit significantly from a simulation platform that would allow rapid prototyping and testing of initial design ideas and choices. Such a platform, should ideally have a small learning curve, easy implementation and visualisation of the AMAS under development, while preserving agent oriented programming characterist...

This research examines the feasibility of using a field-based approach, within the multi-agent system (MAS) paradigm, to achieve transport assignment in an automatic guided vehicle (AGV) system. In a field-based approach, transports emit fields into the environment. The AGV’s behavior consists of continuously combining received fields and following the gradient of these combined fields. This wi...

In PODC 2003, Micali presented a fair electronic exchange protocol for contract signing with an invisible trusted party [17]. The protocol was filed as a US patent No 5666420 in 1997 [16]. In the protocol, two mutually distrusted parties exchange their commitments to a contract in a fair way such that either each of them can obtain the other’s commitment, or neither of them does. The protocol i...

With the economy developing and popular Internet, the general concept of contract signing has changed. In the past, people usually sign a contract at the same time and same place face to face, but actually each party involved in contract may live in different part of earth, they want to sign something for business or some other things in economic, efficient, secure and fairway. A fair contract ...

In order to determine the Fermi level position of our devices, we first measured the resistance vs. applied gate voltage dependence of the graphene sheet that contained the nanoresonators, as shown in Fig. S1. From these measurements we were able to determine the charge neutral point (CNP) for each device, which corresponds to applied gate voltage that aligns the Fermi level of the graphene wit...

The multi-agent paradigm has become a useful tool in solving military problems. However, one of key challenges in multi-agent model for distributed warfare could be how to describe the microcosmic tactical warfare platforms actions. In this paper, a platform-level distributed warfare model based on multi-agent system framework is designed to tackle this challenge. The basic ideas include: Estab...

C-type natriuretic peptide (CNP), initially isolated from porcine brain [3], is the most recently characterized member of the natriuretic peptide family. The human CNP gene consists of at least two exons and an intron [4]. Whereas synthesis of atrial and brain natriuretic peptides (ANP and BNP) has been demonstrated mainly in the heart, but also in various other organs [2, 5], CNP m R N A in ma...