Springer Series on Agent Technology – serie

The ability of production companies to rapidly develop and deploy effective and efficient control systems is critical for success in the consumer-driven environment of contemporary manufacturing. This book presents a novel approach to the design of manufacturing control systems, based around the idea of agents, semiautonomous decision makers that cooperate to process goods and meet orders. This new methodology is DACS – Designing Agent-based Control Systems. Developed at DaimlerChrysler’s research labs in Berlin, DACS is the first methodology specifically produced for the design of agent-based control systems. Beginning with a detailed overview of agent technologies, manufacturing control, and design methodologies, the book explains the DACS methodology and illustrates it by way of detailed case studies. The book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in agent systems, manufacturing control, and software methodologies.

“Anything happens must have its own reason ”. Although I cannot really recall exactly when I heard of this statement for the first time, it is always in my mind and in fact it has been one of the motivations for me to carry out research and study. When I asked myself again about the purpose of writing this book at the time of writing this preface, several “add on” rea sons that had never occurred to me at the start of writing this book in the spring of 2003 surprisingly came up. Back then, when I was preparing the progress report for the iJADE (2. 0) project, a “fuzzy” idea of whether it was feasible to write a book on intelli gent agents came to my mind. This book not only would discuss and deal with the theory but also the “spin off” applications from the iJADE pro ject, including: the iJADE WeatherMan, the iJADE Stock Advisor, the iJADE Surveillant and the latest works on iJADE Negotiator. The fact that I had to launch the iJADE development kit officially over the Web in the summer of 2003 (http://www. ijadk. org) and to arrange courses and semi nars to teach and train our undergraduate students to make use of this tool kit further supported the idea and the future use of this book. Hence, the “archetype” of this book emerged.

More and more, software systems involve autonomous and distributed software components that have to execute and interact in open and dynamic environments, such as in pervasive, autonomous, and mobile applications. The requirements with respect to dynamics, openness, scalability, and decentralization call for new approaches to software design and development, capable of supporting spontaneous configuration, tolerating partial failures, or arranging adaptive reorganization of the whole system.Inspired by the behaviour of complex natural systems, scientists and engineers have started to adjust their mechanisms and techniques for self-organization and adaption to changing environments. In line with these considerations, Mamei and Zambonelli propose an interaction model inspired by the way masses and particles in our universe move and self-organize according to contextual information represented by gravitational and electromagnetic fields. The key idea is to have the components’ actions driven by computational force fields, generated by the components themselves or by some infrastructures, and propagated across the environment. Together with its supporting middleware infrastructure – available with additional information under http://www.agentgroup.unimore.it – this model can serve as the basis for a general purpose and widely applicable approach for the design and development of adaptive distributed applications.

Since the first edition was published two years ago, much has been done on extend­ ing the work done on SMART to address new and important areas [3-5,54,79,80, 108-110,116,118-120,122]. In this second edition, we have revised, updated and corrected the existing text and added three new chapters. These chapters provide a broader coverage of the fie1d of agents, and show in more detail how the specific framework described can be used to examine other areas. In Chapter 6, we use the concepts of discovery to apply the framework to autonomous interaction in multi­ agent systems; in Chapter 10 we use it for considering normative agents and sys­ tems; and in Chapter 11 we describe work on an implementation and development environment. As a course text, the book can be considered in different parts, as follows. - Chapter I and Chapter 2 offer a basic introduction to agents and their core com­ ponents. - Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 cover relationships between agents and basic notions of cooperation for multi-agent systems. - Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 introduce sociological agents, which are needed for rea­ soning and planning, and their use in reasoning about communication and inter­ action. - Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 each cover different application areas relating to different aspects, inc1uding coordination (through the contract net), agent architecture (through AgentSpeak(L), social dependence networks, and normative systems.

When multiple agents are in a shared environment, there usually exist con­ straints among the possible actions of these agents. A distributed constraint satisfaction problem (distributed CSP) is a problem in which the goal is to find a consistent combination of actions that satisfies these inter-agent constraints. More specifically, a distributed CSP is a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) in which multiple agents are involved. A constraint satisfaction problem is a problem in which the goal is to find a consistent assignment of values to variables. Even though the definition of a CSP is very simple, a surprisingly wide variety of artificial intelligence (AI) problems can be formalized as CSPs. Therefore, the research on CSPs has a long and distinguished history in AI (Mackworth 1992; Dechter 1992; Tsang 1993; Kumar 1992). A distributed CSP is a CSP in which variables and constraints are distributed among multiple autonomous agents. Various application problems in Multi-agent Systems (MAS) that are concerned with finding a consistent combination of agent actions can he formalized as dis­ tributed CSPs. Therefore, we can consid(~r distributed CSPs as a general framework for MAS, and algorithms for solving distributed CSPs as impor­ tant infrastructures for cooperation in MAS. This book gives an overview of the research on distributed CSPs, as well as introductory material on CSPs. In Chapter 1. we show the problem defi­ nition of normal, centralized CSPs and describe algorithms for solving CSPs.

The ability of production companies to rapidly develop and deploy effective and efficient control systems is critical for success in the consumer-driven environment of contemporary manufacturing. This book presents a novel approach to the design of manufacturing control systems, based around the idea of agents, semiautonomous decision makers that cooperate to process goods and meet orders. This new methodology is DACS – Designing Agent-based Control Systems. Developed at DaimlerChrysler’s research labs in Berlin, DACS is the first methodology specifically produced for the design of agent-based control systems. Beginning with a detailed overview of agent technologies, manufacturing control, and design methodologies, the book explains the DACS methodology and illustrates it by way of detailed case studies. The book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in agent systems, manufacturing control, and software methodologies.

“Anything happens must have its own reason ”. Although I cannot really recall exactly when I heard of this statement for the first time, it is always in my mind and in fact it has been one of the motivations for me to carry out research and study. When I asked myself again about the purpose of writing this book at the time of writing this preface, several “add on” rea sons that had never occurred to me at the start of writing this book in the spring of 2003 surprisingly came up. Back then, when I was preparing the progress report for the iJADE (2. 0) project, a “fuzzy” idea of whether it was feasible to write a book on intelli gent agents came to my mind. This book not only would discuss and deal with the theory but also the “spin off” applications from the iJADE pro ject, including: the iJADE WeatherMan, the iJADE Stock Advisor, the iJADE Surveillant and the latest works on iJADE Negotiator. The fact that I had to launch the iJADE development kit officially over the Web in the summer of 2003 (http://www. ijadk. org) and to arrange courses and semi nars to teach and train our undergraduate students to make use of this tool kit further supported the idea and the future use of this book. Hence, the “archetype” of this book emerged.

More and more, software systems involve autonomous and distributed software components that have to execute and interact in open and dynamic environments, such as in pervasive, autonomous, and mobile applications. The requirements with respect to dynamics, openness, scalability, and decentralization call for new approaches to software design and development, capable of supporting spontaneous configuration, tolerating partial failures, or arranging adaptive reorganization of the whole system.Inspired by the behaviour of complex natural systems, scientists and engineers have started to adjust their mechanisms and techniques for self-organization and adaption to changing environments. In line with these considerations, Mamei and Zambonelli propose an interaction model inspired by the way masses and particles in our universe move and self-organize according to contextual information represented by gravitational and electromagnetic fields. The key idea is to have the components’ actions driven by computational force fields, generated by the components themselves or by some infrastructures, and propagated across the environment. Together with its supporting middleware infrastructure – available with additional information under http://www.agentgroup.unimore.it – this model can serve as the basis for a general purpose and widely applicable approach for the design and development of adaptive distributed applications.

Since the first edition was published two years ago, much has been done on extend­ ing the work done on SMART to address new and important areas [3-5,54,79,80, 108-110,116,118-120,122]. In this second edition, we have revised, updated and corrected the existing text and added three new chapters. These chapters provide a broader coverage of the fie1d of agents, and show in more detail how the specific framework described can be used to examine other areas. In Chapter 6, we use the concepts of discovery to apply the framework to autonomous interaction in multi­ agent systems; in Chapter 10 we use it for considering normative agents and sys­ tems; and in Chapter 11 we describe work on an implementation and development environment. As a course text, the book can be considered in different parts, as follows. - Chapter I and Chapter 2 offer a basic introduction to agents and their core com­ ponents. - Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 cover relationships between agents and basic notions of cooperation for multi-agent systems. - Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 introduce sociological agents, which are needed for rea­ soning and planning, and their use in reasoning about communication and inter­ action. - Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 each cover different application areas relating to different aspects, inc1uding coordination (through the contract net), agent architecture (through AgentSpeak(L), social dependence networks, and normative systems.