Interaction Monitoring and Termination Detection for Agent Societies: Preliminary Results

  • Tshiamo Motshegwa
  • Michael Schroeder
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 3071)

Abstract

For large-scale and complex societies of agents monitoring and control are important to both agent designers and society administrators. Specifically, interaction monitoring and termination detection are of importance in optimising performance of a system and keeping users up-to-date on progress. Both monitoring and termination detection are well-studied problems for distributed object systems. In this paper, we investigate how these approaches can be applied to agent systems. We present a novel algorithm, which takes advantage of a monitor’s additional information on partial behaviour specifications of the agents to derive observable termination criteria. We sketch an implementation and qualitatively compare our novel algorithm to the existing distributed systems approaches and propose future experimental work.

Keywords

Multiagent System Termination Detection Agent Society Detection Delay Auction House 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. 1.
    Pitt, J., Mamdani, A.: A protocol-based semantics for an agent communication language. In: Proceedings 16th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence IJCAI 1999, Stockholm, Sweden, pp. 486–491. Morgan-Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco (1999)Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Weiss, G. (ed.): Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence. MIT Press, Cambridge (1999)Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    Genesereth, M., Ketchpel, S.: Software agents. Communications of the ACM 37, 48–53 (1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  4. 4.
    Labrou, Y., Finin, T.: Semantics and conversations for an agent communication language. In: Pollack, M.E. (ed.) Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artifical Intelligence (IJCAI 1997), San Mateo, CA, USA, pp. 584–591. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco (1997)Google Scholar
  5. 5.
    FIPA: Specification part 2 agent communication language (1997)Google Scholar
  6. 6.
    Wooldridge, M.: Semantic issues in verification of agent communication languages. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 3 (2000)Google Scholar
  7. 7.
    Venkatraman, M., Singh, M.: Verifying compliance with commitment protocols. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2, 217–236 (1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  8. 8.
    Chaib-draa, B., Dignum, F.: Trends in agent communication language. Computational Intelligence 2(5) (2002)Google Scholar
  9. 9.
    Friedman, D., Rust, J.: The Double Auction Market, Institutions, Theories, and Evidence. Addison Wesley Longman, Amsterdam (1993)Google Scholar
  10. 10.
    Mattern, F.: Global quiescence detection based on credit distribution and recovery. Information Processing Letters 30, 195–200 (1989)CrossRefMathSciNetGoogle Scholar
  11. 11.
    Mattern, F.: Algorithms for distributed termination detection. Distributed Computing 2, 161–175 (1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  12. 12.
    Babaoglu, O., Marzullo, K.: Consistent global states of distributed systems: Fundamental concepts and mechanisms. In: Mullender, S. (ed.) Distributed Systems, pp. 55–96. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1993)Google Scholar
  13. 13.
    Dijkstra, E., Scholten, C.: Termination detection for diffusing computations. Information Processing Letters 11, 1–4 (1980)MATHCrossRefMathSciNetGoogle Scholar
  14. 14.
    Tel, G.: Distributed control for AI. Technical Report UU-CS-1998-17, ICS, Information Computing Sciences, University of Utrecht,Netherlands (1998)Google Scholar
  15. 15.
    Dijkstra, E.W., Feijen, W.H.J., van Gasteren, A.J.M.: Derivation of a termination detection algorithm for distributed computations. Information Processing Letters 16, 217–219 (1983)CrossRefMathSciNetGoogle Scholar
  16. 16.
    Singh, M.: On the semantics of protocols among distributed intelligent agents. Technical Report TM-91-09, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (1991)Google Scholar
  17. 17.
    Noriega, P.: Agent mediated auctions: The Fishmarket Metaphor. PhD thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (1997)Google Scholar
  18. 18.
    Tel, G.: 13. In: Introduction To Distributed Algorithms, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2000)Google Scholar
  19. 19.
    Bellifemine, F., Poggi, A., Rimassa, G.: Jade: A FIPA-compliant agent framework. In: PAAM 1999, pp. 97–108 (1999)Google Scholar
  20. 20.
    Vitaglione, G., Quarta, F., Cortese, E.: Scalability and performance of JADE message transport system. In: AAMAS Workshop on AgentCities, Bologna (2002)Google Scholar
  21. 21.
    Wellman, M., Walsh, W.: Distributed quiescence detection in multiagent negotiation. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Multiagent Systems (2000)Google Scholar
  22. 22.
    Mockapetris, P.: RFC 1034: Domain names - concepts and facilities. Technical report, ISI, NetWorking Group (1987)Google Scholar
  23. 23.
    Birman, K.: The process group approach to reliable distributed computing. Communications of the ACM 36, 37–53 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  24. 24.
    Hagel, J., Roth, A. (eds.): Handbook of Experimental Economics. Princenton University Press, Princenton (1995)Google Scholar
  25. 25.
    Tel, G., Mattern, F.: The derivation of distributed termination detection algorithms from garbage collection schemes. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 15, 1–35 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004

Authors and Affiliations

  • Tshiamo Motshegwa
    • 1
  • Michael Schroeder
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of ComputingCity University London 

Personalised recommendations