Blockchain Papers

Zaki Brahmi, Mohamed Mohsen Gammoudi, Malek Ghenima

No abstract is available for this record.

Yiming Zhao

This paper analyzes the development and properties of zero knowledge argument systems in Bare Public Key(BPK) model set, according to the researches and applications of recent years. The generic 4-round mode and 3-round mode are proposed for the constructions of zero knowledge protocols with optimal round complexity, following explorations on the proof techniques of (concurrent) soundness and (resettable) zero knowledge of the protocols. Possible focuses of the near future are discussed.

Zaki Brahmi, Mohamed Mohsen Gammoudi

No abstract is available for this record.

Cristiano Castelfranchi

This chapter presents organizations as a macro-micro notion and device; they presuppose autonomous proactive entities (agents) playing the organizational roles. Agents may have their own powers, goals, relationships (of dependence, trust, etc.). This opens important issues to be discussed: Does cooperation require mentally shared plans? Which is the relationship between individual powers and role powers; personal dependencies and role dependencies; personal goals and assigned goals; personal beliefs and what we have to assume when playing our role; individual actions and organizational actions? What about possible conflicts, deviations, power abuse, given the agents’ autonomy? MultiAgentSystems discipline should both aim at scientifically modeling human organizations, and at designing effective artificial organizations. Our claim is that for both those aims, one should model a high (risky) degree of flexibility, exploiting autonomy and pro-activity, intelligence and decentralized knowledge of roleplayers, allowing for functional violations of requests and even of rules.Request access from your librarian to read this chapter's full text.

Mark Burgess, Siri Fagernes

No abstract is available for this record.

Don Perugini, Dennis Jarvis, Stefan Reschke, Don Gossink

Military operations typically involve cooperation of various military, government and commercial organizations from various nations. In order to coordinate these autonomous organizations, a social mechanism is required that facilitates deliberative planning and task allocation in decentralized, open and dynamic environments, and enables agreements via a legal contracting process. In this paper, we present (a component of) such a mechanism, called the legal agreement protocol (LAP). Agents that plan using LAP must plan with partial observability that is the customer is only aware of proposals (capabilities) that suppliers choose to send. This makes it difficult for the customer to determine the (minimum/average) expected cost of any unallocated sub-tasks in its search. In this paper, we present and compare various heuristics that allow the customer to dynamically determine the expected cost for sub-tasks as proposals are received during planning. We show that different heuristics have tradeoffs in terms of quality of solution and search effort (efficiency of search and quantity of communication). The number of distributed agents involved in planning also influences the effort required to search. More agents increase communication, but provide more information (observability) about agents' capabilities to be utilized by the heuristics

Jennings, Nick, Robert Johnston, Wright, Andy

The move from platform centric planning to network enabled capability poses not only organizational challenges but also challenges to the technology that will be needed to enable networked operations. Within this context, this paper outlines the central role that autonomous software agents, that coordinate their activities in flexible ways, have to play in providing robust system solutions. The major research challenges are addressed in order to take this promising technology forward and to make it suitable for NEC application. The interactions of the various autonomous agents within the system, that are necessary in order to achieve their individual and collective aims, can be analyzed and designed using techniques from Game Theory and Mechanism Design. Game theory is exploited because it has developed powerful tools for analyzing decision making in decentralized open systems with multiple autonomous agents. Recently, these tools have been tailored to computational settings to provide a principled foundation for building multiple agent systems. This tailoring gives rise to the field of computational mechanism design.

M. Georgoudakis, Christos Alexakos, Αθανάσιος Καλογεράς, John Gialelis · 5 authors

This paper presents a distributed system architecture that is based on the prominent industrial standard ANSI / ISA-95 and utilizes ontologies and web services in an attempt to address the challenge of interoperability in the industrial enterprise environment in an efficient way. Work presented in this paper is partly financed by the PABADIS'PROMISE project framework (FP6-IST-016649). This paper proposes an agent-based approach, which assisted by an appropriate ontology attempts to match the properties of information agents and the generic requirements of the industrial automation domain in order to address automation information handling problems. The novelty of the approach lies in the utilization of ontological descriptions of the resources and the processes invoked by intelligent agents, while it couples production - related processes with shop floor equipment via standard Device Description Language, avoiding ad-hoc implementations. The benefits of this approach are optimal interoperability among the agents and adaptability in dealing with considerable changes in the industrial environment. Although ontological description of resources is hardly a new concept, the problem associated with this approach is the ad hoc methodology of description usually followed which renders the ontology to a dictionary usable only within the boundaries of the enterprise, thus of limited interoperability. The proposed framework is based on emerging web technologies such as Web Services, Ontology Web Language (OWL) and JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) agent platform while it introduces the following features: - ANSI / ISA 95 (2) based ontology implementation is used in order to model knowledge within the industrial environment domain.

Zeng Guangping, Lu Qingling, Zhang Shumin, Ming Chen · 5 authors

Based on intelligent autonomous decentralized systems(IADS) and SoftMan,an organization structural model of softMan community is designed.SM.man management function,management and control strategy and coordination running mechanism are expounded.Characteristics of coordination control and forms of SoftMan Crowd are analyzed and partial-global planning(PGP) coordination control strategy is put forward.PGP may avoid task redundancy between nodes through intercommunion.Each node maintains its PGP and coordinates their behavior by PGP independently and asynchronously so as to accomplish the global task.

M. Oku, M. Omura, J. Kann, Mario Perrone · 5 authors

An automation system architecture for implementing autonomous decentralized systems (ADSs) called Hi-Cell is described. A project model of human organization featuring activities such as teaming is proposed as an analog for Hi-Cell behavior. Familiar team behaviors such as task allocation, learning, and cooperation are explored in the automation domain.>

A. Yavnai

This paper presents a new distributed decentralized architecture for the organization, command, control and communication (C/sup 3/) of multiple agent system which has to execute a mission, cooperatively and autonomously. This architecture can be applied to multiple unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), to unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), as well as to unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), unmanned space vehicles (USVs) or to any other types of autonomous cooperative multiple agent systems. The rationale for autonomous cooperative operation of a multiple agent system, stems from the need to execute critical missions under time, space resources and availability constraints, which are beyond the capability of a single agent to perform successfully. If the system agents are distributed geographically, cooperative operation is a reasonable approach. It supports share of information, share of resources, efficient resource allocation, context and situation driven responsiveness, robustness and flexibility under changing conditions, as well as redundancy. A key feature of the proposed architecture is that all the agents are identical in their sensing, information processing, decision making, communication and mission related capabilities. Thus, a failed agent can be functionally replaced by a peer agent. The architecture is both distributed and decentralized. It is implemented via four major building blocks, which are embedded within each agent.

Hajime Asama, Koichi OZAKI, Yuji Ishida, Kazutaka Yokota · 7 authors

As a flexible and robust intelligent robot system, we have been developing an autonomous and decentralized robot system called ACTRESS, which is composed of multiple robotic agents. In this paper, introducing an idea of cooperative action with group organization and a strategy for cooperative task processing using communication, a method for team organization by efficient negotiation is presented. The efficient negotiation is realized by a newly developed communication functionality called groupcast and a learning mechanism utilizing historical records on past negotiation. The negotiation procedures for team organization are implemented, and as a result of simulation experiments, the efficiency of the learning mechanism is verified.>

Sanda Mandutianu, Fred Y. Hadaegh, P. Elliot

Concerns use of spacecraft as autonomous coordinated teams. Generalized reasoning capability offered by advanced distributed software technology and AI can cope with unexpected events and uncertainty, and so close the loop of perception, decision and eventually deliberation. The team members play interchangeable roles and negotiate about the task. We present a multi-agent system to provide a high degree of autonomy and support for coordination among team members. We use JPL formation flying mission initial architectures as benchmark. Our target is to avoid inconsistencies/disagreements between two or more participants in a collaborative context, increase the system's fault tolerance in cases such as loss of a member while the system still operates reliably. We address cooperation between collaborating independent autonomous agents. In a top-down organization agents are coordinated hierarchically, where the agents at the top of the hierarchy make the majority of the intelligent group decisions. In a more structured but still hierarchical organization, lower-level agents exercise more intelligence. A lower-level agent can advance a plan for the others to follow, and a higher-rank agent decides on the best plans. Although more rigid, the centralized intelligence organization allows for less communication among agents, so is more straightforward to implement. The decentralized approach requires more communication, but the intelligence is truly distributed, which makes for a more flexible, adaptive and efficient organization.

Pietro Baroni, Massimiliano Giacomin

Argumentation is receiving an increasing attention as a technique for practical and uncertain reasoning underlying the realization of intelligent autonomous agents. Since a decentralized organization has been proposed by several authors as an appropriate paradigm for the design of agent architectures, we propose in this article, a distributed approach to argumentation, in which several independent asynchronous processes carry out argumentation activity, by exploiting local information only. The final result of this process is the computation of the defeat status of the arguments: we devise a general distributed algorithm, which does not rely on any specific notion of defeat between arguments. The issue of coordination has been explicitly tackled by ensuring the property of self-stabilization for the algorithm. A proof of its correctness, as well as an analysis of its complexity, is provided.

Mark d’Inverno, G. Flucke

No abstract is available for this record.

S. Covaci

The first question addressed in the paper is "Why and how agent technology supports the design and implementation of Autonomous Decentralised Systems?" Subsequently, based on the main characteristics of the intelligent and mobile agents we assess the specific support agent technology collectively can offer. Finally a glimpse into the future of this technology is given. A critical evaluation of the agent technology vs. the traditional distributed object technology and RPC is undertaken throughout the paper in order to foresee possible introduction and evolution scenarios. The paper merely focuses on the aspects relevant to the providers of infoware technology, frameworks and products.

Frank Dignum, G.J.P.M. Houben

This paper describes a new approach to design modern information systems that offer an integrated access to the data and knowledge that is available in local applications. By integrating the local data management activities into one transparent information distribution process, modern organizations can offer better support for its workers in the execution and coordination of their work activities. Observing practical applications of decentralized, autonomous and heterogeneous information systems we see deficiencies in currently available approaches to model such information systems. They do not acknowledge the pivotal role that (informal) communicating workers play in the context of an entire organization. The interaction between the members of social and informal groups of employees makes it possible that (in many of today’s information-intensive enterprises) the local structured procedures can be effectively and flexibly integrated into global work processes supporting the business goals. Traditional design techniques concentrate on either the structured local procedures (and its local database applications), the structured global process (and its global business goals), or the informal (less structured) communication between individuals. We suggest to combine an activity-based model (suited to describe the structured parts of the processes) with a goal- or conversation-based model to tie the different elements together. Using an agent architecture we show that it is possible to implement this integrated approach. The different types of cooperating agents support the individual workers by assessing the goal of the activity, the applicability of the standard procedure, and the availability of alternative knowledge and information in order to supply the necessary information.

Grzegorz Dobrowolski

No abstract is available for this record.

Ian Finch, Frans Coenen, Trevor Bench‐Capon, M. J. R. Shave

No abstract is available for this record.

丹奈子 牧野, Ninako Makino

No abstract is available for this record.

Daniel D. Corkill, Victor Lesser

Distributed problem solving networks provide an interesting application area for high-level network coordination through the use of organizational structuring. We describe a decentralized approach to the coordination of these networks that relies on each node making sophisticated local activity decisions. Each node is guided by a high-level strategic plan for cooperation among nodes in the network and must balance its own perceptions of appropriate problems solving activity with activities deemed important by other nodes. The high-level strategic plan, which is a form of meta-level control, is represented as a network organizational structure specifying in a general way the information and control relationships among the nodes. In addition to its application to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, this research has implications for organizing and controlling complex knowledge-based systems that involve semi-autonomous problem solving agents.