ics 806-Week 1

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

1/15

September 2009 UONBI, School of Compuing andInformatics, by Elisha Opiyo

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

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

2/15


MOTIVATION- traditionally

MAN MACHINES

(Lever, Car,Airplane, Computer)

Some Effort

More work done out ofmagnified effort

MANCOMPUTERS

Data, processing needs

Information, more processingability

COMPUTERS

(traditional software/ hardwareengineering)

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

3/15


MOTIVATION- ideally

MAN MACHINES

(Automatedmachines; robots)

Make Requests

Perform every request

MANCOMPUTERS

(Agent Orientedsoftware / hardwareengineering)

Make Requests

Agents figure out the needs

and perform the requests

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

4/15


MOTIVATION- Software Engineering

Old/Traditional

SoftwareEngineer

Development Tools

(Structured Programming; ObjectOriented Programming; Intelligenceis acceptable but not important)

Assembled structured components

or objects do most of the work

New SoftwareEngineer

Development Tools

(Agents; Intelligence is importantvia reasoning, communication,and interactions)

Agents do most of the work

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

5/15


MOTIVATION-THE BIGQUESTION

HOW CAN WE DEVELOP ICT

BASED SYSTEMS USINGAGENTS?????

(Vital Insights will be gained fromthis course)

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

6/15


DEFINITIONS

Artificial intelligence

Russel&Novig(1995) summarizes the views:---- field of study in which people attempt to makecomputers that

think like human beings; act like people (do things requiringintelligence/currently good at);

rationally think are made (replicate mentalfaculties using computational models-perceive

reason and act);. rationally act;

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

7/15


DEFINITIONS

AgentSeveral views exist on what an agent really is:---software or software/hardware ------ autonomous (act relatively independently)

..characterized by autonomy, mobility, reactivenes, proactiveness andintelligence. Examples include Internet search engines and robots (Brenner etal(1998)).----components of software or hardware, which are capable of acting exactingly inorder to accomplish tasks on behalf of their users. Examples: Internet SearchEngines, 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 actand react like humans, animals, ants, some Internet software, computationalprocesses in operating systems context, etc (Russel & Novig(1995)).

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

8/15


DEFINITIONS

Multi-agent system

---- a system of agents which interact with one anotherthrough cooperation, competition, coordination ornegotiation (Wooldridge(2002)).

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

---- an organization of coordinated autonomous agents .

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

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

9/15


DEFINITIONS

Distributed artificial intelligence (DAI)

--a branch of AI or a field of study thatexamines the construction and application of

systems in which several interacting,intelligent agents pursue some set of goals or

perform some set of tasks.

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

10/15



CHARACTERISTICS OF AGENTS

Agent characteristicsAutonomy-acting independently & exercise control over their internal state.Reactiveness. -reactivesystem- interacts with its environment; responds to

changes that occur in it.

Proactiveness. -generating and attempting to achieve goals due to on ownintiative eg as a result of recognizing opportunities.

Social Ability. -take others into account when trying to achieve goalssometimes 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.

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

11/15



Characteristics of multi-agent systems1. each agent has incomplete information2. control is decentralized3. data is decentralized4. computation is asynchronous

Some characteristics of multi-agent systems applicationsinherent 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 singlesystem

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

12/15



Advantages of multi-agent systems-

Lead to the realization of increased:

speed and efficiency

robustness and reliability

scalability and flexibility

reusability/ cost

distributed environment

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

13/15


Agent applicationsMany applications areas including: electronic commerce; real time monitoring

and control of networks; modeling and control of transportation systems;information handling; automatic meeting scheduling; industrial manufacturingand production; electronic entertainment; re-engineering of information flow inlarge organizations; investigation of complex social phenomena such asevolution of roles, norms and organizational structures.

Application Domains Areas :distributed/concurrent systems;networks;

human-computer interfaces.

Application Domain 1: Distributed SystemsAgents are seen as a natural metaphor.

Example domains: air traffic control (Sydney airport); business processmanagement; power systems management; distributed sensing; space shuttlefault diagnosis; factory process control.

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

14/15


Agent applications

Domain 2: Networks-mobileagents - can move around a network (e.g., the Internet) operating on ausers behalf.-TELESCRIPT language developed by General Magic, Inc, for remoteprogramming.

Applications include: hand-held PDAs with limited bandwidth; informationgathering.

Domain 3: HCI-use of agent in interfaces.-avoid direct manipulationparadigm 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;

8/14/2019 ics 806-Week 1

15/15


Other application areasTour 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 theservices provided by search/indexing agents such as LYCOS and InfoSeek.

FAQ-finders: -agents direct users to FAQ documents in order to answerspecific questions. Since FAQS tend to be knowledge intensive, structureddocuments, 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

meanby this search, or what you really want. Expertise finders try tounderstand the users wants and the contents of information services, in orderto provide a better information provision service.

ics 806-Week 1

Documents

Transcript of ics 806-Week 1