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The Entity-Operation Model for Practical Multi-entity Deployment

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Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14378))

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Abstract

In the world of multi-agent system (MAS) frameworks, developers are many times forced into a fixed and reduced array of abstractions, with limited options in expressive modeling of all the components of a MAS. For instance, in JADE, the most popular agent framework, developers are limited to using agents as sole abstraction for all elements of the MAS. These limitations hinder interoperability, the deployment of open, heterogeneous systems, and the use of agents in complex scenarios involving a great variety of elements such as physical devices, context managers, services, and communication infrastructures.

We introduce the entity-operation model for multi-agent systems, as an approach to integrate all elements in the MAS deployment as first-class entities in the MAS model, to support heterogeneity and flexibility in the implementation, and to achieve context-aware access control to the functionalities offered by entities.

We present a formalization of the model, together with mechanisms for authorizing operations and for routing operation calls in the MAS. We discuss the entity-operation model in relation to other existing MAS frameworks, and we give insight into implementation challenges which arose when integrating the model with the Flash-mas framework.

This work was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS - UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2021-1422, within PNCDI III. This work has been partially funded by UEFISCDI project Cornet (1/2018, PN-III-P3-3.6-H2020-2016-0120).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Fast and Lightweight Multi-Agent Shell. The source code is available at https://github.com/andreiolaru-ro/FLASH-MAS.

  2. 2.

    Semantic triple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University Politehnica of Bucharest, 313 Splaiul Independentei, 060042, Bucharest, Romania

    Andrei Olaru, Gabriel Nicolae & Adina Magda Florea

Authors
  1. Andrei Olaru
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  2. Gabriel Nicolae
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  3. Adina Magda Florea
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Correspondence to Andrei Olaru .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of St.Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Andrei Ciortea

  2. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Mehdi Dastani

  3. Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Jieting Luo

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Olaru, A., Nicolae, G., Florea, A.M. (2023). The Entity-Operation Model for Practical Multi-entity Deployment. In: Ciortea, A., Dastani, M., Luo, J. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14378. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48539-8_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48539-8_17

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-48539-8

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