The ability to create effective multi-agent organizations is key to the development of larger, more diverse multi-agent systems. In this article we present KBORG: a fully automated, knowledge-based organization designer for multi-agent systems. Organization design is the process that accepts organizational goals, environmental expectations, performance requirements, role characterizations, and ...

Distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs) are a model for representing multi-agent systems in which agents cooperate to optimize a global objective. The DCOP model has two main advantages: it can represent a wide range of problem domains, and it supports the development of generic algorithms to solve them. Firstly, this paper presents some advances in both complete and approximate DC...

This paper presents a holonic co-ordination server which is made up of a recursive hierarchy of three different agent types: On the top stands an agent providing matchmaking services and representing the co-ordination server to the outside. It passes incoming requests to a subordinated agent type that is equipped with co-ordination mechanisms such as auctions, negotiations and coalition formati...

Coordination is a key problem in massively multi-agent systems. As applications execute on distributed computer systems, coordination mechanisms must scalably bridge the network distance between where decisions are made and where they are to be enforced. Our work on the CyberOrgs model1 addresses this challenge by encapsulating distributed multi-agent computations along with computational and c...

The Multi-Agent System (MAS) community has developed, over the last few years, a number of fundamental algorithms for coordinating agents in a variety of environments. These algorithms employ both centralised and decentralised forms of coordination and have been shown to reach efficient solutions, albeit with exponential complexity in some cases. For example, distributed constraints optimisatio...

To achieve an optimal outcome in many situations, agents need to choose distinct actions from one another. This is the case notably in many resource allocation problems, where a single resource can only be used by one agent at a time. How shall a designer of a multi-agent system program its identical agents to behave each in a different way? From a game theoretic perspective, such situations le...

We propose a recursive multi-resolution collaborative architecture (MRCA), based on multi-agent coordination mechanisms as a solid foundation for the development of web-centric cooperative applications in global manufacturing. The architecture consists of three layers: a low-level internetworking communication-support layer; a coordination layer ± managing inter-agent cooperation through intell...

Faculty of Engineering Science and Maths School of Electronics and Computer Science Doctor of Philosophy Bayesian learning for agent coordination by Mair Allen-Williams Multi-agent systems draw together a number of significant trends in modern technology: ubiquity, decentralisation, openness, dynamism and uncertainty. As work in these fields develops, such systems face increasing challenges. Tw...

One of the major interests of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), which are able to handle distributed planning, is coordination. This coordination requires both an adequate plan representation and eecient interacting methods between agents. Interactions are based on information exchange (e.g. data, partial or global plan) and allow agents to update their own plans by including the exchanged information...

Incorporating coalition formation algorithms into agent systems shall be advantageous due to the consequent increase in the overall quality of task performance. Coalition formation was addressed in game theory, however the game theoretic approach is centralized and computationally intractable. Recent work in DAI has resulted in distributed algorithms with computational tractability. This paper ...