As the number of deployed multi-agent applications increases, further and better experience with the technology is gained, enabling a strong evaluation of the ®eld from a more practical perspective. In particular, questions relating to how the theory of multi-agent systems impacts on practice, and how the practical development itself compares with other technologies, can be answered in the ligh...

In Multi-Agent learning, agents must learn to select actions that maximize their utility given the action choices of the other agents. Cooperative Coevolution offers a way to evolve multiple elements that together form a whole, by using a separate population for each element. We apply this setup to the problem of multi-agent learning, arriving at an evolutionary multi-agent system (EA-MAS). We ...

Real-world applications are usually characterized by heterogeneous distributed entities that in-teract following complex coordination protocols and that dynamically and autonomously mod-ify their strategies during this interaction; these systems are extremely difficult to model andimplement, and traditional software engineering tools and techniques are often insufficient toc...

E-institutions are envisioned as facilities on the Internet for heterogeneous software agents to perform their interactions and thus forming truly open agent systems. We investigate how these heterogeneous agents can determine whether an institution is one in which they can participate. We propose a layered approach which is supported through a (traditional) middle agent that is part of the env...

MULTIPLE-AGENT PLANNING SYSTEMS Kurt Konolige Nils J. Nilsson SRI International, Menlo Park, California We analyze problems confronted by computer agents that synthesize plans that take into account (and employ) the plans of other, similar, cooperative agents. From the point of view of each of these agents, the others are dynamic entities that possess information about the world, have goals, ma...

To select an appropriate tool or tools to build an agent-based system we need to map from features of agent systems to implementation technologies. In this paper we propose a simple scheme for classifying agent systems. Starting from the notion of an agent as a cluster concept, we motivate an approach to classification based on the identification of features of agent systems, and use this to ge...