This article reports our progress in the developing of a system of cooperative autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles using the Multiagent Systems Engineering (MaSE) methodology. Illustrative fragments of the system models produced during the analysis phase are presented. Some topics of the MaSE methodology are discussed.

E-services may be used to wrap an organization’s information system and to provide a standard interface that enables cooperation with other information systems. As a consequence, e-services should not only provide functionalities, but also embed mechanisms for inter-organizational coordination and control to enact cooperation. Cooperation among different organizations is based on contractual ag...

In this paper, we propose a team formation methodology based on cooperative learning teams, adopted from the area of educational research. Cooperative learning is a type of learning where students work in teams and learn through team-based interactions. In education, research in assigning students to appropriate teams and enforcing fair assessment of student performance in a team have generated...

Cooperative systems are collections of people and organisations in cooperation facilitated by technology. How does one evaluate the effects of such systems at different stages of their development? This paper suggests that this evaluation is rather difficult, and requires an awareness of viewpoints of many people and groups rather than one view. This leads me into regarding evaluation as an ong...

Learning networks are highlighted in contemporary literature as a means of leveraging resources to create and sustain competitive advantage in micro-firms. Despite their importance in the context of micro-firm development, micro-firm learning, learning processes and networks have previously been neglected as an area of academic study, and there is limited evidence of successful cooperative stra...

This paper presents the work done to investigate the potential of applying Genetic Algorithms (GA’s) to automate the path planning of cooperative construction manipulators. Though there is potential to achieve economy by using cooperative manipulators, this method is not being commonly adopted in construction sites. A key barrier to the use of cooperative manipulators is the meticulous planning...

This paper discusses a design methodology of cooperative path planning for dynamical multi-agent systems with spatial and temporal constraints. The cooperative behavior of the multi-agent systems is specified in terms of the objective function in an optimization formulation. The path of achieving cooperative tasks is then generated by the optimization formulation constructed based on a differen...

The benefice of a collective decisions process mainly rests upon the possibility for the participants to confront their respective points of views. To this end, they must have cognitive and technical tools that ease the sharing of the reasons that motivate their own preferences, while accounting for information and feelings they should keep for their own. The paper presents the basis of such a ...

This paper presents a method named ADELFE, which is led by the Rational Unified Process but is devoted to software engineering of adaptive multi-agent systems. ADELFE guarantees that the software is developed according to the AMAS theory. We focus this presentation on the four first core workflows of the RUP. Therefore, in the preliminary requirements an agreement on what the system has to do m...

This paper discusses a design methodology of cooperative trajectory generation for multi-robot systems. The trajectory of achieving cooperative tasks, i.e., with temporal constraints, is constructed hy a nonlinear trajectory generation (NTG) algorithm. Three scenarios of multi-robot tasking are proposed at the cooperative task planning framework. The NTG algorithm is, then, used to generate rea...