Towards a Real›Time Multi›Agent System Architecture

2002

The use of the agent/multi-agent system paradigm has increased sharply as an important field of research within the Artificial Intelligence area. In recent times, the application of this paradigm seems appropriate for solving complex problems which require intelligence and bounded response times. This paper presents Simba : an architecture based on Artis agents as its main component for the development of real-time multi-agent systems. The Artis agent architecture guarantees an agent response that satisfies all its critical temporal restrictions in a real-time environment. The main feature of Simba systems is their applicability for complex, distributed, real-time domains. The architecture allows the communication among agents taking into account their hard temporal restrictions.

The agent/multi-agent system paradigm is an important field inside Artificial Intelligence. The use of this paradigm in real-world problems and the existence of development methods and related toolkits are currently two of the main lines of interest in this area. In order to try to solve these problems, it is necessary to develop and make use of agent/multi-agent architectures and development tools. This paper presents a development method for real-time multi-agent systems, called RT-MESSAGE, and an implementation toolkit, called InSiDE+. The developed systems are based on the SIMBA architecture.

Proceedings. Fifth International Workshop on Object-Oriented Real-Time Dependable Systems, 2000

Applications such as military training simulations, and electronic commerce can benefit from the flexible and responsive nature of multi-agent systems. These applications have inherent timing constraints on the operations and interactions that the agents might perform. This paper presents a real-time agent architecture in which agents communicate, cooperate, coordinate and negotiate to meet the goals of a particular application under specified timing constraints. The architecture provides a real-time CORBA layer to handle underlying real-time communication. It also has a real-time agent communication layer in which agents interact via a real-time extension of a well-known agent communication language.

Over the last few years more complex techniques have been used to develop hard real-time systems, and the multi-agent system paradigm seems to be an appropriate approach to be applied in this area. The temporal restrictions of these systems made necessary to build agents architectures that satisfy these restrictions. A formal Agent architecture to model hard-real time systems is proposed in this paper. A prototype that follows this agent architecture and works in a hard real-time environment has been implemented. Finally, a study case is described to show the design agent process.

Expert Systems With Applications, 2008

This paper presents a multi-agent architecture that facilitates the development of real-time multi-agent systems based on the SIMBA 10 approach. The approach allows the integration of unbounded deliberative processes with critical real-time tasks. CBP-BDI deliberative 11 agents collaborate with ARTIS agents in order to solve real-time problems efficiently. The proposal has been successfully tested and eval-12 uated in a case study based on the use of mobile robots for mail delivery. 13

Proceedings of the fourth …, 2000

In this paper we present AMSIA, an agent architecture that combines the possibility of using different reasoning methods with a mechanism to control the resources needed by the agent to fulfill its high level objectives. The architecture is based on the blackboard paradigm which offers the possibility of combining different reasoning techniques and opportunistic behavior. The AMSIA architecture adds a representation of plans of objectives allowing different reasoning activities to create plans to guide the ...

2002

The task at hand is the design and implementation of real-time agents that are situated in a changeful, unpredictable, and time-constrained environment. Based on Neisser's human cognition model, we propose an architecture for real-time agents. This architecture consists of three components, namely perception, cognition, and action, which can be realized as a set of concurrent administrator and worker processes. These processes communicate and synchronize with one another for real-time performance.

2002

The application of multi-agent systems to real-time environments is an interesting line of work that can provide new solutions to very complex and restrictive systems such as real-time systems. A suitable method for real-time multi-agent system development must take into account the intrinsic characteristics of systems of this type. This work presents an approach for the development of real-time multi-agent systems. The proposed method is called RT-MESSAGE and is based on the MESSAGE methodology.

Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2008

The purpose of this paper is to present an approach for integrating new complex deliberative behaviours in a real-time agent architecture, specifically in the ARTIS agent architecture, which is specially designed for hard real-time environments. The new deliberative agent proposed remakes its plans at runtime conserving the system integrity and its real-time feature. The proposed system has been successfully tested in a robotic test environment. This environment consisted of the automated management of the internal and external mail in a department plant, where the main goal was to ease the workload of a mail-robot. The results obtained increased the flexibility and adaptability of the real-time agent while retaining the temporal restrictions. r

AAAI-Spring Symposium on Real-Time …, 2000

Providing an environment for a software agent to execute is very similar to building an operating system for the execution of general purpose applications. In the same fashion that an operating system provides a set of services for the execution of a user request, an agent framework provides a similar set of services for the execution of agent actions. Such services include the ability to communicate with other agents, maintaining the current state of an executing agent, and selecting an execution path from a set of possible execution paths. The particular focus of this paper is the study of Soft Real-Time agent scheduling in the context of a framework for the execution of intelligent software agents; a characterization of agent performance; and development of an environment for testing and comparing the performance of agent activities. The agent architecture used for this study, DECAF (Distributed Environment Centered Agent Framework), is a software toolkit for the rapid design, development, and execution of \intelligent" agents to achieve solutions in complex software systems. Unlike a traditional operating system, DE-CAF has the ability to reason about action execution if a characterization of action performance is available. Also featured in DECAF is the ability to reason about deadlines and other commitments. In this sense DE-CAF supports the idea of \soft" real time execution of tasks. To achieve this, the concept of execution pro les and a characterization of agent execution that will lead to optimal or near optimal scheduling of agent execution is presented. This paper will discuss how an agent architecture di ers from an operating system, the essential details of the of the agent execution framework, a formal model of the parameters used for scheduling considerations and how the agent architecture has been enhanced to provide real-time servicing of agent requests.