SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP REPORTS
SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP REPORTS
Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce Carles Sierra
Agent Based Social Simulation Scott Moss
Intelligent and Mobile Agents in Telecommunications and the Internet
www.agentlink.org
issue
issue
7
7
news
June 2001E-Commerce Feature
Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce at HP Labs Bristol
Chris Preist
Current FIPA initiatives
Protecting what your agent is doing
Stefan Poslad, Patricia Charlton and Monique Calisti
contents
CONFERENCE REPORT
Convention of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB ’01)
Eduardo Alonso, Simon Colton and Daniel Kudenko
University of York, UK Labs, Bristol Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol
SIG REPORT
The Agent Based Social Simulation Special Interest Group Meeting, Amsterdam,
SIG REPORT
The Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC) Special Interest Group meeting, Amsterdam
SIG REPORT
Special Interest Group on Intelligent and Mobile Agents in Telecommunications and the Internet—A letter from the coordinator
NEWS
Redesign of AgentLink Website: Call for Information and Feedback
CALENDAR
Scott Moss
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Michael Luck AgentLink, UK Elizabeth Coulter-Smith AgentLink, UK Carles Sierra IIIA-CSIC, Spain Volker Roth
Fraunhofer IGD, Darmstadt, Germany
FEATURE
Protecting What Your Agent Is Doing Stefan Poslad, Patricia Charlton and Monique Calisti
Queen Mary, University of London; Centre de Recherche de Motorola, Paris; Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne.
SITE REPORT
Multi-Agent Research at the Gerstner Lab
NEWS
The Third European Agent Systems Summer School: Prague
Vladimir Marik and Olga Stepankova
Czech Technical University, Prague
7-11 19-20 12 22 13-15 16-17 21 17-18 23
Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce
at HP Labs, Bristol
lectronic commerce is having a revolutionary effect on business. It is changing the way business-es interact with consumers, as well as the way they interact with each other. Electronic interactions are increasing the efficiency of purchasing, and are a l l o w i n g
increased reach across a global market. E-commerce is not a static field, but is con-stantly evolving to dis-cover new and more effective ways of
sup-porting business. Initially, e-commerce involved the use of EDI and intranets to set up long-term relationships between suppliers and purchasers. This increased the efficiency and speed of purchasing, but resulted in lock-in in the relationship. Both suppliers and purchasers had to invest significantly up-front in the relationship, so were not easily able to move their business elsewhere. The technological relationship between the parties was a friction factor, preventing free competition in the longer term. Often, the relationship was (and still is) beneficial to both parties. However, the lock-in effect also meant that
when the relationship became less beneficial to one party, they couldn’t easily move elsewhere.
The second phase of e-commerce aimed to address this prob-lem. With the increasing availability of the web, a more open e-commerce environment is developing, allowing businesses to trade more flexibly with each other. Some of this openness is achieved by competition between web portals, while some competition occurs within a single web portal, acting as a mar-ketplace for buyers and sellers to meet. Some of the efficiencies of EDI can now be achieved in a more open environment,
where relationships no longer need to be long-term.
However, there is a benefit of the EDI approach that is often lost in this new phase. Price negotiation was carried out in advance in the EDI world, so purchasing can be entirely auto-mated. When a manufacturing planning and forecast system identifies the need for a purchase, it can initiate it automatical-ly without any human involvement, increasing speed and effi-ciency. In phase two, each purchase may involve interaction with a new supplier, and so may involve new negotiation of terms. As a result of this, many of these purchases can’t be
E
HP Labs, Bristol
[email protected]
Hewlett Packard Labs
Bristol, UK
Chris Preist
Agent technology is a key enabling component in
bringing about Hewlett-Packard’s e-services vision,
and for that reason, HP Labs is making significant
investments research in this area.
“
made automatically, and instead require human interaction, mediated by the web.
The third phase of electronic commerce is just beginning. It aims to address this issue, allowing automated business inter-actions to take place in a fluid environment. Technology will no longer be a friction factor to changing supplier or cus-tomer. Long-term relationships will still play an important role, but they will persist because of the choice of both parties rather than technological lock-in. The key building blocks of this new world, e-services, will be able to interact dynamically with each other to create short-term or long-term trusted trading relationships to satisfy the needs of different busi-ness partners. Hewlett Packard is engaged in research in many technologies, to help bring this shift about– distrib-uted systems, encryption and PKI, XML and associated business ontologies, economic analysis and game theory, to name just a few. As automation and distribution are central to the vision, agent technology provides a fundamental role.
In this article, we describe agent technology research in Business-to-business e-commerce at HP Labs Bristol.
The E-Commerce Lifecycle
At HP, our portfolio of research activities is based around the lifecycle of a B2B interaction. In B2B, the contract plays a fundamental role. The lifecycle (based on that in [1]) has the following stages.
1.Matchmaking: A trader locates other traders that it could potentially do business with.
2.Negotiation: The trader enters into negotiation with one or more of these potential business partners, to see if they can agree mutually acceptable terms of business. These terms could include a definition of the good or serv-ice being traded, prserv-ice, delivery date, etc.
3.Contract Formation: These agreed terms are placed into a legally binding contract.
4.Contract Fulfillment: The parties carry out the agreed
transaction, within the parameters specified in the con-tract.We now describe our research in each of these areas.
Matchmaking
During the matchmaking phase a trading agent locates poten-tial trading partners. It does this by use of a description of the service (or good) it is interested in trading. It may advertise this description, attempt to search for relevant advertisements by others, or a combination of both.
We are defining a language for describing service descriptions used during a B2B interaction. During the matchmaking phase, these descriptions appear within the adverts and the queries over the adverts. However, the goal of our work is to design the language in such a way that it is sufficiently expres-sive to be used during negotiation and contract specification. An advert describes what an agent requires or provides. The
match-maker needs to find all the adverts that match with this advert. We have developed an approach that identifies partial matches, and provides a measure of how close the m atch is. This can be used to group agents that have an interest in common, and allow them to negotiate with each other if they choose. To be able to make comparisons where possible and to trans-late between alternative representations, we are making use of the work on ontologies. In particular we are trying to use the work coming from the DAML community (www.daml.org) as much as possible. As part of this work, we have focused particularly on algo-rithms for large-scale matchmaking. Even though is it not too difficult to calculate a measure of partial matching between two descriptions, it is potentially a costly operation for a large-scale matchmaker where several thousands of related adverts are present. To overcome this problem, we are investigating how to augment the matching database with rule-based search strategies.
Negotiation
When a trader has located possible trading partners, it can enter into negotiation with them in an effort to reach an agree-ment with one or more of them. If negotiation is to take place automatically, traders must agree a negotiation protocol, and each trader must have a private negotiation strategy. The role of the negotiation protocol is to coordinate the message flow between participants, and to impose ‘rules’ of the negotiation ‘game’. These rules may be chosen to ensure fairness, to
If negotiation is to take place automatically,
traders must agree a negotiation protocol, and each
trader must have a private negotiation strategy. The
role of the negotiation protocol is to coordinate the
message flow between participants, and to impose
‘rules’ of the negotiation ‘game’.
”
“
analysis to determine the best set of bids to place at any given time [2]. We have carried out experiments using this algorithm, and have demonstrated that it performs better than the standard strategy. We have also shown that, if many buyers use the algorithm, it increases the efficiency of the market. However, interestingly, in certain circum-stances the benefit from this increased efficiency goes to the auctioneers rather than to the buyers [3]. We have also developed a more general mathematical specification for a class of algorithms to do this, where different tradeoffs between accuracy and efficiency can be chosen.
Negotiation for Service Composition
Negotiation in multiple markets becomes more complex when trying to buy a connected set of goods or services simultaneously. For example, when trying to send a crate from London to Prague, there are many different sets of flights that could be used (e.g. LON -> PRA; LON->AMS + AMS->PRA; etc.). If you are negotiating simultaneously with differ-ent flight suppliers, you must be careful to buy exactly one set of flights, and not get stuck with par-tial (and therefore useless) sets. We have developed an algo-rithm that participates in multiple English auctions, and trades off the risk of bidding for more than one set with the potential benefit of winning the cheapest set currently avail-able [4].
Negotiation over Multiple Parameters
Another important issue is the ability to negotiate over com-plex contracts with many different variables. For example, making a tradeoff between the price of a product, the quality and the speed of delivery. Faratin et.al. [5] have developed an algorithm for performing one-to-one negotiation in this con-text. We are currently working on extending this approach to many-to-many negotiation environments.
Preference Acquisition for Negotiation
If an agent is to negotiate effectively on behalf of a user, it must have an accurate understanding of the user’s needs and preferences. We are starting a joint project (ANNA) with Nick Jennings and Nigel Shadbolt of the University of Southampton to develop tools and techniques to facilitate this process. The research will exploit and extend work in the Knowledge Acquisition community in order to deter-mine exactly what knowledge an agent needs to be endowed with to negotiate on behalf of its user, what techniques are appropriate for capturing this knowledge, and how the agent’s performance can be evaluated against its users’ expectations.
encourage honesty, or to maximize the profits of one partic-ular powerful trader. There are many possible protocols – for example, the English auction where many buyers place increasing bids to trade with one seller. The negotiation strategy used by a trader determines how it behaves within the rules provided by the protocol. For example, in an English auction, a buyer’s strategy determines when and how much they bid.
Our research in the area of negotiation protocols has focused on the creation of a general framework. This framework can represent many different protocols, by parameterization with appropriate rules. It is able to handle 1 to 1, 1 to many and many to many negotiations. By using it, agents avoid the need to hold a large number of different protocols to cover different negotiation types, and are even able to par-ticipate (albeit in a flawed
way) in negotiations where they do not know the protocol.
In our framework, negoti-ation consists of an exchange of proposals described using the service description language developed for
matchmak-ing. The partial match tool described in the matchmaking section above is used to identify which proposals are clos-est to which, and what areas of disagreement remain. The agents can use this as input to their strategy. In addition, we have carried out research in different issues related to negotiation strategy.
Negotiation in Multiple Markets
Through matchmaking, a trader will locate a potentially large number of possible trading partners. These partners may be spread across different markets. For example, some may be in an auction house, conducting trade via pre-arranged auctions. Others may be participating in a many-to-many trading exchange. Others may choose to do business directly, via 1-1 negotiation or simply offer a fixed price. One key issue facing the trader is how to simultaneously negotiate with all these potential traders, in different markets, to try to reach a good deal. As cer-tain kinds of market, such as auctions, require a commit-ment to purchase if your bid is accepted. Hence, an agent trading simultaneously in several auctions must be careful not to accidentally buy too many goods. We are interested in developing algorithms that will allow negotiation simultaneously in many markets to get the best deal, but will avoid accidental purchase of too much.
Our work so far has focused on English auctions. We have developed an algorithm that will purchase an appropriate number of goods from a set of auctions, at a cheap price. The algorithm uses historical data together with utility
Contracts define the
expected behaviour of agents
in a business relationship.
“
Contract Formation and Fulfillment
When negotiation is over, the agreement that has been reached must be formally captured. We are working on a precise descriptive model of electronic contracts, which will be able to capture the outcome of any agreement formation process between negotiating parties. We are also designing appropriate abstractions for agents to manage (monitor and execute) their B2B relationships. Our research aims at using the electronic contract in three aspects of the relationship;
1. Contracts define the expected behaviour of agents in a business relationship. We are working on a conceptual architecture in which the decision-m aking system of an agent is influenced by the norms expressed in a contract. The contract will guide the behaviour of the agent, ensuring the agent does not accidentally transgress it.
2. Contracts define real business relationships. Accordingly, we define an architecture enabling agents to enact their contractual commitments through the use of enterprise systems.
3. Contracts should be actionable – and so there should be some agreed authority ready and able to enforce them. Thus, we are also defining a conceptual architecture for a particular normative institution (Market Governance). Such an institution would regulate a community of trad-ing agents conducttrad-ing their business through contractu-al relationships.
This work is being pursued by HP Labs in consultation with academic partners, such as Kings College London.
Service Composition
Earlier, we described our work on negotiation for service composition. We are also carrying out broader research on appropriate technologies to enable service composition to take place automatically. We have developed a system, named DySCo [6], which allows services to specify models of how to interact with them in an integrated way – behavioural mod-els, and specifications of the roles that potential interactors may take. It allows services to explicitly specify aspects of functionality they wish to outsource, and the roles the out-sourcers would take.
When negotiating for provision of a service, two parties can use this representation to identify differences in the way they interoperate. They can use this information to avoid collabo-rating and search for more compatible partners. Alternatively, they can enter into negotiation, and attempt to negotiate changes in their behavioural models to allow interoperation to take place more smoothly.
The system also allows a single party to orchestrate several services, to ensure they collaborate effectively and smoothly. It allows a distributed workflow to be set up to represent the overall process and allows appropriate projection of this
workflow for each role that a service provider performs. It also allows verification that each of the roles are behavioural-ly compatible, and identifies any incompatibilities so they may be resolved.
Agents and Hewlett-Packard
Agent technology is a key enabling component in bringing about Hewlett-Packard’s e-services vision, and for that rea-son, HP Labs is making significant investments in research in this area. We have described our work on Agent-mediat-ed B2B ecommerce above. There is much more agent-ori-ented work within Hewlett-Packard labs, which we can only touch on briefly. Further work in Bristol includes distrib-uted agent-based personalization, and agent-based trading of Internet bandwidth. HP Labs Palo Alto has work on automated auction design, mobile agents, user profiling and FIPA standardization activities, among other things. For further information and access to our publications, see
www.hpl.hp.com/agents.
References
[1]N. R. Jennings, P. Faratin, M. J. Johnson, P. O. O’Brien and M. E. Wiegand. Using Intelligent Agents to Manage Business Processes. First International Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology, 1996.
[2]C. Preist, C. Bartolini and I. Philips. Algorithm Design for Agents which Participate in Multiple Simultaneous Auctions. In Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce III, ed. F. Dignum and U. Cortes, Springer-Verlag LNAI, 2001.
[3] C. Preist, A. Byde and C. Bartolini. Economic Dynamics of Agents in Multiple Auctions. To appear in Proc. International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems, 2001
[4] C. Preist, A. Byde, C. Bartolini and G. Piccinelli. Towards Agent-Based Service Composition through Negotiation in Multiple Auctions. Proceedings of AISB’01 Symposium on Information Agents for Electronic Commerce, 2001.
[5] P. Faratin, C. Sierra and N. Jennings. Negotiation deci-sion functions for autonomous agents. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 24(3-4)
[6] G. Piccinelli and L. Mokrushin, Dynamic e-service composition in DySCo, Proc. 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS-21), 2001.
Protecting What Your Agent Is
Doing
nternets of computational devices are becoming more ubiquitous. The e-business world is being driv-en to create and driv-enhance technologies to support dynamic services, automated interaction, rich infor-mation exchange and tailored solutions, to underpin such open service environments. Indeed such environments are generating complex, semantic, collaborative and com-petitive behaviours that have been, and are being, substan-tially researched and developed within the agent communi-ty. Hence Multi-agent Systems or MAS is one of the tech-nologies that e-business is keenly evaluating and deploying in this environment.
However, only very specific areas within the Internet space have advanced security, to protect it against malicious attacks, and these heavily rely on human supervision and control. For example, users are becoming progressively aware of the problems of using Internet systems such as receiving fraudulent transactions even if they have never used particular on-line financial services. The issue of secu-rity within increasingly ubiquitous Internets is still a very open and critical issue.
As agent technology and the infrastructure for supporting and developing it advances, agents offer the potential to help support the enhanced security requirements for
opera-1 Queen Mary, University of London, UK [email protected]
2 Centre de Recherche de Motorola-Paris, France [email protected]
3 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne [email protected]
Switzerland
A g e n t o r i e n t e d a p p l i c a t i o n s a n d agent-based systems are increas-ingly demanding security guaran-tees that concern confidentiality, i n t e g r i t y, a v a i l a b i l i t y, a c c o u n t i n g a n d n o n - r e p u d i a t i o n i n o r d e r t o be deployed in business applica-t i o n s s u c h a s e - c o m merce, e-finance that include both B2B and B2C transactions. This paper siders the main challenges con-cerning security that need to be overcome for Multi Agent Systems (MAS) to succeed in business enterprises. We outline the main design issues for developing agent security. Finally, we sur vey and draw conclusions regarding spe-cific initiatives currently underway within the FIPA agent forum that seek to address MAS security.
Stefan Poslad
1
, Patricia Charlton
2
and Monique Calisti
3
tion in more open service environments. However, the problem of security, and in particular agent security, is a very multi-faceted issue. We first need to understand the requirements and properties of systems that operate in such distributed, dynamic and open environments and how these affect security. Secondly, we need to define how to use agents and their peculiar properties (such as autonomy, social ability, pro-activeness, etc.) in conjunction with any underlying infrastructure security. Thirdly, we must address a new generation of security issues that arises as automated, dynamic behaviour and peer-to-peer interaction becomes more pervasive, and as agents are promoted to act on our behalf. These issues are interrelated.
The FIPA agent forum [2] has produced specifications that aim to define standard mechanisms and interfaces to assist in dealing with the dynamics of distributed systems [1]. In particular, the FIPA community is now revisiting and addressing the concerns of security. Although this is done within the framework of agent technology, it is worth not-ing that the problems of security lie in any technology that allows networking at any level.
In the remainder of this article we consider the initial challenges that MAS security must overcome to succeed. We then consider design issues in developing agent security. Finally, we review some specific work on agent security undertaken within the FIPA agent standards forum and then we draw conclusions.
Initial Challenges in Addressing MAS Security
There are many challenges that the agent community needs to overcome in order to develop MAS that support security. We first propose the following, informal, counter hypotheses that obviate the need for developing (new) agent security solutions and then we argue against them:
1. Security is very complex; agent systems are just spe-cialised distributed systems. Secure distributed systems can only be developed by, or have already been solved by, security experts - delegate security issues to them.
2. Security is part of the software infrastructure in which the agent platform is embedded, and it is outside the scope of an agent architecture.
3. There is no benefit for security to be either monitored or controlled at the level of agents (at the application layer).
4. Some agents systems do not need security. The early focus on the MAS community was on collaborative, rational, agent services within closed Intranets.
5. Security is domain and platform (implementation) spe-cific - there is no general agent security architecture that is suitable for all applications and implementations. Hence, there is no reason for a general standard here. 6. Complete specifications, and models of agent systems
and agent security need to be completed before we can start to design and build secure agent systems.
These hypotheses are interrelated. At one level, the first four hypotheses all boil down to the belief that security can be handled properly in the supporting infrastructure for agents rather than at the agent layer. To refute or support these four hypotheses we need to understand the similarities and differences between agent-systems and the application domains in which they are being deployed, and convention-al distributed systems and their associated domains.
The fifth and sixth hypotheses suggest a clean slate approach coupled with a deductive or top-down approach to developing secure agent systems. This may be useful but there are many agent systems already in operation. These could benefit from bottom-up approaches coupled to inductive development of agent security models.
Design issues for MAS security
There are two main issues that need to be discussed: how to secure MAS and the type of environments in which they operate, and how the use of agents themselves can enhance security.
Securing MAS using Traditional Security Techniques
We need to develop requirements and designs for MAS security and assess whether or not it is possible and practical to map them to existing secure distributed system models. To illustrate this, let us consider the operation of some cur-rent MAS systems and assess how they can be attacked.
Assuming MAS are operating within open distributed environments such as the Internet, we highlight three fea-tures of agent operation:
1. Agents communicate with other agents using syntacti-cally complex and semantisyntacti-cally rich, complex, messages.
2.Agents make heavy use of facilitators, match-makers and brokers to discover and hence interoperate and co-oper-ate with unknown agents.
3.Agents within one domain or agency interact with agents in other autonomous domains or agencies.
We now consider the risks of each of these issues in turn. A common way to break into a distributed system is to cause the message handler to fail, leaving the system in a state where remote access rights are increased. Due to the complexity of agent interaction (see Figure 1), many differ-ent kinds of syntactic and semantic attack can occur, caus-ing the system to fail. Attacks can indeed occur at:
1.the transport level (message routing, data integrity, etc.).
2.the agent communication level, including content cor-ruption, syntactic and semantic alterations of deployed ontologies, content languages and agent communication languages; and;
3.the interaction protocol level, i.e., the expected sequence of messages can be modified and interrupted.
Agents frequently interoperate with other agents in order to jointly solve tasks they cannot solve themselves – this vides agents with fault-tolerance during dynamic service pro-vision. But in order to find a suitable provider agent, agents frequently make use of other intermediary or mediator agents (see Figure 2). In this example, a service agent registers with a directory agent, that directory agent registers with another directory agent. A user agent searches a remote directory agent via a local directory agent in order to locate a suitable remote service. The mediator services become an obvious focus for Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, masquerades of one agent by a different agent and the introduction of faulty serv-ices that individually or in combination can disrupt the whole agency.
Agents within one agency can often need to interact with agents in another agency, for example, because particular services do no reside in the local agency (see Figure 3). Whereas it is not that difficult to develop a trust model with-in with-individual agencies, it is far more complex to develop trust models that enable co-operation between multiple autonomous agencies that perhaps have their own policies for operation and interoperation.
Now that we have identified some challenges for develop-ing secure MAS that perhaps distdevelop-inguishes them from tradi-tional distributed systems, let us briefly consider whether or not we can deploy traditional hard security techniques to pro-tect these types of agent interaction. We will informally argue the case that this is not as straightforward as it initially seems, particularly if agents and agencies operate in a dynamic and open service environment.
Let us consider the use of the mediator agents. We could for example authenticate write access to the mediator agents -this would help guard against one agent masquerading as another. However, we can easily still tie up the mediator with
frequent multiple reads and cause a DoS. We could prevent this by introducing authentication for read access but this would interfere with bootstrapping the system and hinder unknown agents having the option of browsing an agency’s information before it joins it. If the mediator behaves as an intermediary between a first-party and second-party agent, we may also need different encryption schemes and privacy schemes to share information with the second party but pro-tect it from the third party and vice versa.
Let us consider the case of multi-MAS interaction. We can relatively easily protect each agency using firewalls, secure channels, access control and authentication against agents outside the agency. However, if multiple MAS need to co-operate we need to reveal some aspects of our system security to other agencies that are autonomous to us, and we may be currently uncertain how to trust them.
Agent Enhanced Security
Making open distributed information systems secure has been a frustrating endeavour. While cryptography provides the means for establishing secure peer-to-peer communica-tion, it requires complex management of keys and this is prone to breakdown. Furthermore, pure cryptography is in contradiction with the even more crucial requirement of authentication, i.e. making sure that communication is indeed from, and to, the intended recipient. Finally, there is the complex problem of individual access control that is technically easy to address, but difficult to handle in practice because of the difficulty of correctly modelling access rights while maintaining a functioning system.
By moving communication to a higher level of abstraction, agents offer ways out of this dilemma. Cryptographic com-munication can be embedded at a lower level in the protocol
Figure 1. Agents communicate with other agents using syntactically complex and semantically rich complex messages.
stack for efficiency while being controllable at a higher level. Authentication can make use of agents’ persistence over time and refer to past interactions within a wider body of experience, sim-ilar to the way people do. Thirdly, agents can interact with agents to assess the behaviour of a particular agent, or even the infra-structure itself, to build up a distributed model of trust. Finally, depending on the degree of autonomy that is available, agents could run their own security checks and independently
config-Figure 2. MAS make strong use of mediator agents, such as the FIPA Directory Facilitator agent, to dis-cover and hence interoperate and co-operate with unknown agents.
ure their own security dependent on their application and envi-ronment contexts.
MAS Security within FIPA
In order to address some of the issues of MAS security, the FIPA agent standards forum [FIPASEC] is revisiting MAS security. FIPA first addressed agent security in 1998 when it developed an agent security management specification that added hooks to the Agent Communication Language framework and to facilitator agents, to support different degrees of confidentiality and to sup-port authentication [4]. However, this specification was not wide-ly evaluated and used, and it has since become obsolete. Recentwide-ly, FIPA has formed a new work-group to start to address these MAS security issues called the FIPA Security Work-Group [3]. Its initial work-plan has four themes:
1.To issue calls for information (CFI) to the wider agent and dis-tributed system community to help define and specify tech-nologies to address agent security and to review the responses.
2. To produce an informational output document (such as a FIPA positional statement) on security as input to any future FIPA specification on agent security. This will involve review-ing the previous specification on security.
3.To assess how the use of security impacts the current FIPA ACL and FIPA agent infrastructure specifications.
4. To demonstrate the benefit of using security in specific scenar-ios and concrete systems.
As agent technology is
being increasingly pushed into
domains such as e-commerce,
e-finance, telecommunications
and manufacturing, the need to
operate within general
enter-prise business environments
that include security, becomes
a necessity.
”
“
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank all the FIPA membership and collabora-tors past and present, as the development and maintenance of the FIPA agent specifications and other output docu-ments discussed in this article are a joint effort. In particu-lar, we thank those for their contributions during the FIPA security work-group activities. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the FIPA membership at large.
References
[1]Bernard Burg, Jonathan Dale and Steven Willmott. Open Standards and Open Source for Agent-Based Systems. AgnetLink2 Newsletter. No. 6, pp 2-5, 2001. [2]FIPA, Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. http:// www.fipa.org.
[3] FIPA security WG web-page.
http://www.fipa.org/activities/security.Html
[4] Stefan Poslad and Monique Calisti. Towards improved trust and security in FIPA agent platforms. Autonomous Agents 2000 Workshop on Deception, fraud, and trust in agent societies, Barcelona, June 2000.
The agent community is invited to review, comment on and submit responses to the FIPA CFI on MAS security. This can retrieved from the FIPA Web-site [2].
Conclusions
As agent technology is being increasingly pushed into domains such as e-commerce, e-finance, telecommunications and manufacturing, the need to operate within general enter-prise business environments that include security, becomes a necessity. For this reason, it is becoming more and more urgent to understand:
How we can adapt general distributed system security to be applied to agents.
How and whether or not agents can enhance this securi-ty.
What safeguards we need to have in place as we use agents in new areas to automate human decision-making processes.
Within the FIPA agent forum, work is being undertaken to address some of these issues. This requires collaboration and consensus within the much wider agent community, and with the wider Internet community, if grounded, trusted and useful agent security solutions are to be deployed.
he Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (SSAISB),
http://www.aisb.org.uk, aims to bring together researchers from many different fields of expertise who have an interest in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. The goals of the Society involve pro-moting research activity in these fields, and raising aware-ness of their importance in the scientific world and among the wider public. Internationally, SSAISB aims to provide a showcase of UK Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science research, and to promote UK activity relevant to its area of interest on the world stage.
Each year, SSAISB organises a convention consisting of parallel symposia covering various topics. Each conven-tion has a theme and many symposia cover topics related to that theme, although we always welcome symposia dis-cussing any aspect of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science.
AISB’01 was held at the University of York, from 21st to 24th of March 2001. The convention’s General Chair and Local Arrangements Chair were Simon Colton and Eduardo Alonso respectively. The theme of the AISB-01 was “Agents and Cognition” and we intended to bring together researches of agent-based technologies and researchers looking at various cognitive aspects of Artificial Intelligence. The convention included the fol-lowing symposia:
Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (chaired by Daniel Kudenko and Eduardo Alonso, University of York)
AI and Creativity in Arts and Science (chaired by Geraint A. Wiggins, City University) Emotion, Cognition, and Affective Computing (chaired by
Colin G. Johnson, University of Kent at Canterbury)
Information Agents for E-Commerce (chaired by Michael Schroeder and Kostas Stathis, City University)
Nonconscious Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial (chaired by Axel Cleeremas and Pawel Lewicki, Université Libre de Bruxelles and the University of Tulsa respectively), and
Software Mobility and Adaptive Behaviour (chaired by Luc Moreau, University of Southampton).
We also welcomed back the (Eighth) Workshop on Automated Reasoning (chaired by Andrei Voronkov, University of Manchester). The convention included five invited talks, all on agent related themes:
Nick Jennings (Southampton University), “Automated Haggling: Building Artificial Negotiators”
Lyndon Lee (ISR Intelligent Agent Research, British Telecom), “Multi-Agent Research at BT”
Andrew Jones (University of Oslo), “On the Concept of Trust”
Jim Doran (University of Essex), “Agents and Ecosystem Management: from the Fraser River to Boolean Networks”), and
Christoph Benzmüller (University of Birmingham/Saarland University), “An Agent Based Approach to Reasoning” In addition, Michael Luck gave a short presentation on the organisation and goals of AgentLink II.
The convention was a truly international event, with 204 delegates from twenty countries spanning four conti-nents, and with research presented from more than sixty different institutions. Industry was well represented at the convention: Delegates from 17 different companies (10% of the total number of delegates), including BTexaCT and Hewlett-Packard, attended AISB’01. All in all, 75 techni-cal talks and 35 short talks were given during the four days.
AgentLink supported the Symposium on Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems by funding the visit of the keynote speaker Enric Plaza from the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) who gave a talk on “Cooperation and Learning in Multi-Agent Systems”. The Symposium consisted of 7 full papers and 5 short presen-tations, and finished with a panel discussion on ‘’Future Directions of Learning in Agents and Multi-Agent Systems’’. The symposium was the first workshop on adaptive or learning agents held in the United Kingdom, and was intended to increase awareness and interest in adaptive agent research in the European AI community and encourage further research. Particularly, the Symposium presented an ideal opportunity for Agent and Machine Learning researchers to meet and discuss potential collaborations.
Convention of the
Society for the Study
of Artificial Intelligence
and the Simulation of
Behaviour (AISB’01)
t
Eduardo Alonso, Simon
Colton and Daniel Kudenko
University of York, UK
The Agent Based Social Simulation (ABSS) Special
Interest Group Meeting,
Amsterdam
1
Scott Moss
Manchester Metropolitan
University
he ABSS SIG under AgentLink 1 explored the range of research activities conducted in Europe under the broad rubrics of agent based social simulation (ABSS) and multi agent based simu-lation (MABS). An important and lasting consequence of the ABSS SIG under AgentLink 1 was the develop-ment of communities of interest among SIG partici-pants who had different objectives in ABSS and MABS and came from different backgrounds in computer sci-ence, social science and philosophy.
Although a new research area, there has been a vibrant and successful social simulation community in Europe for some years. Milestones in the development of this community are the edited books resulting from a series of workshops and conferences in the 1990s. There has also been a distinct development within the computer science part of the MAS community towards viewing and using MABS as general simulation paradigm. There
have certainly been important overlaps, as demonstrat-ed for example by the invitdemonstrat-ed papers of Doran and Carley at ICMAS-98. The ABSS SIG provided a new focus for the joint development of MABS as computer science and as social science. In addition, there have been developments that have proved stimulating to both social scientists and computer scientists working on agents research. Obvious examples are the work by Castelfranchi, Conte and their colleagues at CNR-IP in Rome.
An important result of the AgentLink 1 SIG was the clear identification and distinction between founda-tional and representafounda-tional ABSS. Foundafounda-tional ABSS is largely formal and is intended to provide a basis for a new social theory, though no such theory has yet been realised. Representational ABSS describes real social systems as a basis for analysing the reasons for the emer-gence of epiphenomena at macro system scale as a con-sequence of the behaviour of agents and the interac-tions among them. One objective adopted by the SIG was to investigate whether the formal approaches of foundational ABSS could usefully inform and support representational simulation.
The point of bringing these two branches of ABSS together is not entirely to develop new theory or methodology. It is a part of a wider research programme to develop scalable multi agent systems with direct applications. At the Amsterdam SIG meeting in February 2001, a dominating subject of discussion was whether and how ABSS could provide guidance and insight into the achievement of multi agent systems for very large scale applications in complex environments. A particular issue was whether the social simulation techniques developed to describe actual, large scale, complex social systems could provide the appropriate metaphors for large scale, complex software systems. It was agreed at the Amsterdam meeting that one objective of the SIG under AgentLink II will be to identify and develop such synergies between the designing and engi-neering of agent based software systems on the one hand and, on the other hand, agent based social simulation. A second issue of concern is the lack of involvement in the SIG under AgentLink 1 by industrial, commercial or policy interests. Such involvement is a key element in the justification of the SIG since a primary purpose of AgentLink (both 1 and 2) is to bring together the
needs of the industry and (in our case) the policy com-munities with the capabilities of the academic commu-nity. In the particular case of the ABSS SIG, it is essen-tial to involve both the foundational and representa-tional interests of the academic research community in order to assess without preconceptions how ABSS can usefully and uniquely inform and support the design and engineering of practical multi agent systems. Below, we will first describe the working group estab-lished at the Amsterdam meeting to meet the above cri-teria and then, how this working group might be used as a pattern for the establishment of further working groups. This report concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of the Amsterdam discussions for MAS research more generally.
Working Group on Scalable MAS for Dynamic Environments
The specific objectives of this working group are to identify and demonstrate the features of MAS
that are scalable
where the properties of the software environment emerge from agent behaviour and interaction that enables dynamic “plug-and-play” functionality
based on social principles in addition to, or if possi-ble rather than, standardised ontologies and proto-cols.
It was agreed that a suitable demonstrator system should be developed around a design problem described by André Meyer and Joost Reuzel from Philips Research in Eindhoven. The problem is the following: Philips wants to develop cooperating, intelligent consumer appliances that interact with each other and humans to provide the latter with desired services. Some simple examples include the following:
A follow-me concept which divorces activities from devices. For example, if a person is watching televi-sion and moves to another room with another tele-vision (say the kitchen to make a cup of coffee), the second television will display the same programme. A multi-user, multi-device, multi-location design so
that, if a person enters a room with both a television and a stereo system and is “known” by both to want some form of entertainment at that time and in the existing circumstances, the television and stereo agents will negotiate between themselves to provide the most appropriate service – television or music. Dummy-proof network installation and
administra-tion so that when a new appliance is introduced into the house, it will integrate itself into the domestic
network without human intervention.
Taken by themselves, these are fairly standard AI issues. Each appliance is controlled by a software agent that learns over time about the preferences of the humans with whom it interacts. Each appliance agent must learn to communicate with the other agents, perhaps to be informed by them of the humans’ preferences and to engage in such negotiation procedures as may be required with the other agents.
The intention for the working group is to identify an appropriate social metaphor to guide the agent and mechanism design process and to consider alternative approaches to the engineering of the proposed software, as well as understand and model the human context: norms, beliefs, reputation, policies, etc.
In the discussions in Amsterdam, a “playground” metaphor was discussed. The appliance agents interact in the “playground”, developing their own means of interacting much as children learn to play together. Although there is some base, standard communication language among agents, this is intended to be dynamic and evolving, just as children in playgrounds develop their own jargon and, at least as important, as a new child in the playground has to learn the social conven-tions and any special argot of the resident children. In the sort of dynamic environment proposed by our colleagues from Philips Research, neither a static ontol-ogy nor a static protocol is obviously appropriate. An important element in these discussions was the pro-posal by Frances Brazier and Niek Wijngaards of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to use their AgentScape operating system which would include an agent factory and a facility for providing agents with additional ele-ments of an interagent communication language (possi-bly with human intervention) as such elements became necessary.
A further concern was to maintain the input from the formal, foundationalist contributors to ABSS since the interactions between foundational and representational ABSS have been found in the past to be stimulating and productive. There is, moreover, a continuing interest on the part of the foundational ABSS community in inves-tigating the utility of logical formalisms for the devel-opment of new social theory.
In order to pursue these concerns in a coherent fashion, it was agreed to establish the working group composed of (at least) Andre Meyer and Joost Reuzel (Philips Research Eindhoven), Frances Brazier and Niek Wijngaards (Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems Group, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Scott Moss (Centre for Policy modelling, Manchester Metropolitan
University), Rosaria Conte and Mario Paolucci (CNR-IP), Magnus Boman (Swedish Institute of Computer Science), Harko Verhagen (Stockholm University/Royal Institute of Technology) and Paul Davidsson (Blekinge Institute of Technology). This working group is open to and welcomes any other ABSS SIG participants. It is however important to point out that the purpose of the working group is not to undertake free industrial research for Philips or anyone else. The purpose is to use the Philips problem as a plausible and well-defined focus of discussion about the development of specific technical development that would support the use of social metaphor in the development of multi agent sys-tems and the consequent development of techniques for analysing the sources of the social metaphors.
Further Working Groups
The contents of this section have not been discussed by the SIG and are therefore to be read as proposals by Scott Moss and Paul Davidsson as SIG co-ordinators. It is neither expected nor desirable that the SIG should support only one working group. Members of the ABSS research community have a wide range of interests that should be served by appropriately focused working groups. The first ABSS working group should be seen as a point of departure. There should be some industri-al involvement in any working group since a primary raison d’être of AgentLink is to bring industry and aca-demics together. It is not necessary that there be a focusing industrial or policy application but, if there is not, there will need to be some clear focus to lend coherence to the discussions and developments by the group.
ABSS and MAS research more generally
Social systems evolve as a result of the behaviour of and interactions among the individuals of whom society is comprised. Invention and innovation are not imposed by any external force. Individual inventions and inno-vations typically result from the need to resolve some problem. The history of technology is replete with accounts of the new opportunities created by innova-tions that solve old problems. In the exploitation of those new opportunities, new problems are encoun-tered that require new inventions and innovations with their consequent opportunities, and so on and on for-ever. The study of social systems is therefore the study of dynamic changing systems without crisp boundaries or clearly understood constraints.
If agent based computing is to be anything other than yet another programming paradigm with yet better modularity, encapsulation and reusability, it will be a result of its scalability, robustness in the face of
uncer-tainty and its ability to respond to unforeseen environ-mental changes that the agents themselves may have brought about. The reason for having an Agent Based Social Simulation SIG in AgentLink can only be that it provides a means of capturing and formalising the essential aspects of dynamic, innovating, progressive social systems that operate at very large scale in order to build dynamic, progressive software systems that scale up as required.
The Agent Mediated Electronic
Commerce (AMEC) Special Interest
Group meeting,
Amsterdam1
Carles Sierra
IIIA-CSIC, Spain
s i e r r a @ i i i a . c s i c . e s
he objective of this meeting was twofold. We wanted to present and discuss some new results and ideas of the participants, and to plan the AMEC activities within AgentLink II. For the first objective a series of 20 minute presentations were scheduled. Also, and given that the meeting was short and that we wanted to schedule a time slot to meet together with the ABSS SIG participants, we decided to kill two birds with one stone. We organised the common meeting as a panel to discuss one of our common focuses of attention: “Electronic Institutions”, where the different views on the topic were lively (and friendly) confronted. For the second, an open discussion was held and some action lines agreed upon. They are summarised at the end of this short note.
The coordinator presented the book “Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce—The European AgentLink Perspective”, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 1991. It contains the contributions gathered during the three meet-ings held by the SIG during the life span of AgentLink I. This was the main outcome of the previous work done within the SIG and contained the first technological roadmap developed with contributions coming from all AMEC participants. There were 24 attendants in total. Eight participants were from industry and twelve from academia. Only 10 asked for support from AgentLink. This is a positive element showing the interest in the topic addressed by this SIG although the industrial participation should be encouraged for future meet-ings.
Presentations and panel
Andrew Byde, from HP Labs, talked about the use of rein-forcement learning techniques in agents participating in mul-tiple Dutch auctions, a very hot topic. Ana Paula Rocha pre-sented the latest proposals from the Porto group referring to the use of negotiation models and their relation with Electronic Institutions and Virtual Enterprises. She also used notions of reinforcement learning in her model. Ulises
t
Cortés, from UPC, presented an application of the Electronic Institution concept to the problem of human tissues distribu-tion for transplantadistribu-tion. On the more theoretical side, Alessio Lomuscio, from Imperial College, sketched some ideas in the direction of the formalization of one of the cornerstones of Electronic Institutions: the notion of obligation. He gave semantics that would permit to reason about the violation of norms and obligations in Multi-Agent Systems.Rachel Bourne, from QMW, gave a paper describing her group’s ideas on market infrastructures for real-time trading. Their decentralized approach aims at being an alterna-tive to traditional auction markets. The project EIComAg was introduced by Mihail Matskin, from NUST, which also focuses on the deployment of infra-structures for electronic marketplaces, including a very interesting application to knowledge trade. Mehdi Dastani, representing the VUA group, also gave a pres-entation centred on the notion of brokering.
Finally, on the personalization front, Josep Lluís de la Rosa, from the University of Girona, presented some promising ideas imported from the area of automatic control to model the learning of user profiles.
The panel organized in cooperation with the ABSS SIG showed many shared views in the design of agent soci-eties. More shared views than expected! The presenta-tion of the UK deregulated power market by John Chennells from Logica was very clarifying and showed in detail how complex the institutions and agent organ-izations to be developed to cope with real problems may be. The participants in the panel were: John Chennells, Frank Dignum, Scott Moss, Eugenio Oliveira, Julian Padget and Carles Sierra.
Next actions
With respect to the structure of the three meetings to be held during AgentLink II several ideas were proposed:
Special Interest
Group on Intelligent
and Mobile Agents
in Telecommunications and
the Internet
A letter from the coordinator
Volker Roth
Fraunhofer IGD
Darmstadt, Germany
v r o t h @ i d g . f h g . d e
ecently, Steve Corley stepped down from his post as the coordinator of the IATA SIG. Michael Luck kindly introduced me, Volker Roth, as the new coordinator of this SIG at the AgentLink II meeting that took place in February this year in Amsterdam. I got into touch with Michael at last year's European Agent Systems Summer School, held in Saarbruecken, Germany. Together with Christian Tschudin, I gave several presentations on mobile agents and security at this Summer School. This has been my primary research focus since end of 1996. Michael and me agreed to stay in touch with regard to mobile agent related activities within AgentLink.
Asking me to take over coordination of the IATA SIG reflects AgentLink's intention to establish the topic of mobile agents in one of its Special Interest Groups, and IATA seemed to be a
1. To prepare the edition of a handbook on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce, or on some relevant subtopic, for instance, ‘Negotiation’,
2 . To discuss the situation of agent technology at different companies; the companies may come and explain what they use and why they use it, and then the AMEC participants could give feed back tothem,
3. To have small discussion groups working (maybe) in the direction of preparing specific handbooks.
4.To work on newer versions of the technological road map.
No need to say that most participants still want to listen to the newest results of the different groups, so some time should always be scheduled for this purpose. After listening to the opinions of the participants, action ‘2’ seems the most inter-esting for the next meeting in Praha this July.
Analysis
I think AMEC can play a useful role within AgentLink. It keeps a high cohesion of the topics and interests of the partic-ipants, and most participants find it useful to attend. We have to be careful in not creating too high expectations with respect to the outcome, though. We cannot forget that the activities funded by AgentLink cover just the meeting expenses of a sub-group of participants.
The most negative aspect (not extremely negative in my opin-ion) is about the industrial interest. Although we had a 33% participation from industry in this meeting we still have to increase it.
Finally, I have received in the last year the very valuable help of Frank Dignum in the preparation of the book and the tech-nological road map. As I think it would be very positive to have him helping in the near future in the organization of the activities, I asked everybody in the SIG whether they would like to see him helping as co-coordinator. Those that gave their opinion were very positive about it. I talked to Mike Luck and he agrees on that. We’ll ask for an official acceptance in the next management board meeting.
I hope to see you all in Praha this July!
[1]February 22-23, 2000
suitable candidate. Thus my task for the next months is to reinvigorate the work of the SIG, and to lead it over to the new focus.
One of the changes I wish to introduce is a revision of the SIG's name. This measure seems advisable in order to attract people interested in mobile agents to the SIG, whose name doesn't reflect this topic so far. The idea here is to have a name that is short, catchy, and general enough to account for intelli-gent as well as mobile aintelli-gents, and to have a subtitle that gives a slightly more precise statement on the goals of the SIG. Preferably, the name should have a short easy memorable acronym.
I discussed this with Steve Corley, and we finally agreed on "Special Interest Group on Intelligent and Mobile Agents" with the subtitle "in Telecommunications and the Internet". SIGMA will serve as the acrony. The new title is general enough to remain stable in the face of potentially changing interests of active SIG members. Yet it is specific enough to attract people with interest in intelligent as well as mobile agents, and accounts for the previous application focus. As a consequence, the mission statement of SIGMA must be updated as well. I did not revise the IATA SIG mission state-ment yet, but I already have a structure to propose. My view is that SIGMA should address the following areas:
a)Mobile agents & infrastructure:
applications, standardization, interoperability, and research
b) Intelligent agents:
applications
c) Joint worlds:
applications, interoperability
The IATA SIG primarily addressed b) so far. Items a) and c) are meant to account for the wider scope AgentLink wishes to address the SIG in the future.
Mobility may serve as the 'nucleus' that gives SIGMA a dis-tinct flavour. Since research aspects of mobile agents are not covered by any of the other SIGs explicitly, one of its goals should be to fill this gap. In terms of intelligent agent research, SIGMA can draw on the experience and work of
the other SIG's, for instance Carles' AMEC SIG in the area of negotiation. On the other hand, SIGMA can complement the work of other SIGs with regard to aspects of agent mobility. Therefore, SIGMA should also address how both worlds can be brought together.
Among my first actions was to establish a new mailing list to be used for discussion and coordination. I also retrieved a list of mail addressed of existing members of the IATA SIG, and asked them to subscribe to the new list. This procedure is meant to eliminate outdated mail addresses that accumulated on the list maintained by DAI-Labs in the past. I hope to
receive some more comments in the future.
A Web site for SIGMA will hopefully soon be reachable as well, on URL: http://www.semoa.org/agentlink/index.html.
The first meeting of SIGMA will take place at the AgentLink meeting in Prague, Czech Republic. Two sessions are planned, one of which will be a joint session of Franco's MSEAS (Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems) and SIGMA on the topic of mobile agents and software engi-neering. We're looking forward to meeting you there! The second session will be a mixture of presentations and dis-cussions. I am also trying to organize some demonstrations of real systems and applications, so that the participants can have a hands-on look and get inspired by actual systems and appli-cations. The presentations are meant to give an
introduction to the field of mobile agents, and to address a wide scope ranging from agent
migration, security, to interoperability of mobile agent sys-tems. If you are interested to give a talk, or present an inter-esting system or application then I would like to hear from you!
Considerable work lies ahead, yet I'm confident that the SIG will be operative and productive, soon. Everybody who is interested in the topics of SIGMA is invited to join SIGMA's mailing list by sending a mail to [email protected]
"subscribe sig-ma <your mail address>"in its body. Finally, I wish to thank Steve Corley for the work he did for the SIG in the past, as well as for the numerous discussions and advice he gave me!
Looking forward to meeting you all in Prague, Volker Roth
mobile robotics
biocybernetics & pattern recognition
The working group “Distributed AI & Multi-Agent Systems” organized by Dr. Michal Pechoucek consists of 6 academic staff members (Vladimir Marik, Olga Stepankova, Jiri Lazansky, Michal Pechoucek, Jaroslav Barta, Lenka Lhotska) and about 15 Ph.D. and M. Sc. students. Their research activities are aimed mainly at theoretical foundations of MAS as well as at implemen-tation of research and industrial prototypes of MAS. Their theoretical studies are focused on the following:
Knowledge representation in acquaintance models.A specific tri-base acquaintance model (3bA) applicable for a wide scope of tasks (sys-tem integration, production planning and sched-uling, coalition formation, supply chain manage-ment, diagnostics etc.). This model was designed recently and its development continues. Meta-reasoning and meta-agents, applied in
improving the capabilities of MAS by discover-ing efficient patterns of global behavior—solvdiscover-ing reconfiguration and load re-allocation tasks, etc. Application of machine learning algorithms in
MAS, e.g. for optimizing the cooperation neigh-borhood, bottleneck detection, or intruder dis-covery, etc.
The team was, or has been, engaged in several impor-tant European projects including:
EUREKA No. 1439 “PVS’98” (1996-1999): The goal of this project was to design and imple-ment a production planning and scheduling sys-tem for project oriented manufacturing. The
Multi-Agent Research at the Gerstner
Lab
urrently, there are 27 members of academic staff and 31 Ph.D. students employed in the Lab. The Gerstner Lab together with the Center for Machine Perception (www.cmp.felk.cvut.cz)
forms the Department of Cybernetics, which recently gained the title EU-Center of Excellence due to project MIRACLE (ICA1-CT-2000-70002).
The research activities of the GL are oriented towards the hottest topics of Artificial Intelligence, namely to:
expert systems and knowledge engineering distributed AI & multi-agent systems soft computing
machine learning & inductive logic programming data-warehousing & data-mining
The Gerstner Lab (www.cyber.labe.felk.cvut.cz) was established in 1991 as a Joint research Lab of the Czech Technical University and FAW J. Kepler University, Linz, Austria around three key researchers: Prof. Vladimir Marik (head of the Gerstner Lab), Prof. Olga Stepankova and Dr. Jiri Lazansky.
Vladimir Marik and Olga Stepankova
Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic
[email protected] [email protected]
resulting system ProPlanT for production planning in the Czech TESLA-TV company explores multi-agent principles and represents the core multi-multi-agent prototype also used for more recent research and experimental purposes. The main partners: EPFL Lausaunne (CH), Univ. of Savoie (F), TESLA-TV (CZ).
TRIAL IST-1999-20171 “ExplanTech” (2000-2002): The goal of this project is to gen-eralize and apply the multi-agent technology used originally in the ProPlanT system to supply chain management purposes. The main partners: UniSoft (GR), Chatzapoulos Comp. (GR), CertiCon (CZ).
IST-1999-11495 “Sol-Eu-Net” (2000-2002): This is aimed at data mining and decision sup-port for business competitiveness. The research involves machine learning techniques for multi-agent systems. The main partners include: IJS (SI), GMD Sankt Augustin (Germany), OFAI Vienna (Austria), Oxford University (UK) et al. The Gerstner Lab also tightly cooperates with industry, the most important research contacts being:
Rockwell Automation, Milwaukee, WI: Several research projects aimed at application of MAS in system diagnostics and distributed control have been undertaken. Recently the GL participates in the development of FIPA-based multi-agent systems for higher-level decision making con-nected with holonic control.
U.S.Air Force Research Lab, USA: One of the contracts is aimed at the problem of intruder detection in a vast information/communication system. The other contract aims to explore the ProPlanT technology for coalition formation in peace-keeping operations.
Modelarna LIAZ Liberec, CZ: Development of the MAS-based production planning system integrated with the company information sys-tem.
Important international events organized in the MAS field by GL include:
3rd IEEE/IFIP Intern. Conf. BASYS’98 “Multi-Agent Systems and Virtual Organizations”, Prague, Czech Republic, August 1998
1st workshop HOLOMAS’00 “Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing”, Greenwich, UK, September 2000
European Summer School ACAI’01 “Multi-Agent
Systems and Their Applications” a joint event of ECCAI and AgentLink co-organized by CTU, Univ. of Vienna and the Czech Society for Cybernetics and Informatics, Prague, Czech Republic, July 2-13, 2001 2nd workshop HOLOMAS’01 “Holonic and
Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing”, Munich, Germany, September 2001
5th IEEE/IFIP Intern. Conf. BASYS’02, Cancun, Mexico, September 2002
13th IEEE Intern. Conf. DEXA’03, Prague, Czech Republic, September 2003
he AgentLink website is undergoing a major overhaul that will continue over the coming months. The overhaul will involve a redesign of visual interface, navigation, and con-tent. The aim is to create more visually attractive and effi-ciently functioning site. Readers of AgentLink News may have noticed the new home page design and other distinctive features.
As part of the new look, more content has been added, and exist-ing content has been updated. For example, the Agent Research Paper Clearinghouse has begun to be populated with papers from various groups, and we are keen to add more. If you want to add papers to the repository, simply email [email protected]
with the URL for your paper and the classification according to the scheme at http://www.agentlink.org/resources/clearing-house-view.html
Similarly, the Agent Software pages have been furnished with an extensive list of available software. To add something to our list, again email [email protected]. Perhaps more importantly
Redesign of AgentLink
Website
Call for Information and
Feedback
in relation to fostering European research in the area of agent-based systems, we have added new agent-related projects (typically funded by the European Commission) to the agent projects pages. We want to continually update information on these projects, together with information regarding new projects and will be able to do this with your support.
A new page on IST Calls for Proposals from the European Commission has been included in the site to complement the calls for papers and events pages. Information about member nodes on the site is now accessed through a map of Europe, which leads to
maps of individual nations showing their nodes. At present this information is limited to the contact details for the Technical Contact for each site. However, we aim to enhance this to include much more useful information for forming collaborations and gen-erating project proposals, and identifying relevant expertise. Again, in order to realise this goal we welcome information from our members.
In short, we want to make the web site the ultimate resource for agent researchers and industry. We want it to be the first port of call for those looking for collaborators for European projects, or indus-trialists looking for academic expertise and vice versa. We want it to be a resource for instructors, students, and anyone else with an inter-est in agent systems. This can only be done if members and others provide us with appropriate up-to-date information, so we are rely-ing on you to help.
If you have any comments or suggestions for us to take on board during the process of redesign and content updating, please let us know by mailing [email protected] are always keen to have good suggestions.
Elizabeth Coulter-Smith
AgentLink Publications and
Web Coordinator
University of Southampton, UK
p u b l i c a t i o n s @ a g e n t l i n k . o r g
t
The AgentLink UK Members Map University of Southampton Member Pr
ofile
The Third European
Agent Systems
Summer School and
SIG Meeting: Prague
he 3rd European Agent Systems Summer School will be held this year in collaboration with ECCAI’s Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence (ACAI-01), under the joint heading of Multi-Agent Systems & Applications.
The Summer School is jointly organized by the Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU), the Czech Society for Cybernetics and Informatics (CSKI) and the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI) in coop-eration with ECCAI and AgentLink. Further half/full-day co-located events on related topics will be included, such as the ILPNet2 workshop on “Inductive Logic Programming and Agents’’. AgentLink will also be holding SIG meetings in Prague at the same time. See http://www.agentlink.org/hap-penings/agentlink-july2001.htmlfor regular updates.
The Summer School will present the current state of the art in the area of multi-agent systems as well as demonstrate the applicability of these systems in many practical tasks. Presentations will highlight different aspects and viewpoints of this recently established and very active scientific field. The core will be formed by plenary invited mini-courses delivered by leading experts, but it will also include workshops, student sessions and panel discussions aimed at various problems relat-ed to MAS. The student sessions will provide an opportunity to present results and discuss student work in progress and their proceedings will be published by CTU AND OeFAI. Details of the summer school can be found at
http://cyber.felk.cvut.cz/ACAI01.
SIG Meetings in Prague
Along with the Summer School in Prague in July, AgentLink is organising SIG meetings from the 9th to the 11th. Five SIGs will meet, in a number of different sessions spread across the three-day period. Initial outlines of the sessions being organised are given below, with further details appearing on the AgentLink website over time at
t
Michael Luck
AgentLink General Coordinator
University of Southampton, UK
[email protected]
h t t p : / / w w w. a g e n t l i n k . o rg / h a p p e n i n g s / a g e n t l i n k -july2001.htmland on the individual SIG pages.Limited travel support is available for those participating in SIG meetings. Please contact the SIG organisers directly for information on how to participate, and/or check the SIG and meeting web pages at http://www.agentlink.org/.
Participation f