MSC COMPUTER SCIENCE

ICS 806 - MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS

The main topics of the week:
1. Course objectives
2. Motivation
3. Definitions
1. Artificial intelligence
2. Agent
3. Multi-agent system
4. Distributed Artificial Intelligence
4. Agent characteristics
5. Advantages of multi-agent systems
6. Agent applications
September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing and
Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
 MOTIVATION- traditionally

Some Effort

MAN MACHINES
(Lever, Car,
More work done out of
Airplane, Computer)
magnified effort

Data, processing needs

COMPUTERS
MAN
(traditional software
/ hardware
Information, more processing engineering)
ability
September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing and
Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
 MOTIVATION- ideally

Make Requests

MAN MACHINES
(Automated
Perform every request
machines; robots)

Make Requests

COMPUTERS
MAN
(Agent Oriented
software / hardware
Agents figure out the needs engineering)
and perform the requests
September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing and
Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
 MOTIVATION- Software Engineering

Old/Traditional Development Tools

Software (Structured Programming; Object
Engineer Oriented Programming; Intelligence
is acceptable but not important)
Assembled structured components
or objects do most of the work

Development Tools
New Software
Engineer (Agents; Intelligence is important
via reasoning, communication,
and interactions)

September 2009
Agents do most of the work
UONBI, School of Compuing and
Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
 MOTIVATION-THE BIG
QUESTION

HOW CAN WE DEVELOP ICT

BASED SYSTEMS USING
AGENTS?????
(Vital Insights will be gained from
this course)
September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing and
Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
 DEFINITIONS

Artificial intelligence
Russel&Novig(1995) summarizes the views:
---- field of study in which people attempt to make
computers that…
• …think like human beings;
• …act like people (do things requiring
intelligence/currently good at);
• …rationally think are made (replicate mental
faculties using computational models-perceive
reason and act);
•…. rationally act; UONBI, School of Compuing and
September 2009
Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
 DEFINITIONS
Agent
Several views exist on what an agent really is:
---software or software/hardware ------ autonomous (act relatively independently)
…..characterized by autonomy, mobility, reactivenes, proactiveness and
intelligence. Examples include Internet search engines and robots (Brenner et
al(1998)).
-
---components of software or hardware, which are capable of acting exactingly in
order to accomplish tasks on behalf of their users. Examples: Internet Search
Engines, Robots, etc (Nwana(1996)).

---objects in the environment -- perceive and react to states in the environment.

Examples: any thing for which an environment can be specified and that can act
and react like humans, animals, ants, some Internet software, computational
processes in operating systems context, etc (Russel & Novig(1995)).

September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing and

Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
 DEFINITIONS

Multi-agent system
---- a system … of agents which interact with one another
through cooperation, competition, coordination or
negotiation (Wooldridge(2002)).

---- a system of several agents ( implied) (Sycara(1998)).

---- an organization of coordinated autonomous agents ….

interact in order to achieve common goals (Georgini et
al.(2001)).
---- a group of agents that can interact (Vlassis(2003)).

September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing and

Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
 DEFINITIONS

Distributed artificial intelligence (DAI)

--a branch of AI or a field of study … that

examines the construction and application of
systems in which several interacting,
intelligent agents pursue some set of goals or
perform some set of tasks.

September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing and

Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
 ICS 806 - MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS

CHARACTERISTICS OF AGENTS

Agent characteristics
Autonomy- acting independently & exercise control over their internal state.
Reactiveness. -reactive system- interacts with its environment; responds to
changes that occur in it.

Proactiveness. -generating and attempting to achieve goals due to on own

intiative eg as a result of recognizing opportunities.

Social Ability. -take others into account when trying to achieve goals
sometimes through cooperation, negotiation etc.

Mobility. – ability to move around network platforms.

Veracity. – avoid communicating false information knowingly.
Benevolence. -conflicting goals; always try to do what it is asked.
Rationality. -act in order to achieve its goals subject to beliefs.
Learning/adaptation. - can improve performance over time.
Personality – have distinct personality- behaviour, name, role.
September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing and
Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
 ICS 806 - MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS

Characteristics of multi-agent systems

1. each agent has incomplete information
2. control is decentralized
3. data is decentralized
4. computation is asynchronous

Some characteristics of multi-agent systems applications

inherent distribution
geographical
temporal

semantics- new ontology and languages may be needed

functional – new cognitive capabilities may be needed

inherent complexity- problems are too large to be solved by a single

system

September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing and

Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
 ICS 806 - MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS

Advantages of multi-agent systems-

Lead to the realization of increased:

•speed and efficiency

•robustness and reliability

•scalability and flexibility

•reusability/ cost

•distributed environment

September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing and

Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
Agent applications
Many applications areas including: electronic commerce; real time monitoring
and control of networks; modeling and control of transportation systems;
information handling; automatic meeting scheduling; industrial manufacturing
and production; electronic entertainment; re-engineering of information flow in
large organizations; investigation of complex social phenomena such as
evolution of roles, norms and organizational structures.

Application Domains Areas :

•distributed/concurrent systems;
•networks;
•human-computer interfaces.

Application Domain 1: Distributed Systems

Agents are seen as a natural metaphor.
Example domains: air traffic control (Sydney airport); business process
management; power systems management; distributed sensing; space shuttle
fault diagnosis; factory process control.

September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing and

Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
 Agent applications
Domain 2: Networks
-mobile agents - can move around a network (e.g., the Internet) operating on a
user’s behalf.
-TELESCRIPT language developed by General Magic, Inc, for remote
programming.

Applications include: hand-held PDAs with limited bandwidth; information

gathering.

Domain 3: HCI
-use of agent in interfaces.
-avoid direct manipulation paradigm that has dominated for so long.
- Agents sit ‘over’ applications, watching, learning, and eventually doing things
without being told — taking the initiative.
Pioneering work at MIT Media Lab (Pattie Maes): news reader; web browsers;
mail readers.

Read agents on the internet - scenarios;

Maes’ MAXIMS – e-mail reading assistant;
September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing and
Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo
Other application areas
Tour guides: - agents that help to answer the question ‘where do I go next’
when browsing the internet.

Indexing agents: - agents provide an extra layer of abstraction on top of the

services provided by search/indexing agents such as LYCOS and InfoSeek.

FAQ-finders: - agents direct users to FAQ documents in order to answer

specific questions. Since FAQS tend to be knowledge intensive, structured
documents, there is a lot of potential for automated FAQ servers.

Expertise finders: - agents locate experts of a given field;

Suppose I want to know about people interested in temporal belief logics.
Current WWW search tools would simply take the 3 words ‘temporal’, ‘belief’,
‘logic’, and search on them. This is not ideal: LYCOS has no model of what you
mean by this search, or what you really want. Expertise finders ‘try to
understand the users wants and the contents of information services’, in order
to provide a better information provision service.

September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing and

Informatics, by Elisha Opiyo