Abstract
This chapter will focus on how to get organizations - multiple software agents and perhaps humans - to coordinate thier activities when they are working on shared, loosely coupled problems, such as engineering design or information gathering. It will describe some useful representations (including tæms [Task Analysis and Environment Modeling System]) for annotating an agent’s representation of its activities, and some approaches (including GPGP [Generalized Partial Global Planning]) to designing coordination mechanisms that are adapted to some particular problem-solving environment. Examples will be drawn from various projects in distributed information gathering and distributed hospital patient scheduling.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant IIS-9733004.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
W. Chen and K. Decker. Coordination mechanisms for dependency relationships among multiple agents (poster). In Proceedings of the 1st Intl. Joint Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Mult-Agent Systems, Bologna, 2002.
K. Decker, S. Khan, C. Schmidt, and D. Michaud. Extending a multi-agent system for genomic annotation. In M. Klusch and F. Zambonelli, editors, Cooperative Information Agents IV, pages 106–117. Springer-Verlag, 2001.
K. Decker, X. Zheng, and C. Schmidt. A multi-agent system for automated genomic annotation. In Proceedings of the 5th Intl. Conf. on Autonomous Agents, Montreal, 2001.
K. S. Decker, A. Pannu, K. Sycara, and M. Williamson. Designing behaviors for information agents. In Proceedings of the 1st Intl. Conf. on Autonomous Agents, pages 404–413, Marina del Rey, February 1997.
Keith Decker and Jinjiang Li. Coordinating mutually exclusive resources using gpgp. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 3(2): 133–157, 2000.
Keith S. Decker. Environment Centered Analysis and Design of Coordination Mechanisms. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, 1995. http://dis.cs.umass.edu/~decker/thesis.html.
Keith S. Decker. Task environment centered simulation. In M. Prietula, K. Carley, and L. Gasser, editors, Simulating Organizations: Computational Models of Institutions and Groups, pages 105–131. AAAI Press/MIT Press, 1997.
Keith S. Decker and Victor R. Lesser. An approach to analyzing the need for meta-level communication. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 360–366, Chambéry, France, August 1993.
Keith S. Decker and Victor R. Lesser. A one-shot dynamic coordination algorithm for distributed sensor networks. In Proceedings of the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 210–216, Washington, July 1993.
Keith S. Decker and Victor R. Lesser. Quantitative modeling of complex computational task environments. In Proceedings of the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 217–224, Washington, July 1993.
Keith S. Decker and Victor R. Lesser. Designing a family of coordination algorithms. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, pages 73–80, San Francisco, June 1995. AAAI Press. Longer version available as UMass CS-TR 94-14.
Keith S. Decker and Victor R. Lesser. Designing a family of coordination algorithms. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems(ICMAS-95), San Francisco, 1995.
Keith S. Decker and J. Li. Coordinating mutually exclusive resources using gpgp. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 3, 2000.
Keith S. Decker and Katia Sycara. Intelligent adaptive information agents. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 9(3):239–260, 1997.
Edmund H. Durfee, Victor R. Lesser, and Daniel D. Corkill. Coherent cooperation among communicating problem solvers. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 36(11):1275–1291, November 1987.
K. Erol, D. Nau, and J. Hendler. Semantics for hierarchical task-network planning. Technical report CS-TR-3239, UMIACS-TR-94-31, Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland, 1994.
J. Graham and K. Decker. Towards a distributed, environment-centered agent framework. In Intelligent Agents IV, Agent Theories, Architectures, andLanguages. Springer-Verlag, 2000.
A. Kumar and P.S. Ow. A study of distributed problem solving for patient scheduling. In Proc. ORSA/TIMS, Washington, D.C., 1988.
V. Lesser, B. Horling, R. Vincent, A. Raja, and S. Zhang. The taems white paper. http://mas.cs.umass.edu/research/taems/white/, 1999.
Victor R. Lesser and Daniel D. Corkill. The distributed vehicle monitoring testbed. AI Magazine, 4(3):63–109, Fall 1983.
Hector J. Levesque, Philip R. Cohen, and José H. T. Nunes. On acting together. In Proceedings of the Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 94–99, July 1990.
Thomas W. Malone. Modeling coordination in organizations and markets. Management Science, 33:1317–1332, 1987.
P. S. Ow, M. J. Prietula, and W. Hsu. Configuring knowledge-based systems to organizational structures: Issues and examples in multiple agent support. In L. F. Pau, J. Motiwalla, Y. H. Pao, and H. H. Teh, editors, Expert Systems in Economics, Banking, and Management, pages 309–318. North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1989.
M.V. Nagendra Prasad, K. S. Decker, A. Garvey, and V.R. Lesser. Exploring organizational designs with TÆMS: A case study of distributed data processing. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Multi-agent Systems, Kyoto, Japan, December 1996.
M.V. Nagendra Prasad and V.R. Lesser. Learning situation-specific coordination in generalized partial global planning. In AAAI Spring Symposium on Adaptation, Co-evolution and Learning in Multiagent Systems, Stanford, March 1996.
A.S. Rao and M.P. Georgeff. BDI agents: From theory to practice. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, pages 312–319, San Francisco, June 1995. AAAI Press.
J.S. Rosenschein and G. Zlotkin. Rules of Encounter: Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation among Computers. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994.
Toshiharu Sugawara and Victor R. Lesser. On-line learning of coordination plans. Computer Science Technical Report 93-27, University of Massachusetts, 1993.
K. Sycara, K. S. Decker, A. Pannu, M. Williamson, and D. Zeng. Distributed intelligent agents. IEEE Expert, 11(6):36–46, December 1996.
The Gene Ontology Consortium. Gene ontolgy: tool for the unification of biology. Nature Genetics, 25(1):25–29, May 2000.
T. Wagner, A. Garvey, and V. Lesser. Complex goal criteria and its application in design-to-criteria scheduling. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Providence, July 1997.
M.P. Wellman and J. Doyle. Modular utility representation for decision-theoretic planning. In Proc. fo the First Intl. Conf. on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems, pages 236–242, June 1992.
M. Williamson, K. S. Decker, and K. Sycara. Executing decision-theoretic plans in multi-agent environments. In AAAI Fall Symposium on Plan Execution, November 1996. AAAI Report FS-96-01.
M. Williamson, K. S. Decker, and K. Sycara. Unified information and control flow in hierarchical task networks. In Proceedings of the AAAI-96 workshop on Theories of Planning, Action, and Control, 1996.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Decker, K. (2002). Coordinating Intelligent Agents. In: d’Inverno, M., Luck, M., Fisher, M., Preist, C. (eds) Foundations and Applications of Multi-Agent Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2403. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45634-1_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45634-1_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-43962-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45634-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive