research-article

Multi-Agent System in Practice: When Research Meets Reality

Authors:

Marco Lützenberger,

Tobias Küster,

Johannes FähndrichAuthors Info & Claims

AAMAS '16: Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems

Pages 796 - 805

Published: 09 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

The applicability and usefulness of agent technology for real world problems is still a matter of discussion - even within the AAMAS community. While theoretical models have significantly matured and led to an exciting variety of results, there were only few attempts to validate these models in reality. In this paper we aim to report on challenges that occurred when agent theory was used to approach real world problems. In doing so, we focus on the concept of planning, since planning currently appears to be one of the most relevant concepts for distributed real world applications. We examine four agent-based applications and emphasise problems that occurred when agent theory was practically applied. We also show how these problems were countered and propose more general solutions based on these tailored and context-specific approaches. The aim of this paper is to bring the two diverging branches of agent theory and practice back together in order to better adapt agent technology to the requirements of professional software.

References

[1]

R. Akkiraju, B. Srivastava, A.-A. Ivan, R. Goodwin, and T. Syeda-Mahmood. SEMAPLAN: Combining planning with semantic matching to achieve web service composition. In Proceedings of the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'06), 2006.

Digital Library

[2]

T. Aubonnet, L. Henrio, S. Kessal, O. Kulankhina, F. Lemoine, E. Madelaine, C. Ruz, and N. Simoni. Management of service composition based on self-controlled components. Journal of Internet Services and Applications, 6(1):1--15, 2015.

[3]

P. Bercher, T. Geier, and S. Biundo. Using state-based planning heuristics for partial-order causal-link planning. In I. J. Timm and M. Thimm, editors, KI 2013: Advances in Artificial Intelligence, volume 8077 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pages 1--12. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2013.

[4]

D. Bianchini, V. D. Antonellis, M. Melchiori, and D. Salvi. Semantic-enriched service discovery. In Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Data Engineering Workshops, pages 38--38, 2006.

Digital Library

[5]

B. Burmeister. Industrial application of agent systems: Lessons learned and future challenges. In L. Braubach, W. van der Hoek, P. Petta, and A. Pokahr, editors, Multiagent System Technologies, 7th German Conference, MATES 2009, Hamburg, Germany, September 2009, Proceedings, volume 5774 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pages 1--3. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2009.

Digital Library

[6]

A. Carenini, D. Cerizza, M. Comerio, E. D. Valle, F. D. Paoli, A. Maurino, M. Palmonari, and A. Turati. GLUE2: A web service discovery engine with non-functional properties. In Proceedings of the IEEE 6th European Conference on Web Services (ECOW'08), pages 21--30, 2008.

Digital Library

[7]

S. A. B. Cruz, A. M. V. Monteiro, and R. Santos. Automated geospatial web services composition based on geodata quality requirements. Computers & Geosciences, 47(0):60--74, 2012.

Digital Library

[8]

J. de Bruijn, H. Lausen, R. Krummenacher, A. Polleres, L. Predoiu, M. Kifer, and D. Fensel. The web service modeling language (WSML). Technical report, Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), 2005. http://www.wsmo.org/TR/d16/d16.1/v0.21/.

[9]

P. Doherty, W. Lukaszewicz, and A. Szalas. Efficient reasoning using the local closed-world assumption. In S. A. Cerri and D. Dochev, editors, Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, and Applications, volume 1904 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 49--58. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2003.

Digital Library

[10]

A. E. Eiben and J. E. Smith. Introduction to Evolutionary Computing. Natural Computing. Springer, 2003.

Digital Library

[11]

T. Erl. SOA Principles of Service Design. Prentice Hall, 2007.

Digital Library

[12]

J. Euzenat and P. Shvaiko. Ontology Matching. Springer, 2007.

Digital Library

[13]

J. Fähndrich, N. Masuch, H. Yildirim, and S. Albayrak. Towards automated service matchmaking and planning for multi-agent systems with OWL-S -- approach and challenges. In Service-Oriented Computing -- ICSOC 2013 Workshops, volume 8377 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 240--247. Springer International Publishing, 2014.

[14]

D. Fensel, F. M. Facca, E. Simperl, and I. Toma. Semantic Web Services. Springer Science & Business Media, 2011.

Digital Library

[15]

M. Genesereth. Knowledge interchange format. Proposed Draft NCITS.T2/98-004, American National Standard, 1998.

[16]

A. Gerevini, A. Saetti, and I. Serina. Case-based planning for problems with real-valued fluents: Kernel functions for effective plan retrieval. In Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2012), pages 348--353, 2012.

[17]

M. Ghallab, A. Howe, C. Knoblock, D. Mcdermott, A. Ram, M. Veloso, D. Weld, and D. Wilkins. PDDL -- the planning domain definition language, 1998.

[18]

M. Ghallab, D. Nau, and P. Traverso. The actor's view of automated planning and acting: A position paper. Artificial Intelligence, 208:1--17, 2014.

Digital Library

[19]

L. Guzmán, A. Jaime, C. Ovalle, and A. Demetrio. Web service composition: a semantic web and automated planning technique application. Ingenierıa e Investigación, 28(3):145--149, 2008.

[20]

O. Hatzi, D. Vrakas, M. Nikolaidou, N. Bassiliades, D. Anagnostopoulos, and I. Vlahavas. An integrated approach to automated semantic web service composition through planning. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 5(3):319--332, 2012.

Digital Library

[21]

C.-E. Hrabia, T. Küster, M. Voß, F. D. P. Pardo, and S. Albayrak. Adaptive multi-stage optimisation for EV charging integration into smart grid control. In Q. Chen, P. Torroni, S. Villata, J. Hsu, and A. Omicini, editors, PRIMA 2015: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, volume 9387 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pages 622--630. Springer International Publishing, 2015.

[22]

C.-E. Hrabia, F. D. P. Pardo, T. Küster, and S. Albayrak. Multi-stage smart grid optimisation with a multiagent system (demonstration). In Proceedings of 14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2015), pages 1937--1938, 2015.

Digital Library

[23]

International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. AAMAS 2015 Conference Program. IFAAMAS, 2015.

[24]

P. Kapahnke and M. Klusch. Adaptive hybrid selection of semantic services: The iSeM matchmaker. In Semantic Web Services: Advancement through Evaluation. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2012.

[25]

M. Klusch, A. Gerber, and M. Schmidt. Semantic web service composition planning with OWLS-Xplan. In Agents and the Semantic Web: Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium. AAAI Fall Symposium, November 4-6, Arlington, VA, USA, pages 55--62, 2005.

[26]

J. Kopecký, T. Vitvar, C. Bournez, and J. Farrell. SAWSDL: Semantic annotations for WSDL and XML schema. IEEE Internet Computing, 11(6):60--67, 2007.

Digital Library

[27]

T. Küster, M. Lützenberger, and S. Albayrak. A formal description of a mapping from business processes to agents. In M. Baldoni, L. Baresi, and M. Dastani, editors, Engineering Multi-Agent Systems, volume 9318 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pages 153--170. Springer International Publishing, 2015.

[28]

U. Küster, B. König-Ries, M. Klein, and M. Stern. DIANE: A matchmaking-centered framework for automated service discovery, composition, binding, and invocation on the web. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 12(2):41--68, 2007.

Digital Library

[29]

J. Li. A fast semantic web services matchmaker for OWL-S services. Journal of Networks, 8(5):1104--1111, 2013.

[30]

M. Lützenberger, N. Masuch, T. Küster, D. Freund, M. Voß, C.-E. Hrabia, D. Pozo, J. Fähndrich, F. Trollmann, J. Keiser, and S. Albayrak. A common approach to intelligent energy and mobility services in a smart city environment. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 6(3):337--350, 2015.

[31]

D. Martin, M. Paolucci, S. McIlraith, M. Burstein, D. McDermott, D. McGuinness, B. Parsia, T. Payne, M. Sabou, M. Solanki, N. Srinivasan, and K. Sycara. Bringing semantics to web services: The OWL-S approach. In Semantic Web Services and Web Process Composition, pages 26--42. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2004.

Digital Library

[32]

N. Masuch, B. Hirsch, M. Burkhardt, A. Heßler, and S. Albayrak. SeMa 2 -- a hybrid semantic service matching approach. In Semantic Services: Advancement through Evaluation, pages 35--48. Springer-Verlag, 2012.

[33]

V. Mařík and D. McFarlane. Industrial adoption of agent-based technologies. Intelligent Systems, IEEE, 20(1):27--35, 2005.

Digital Library

[34]

D. McGuinness and F. van Harmelen. OWL web ontology language overview. Technical report, W3C, 2004. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/.

[35]

J. McKean, H. Shorter, M. Luck, P. McBurney, and S. Willmott. Technology diffusion: analysing the diffusion of agent technologies. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 17:372--396, 2008.

Digital Library

[36]

D. S. Nau, M. Ghallab, and P. Traverso. Blended planning and acting: Preliminary approach, research challenges. AAAI, pages 4047--4051, 2015.

Digital Library

[37]

Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) Version 2.0, Apr. 2007.

[38]

M. P. Papazoglou, P. Traverso, S. Dustdar, and F. Leymann. Service-oriented computing: a research roadmap. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, 17(2):223--255, 2008.

[39]

J. Peer. A PDDL based tool for automatic web service composition. In H. J. Ohlbach and S. Schaffert, editors, Principles and Practice of Semantic Web Reasoning, volume 3208 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 149--163. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2004.

[40]

M. Pěchoučyek and V. Mařrík. Industrial deployment of multi-agent technologies: review and selected case studies. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 17(3):397--431, 2008.

Digital Library

[41]

D. Redavid, L. Iannone, T. Payne, and G. Semeraro. OWL-S atomic services composition with SWRL rules. In A. An, S. Matwin, Z. W. Ra's, and D. Ślȩzak, editors, Foundations of Intelligent Systems, volume 4994 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 605--611. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2008.

Digital Library

[42]

L. Sabatucci and M. Cossentino. From means-end analysis to proactive means-end reasoning. In Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS 2015), pages 2--12, 2015.

Digital Library

[43]

C. Sathya and T. Hemalatha. An adaptive architecture for autonomic orchestration of web services. International Journal Of Engineering and Computer Science, 2(4):972--975, 2013.

[44]

P. Shvaiko and J. Euzenat. Ontology matching: State of the art and future challenges. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 25(1):158--176, 2013.

Digital Library

[45]

E. Sirin, B. Parsia, D. Wu, J. Hendler, and D. Nau. HTN planning for web service composition using SHOP2. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 1(4):377--396, 2004.

Digital Library

[46]

H. Tong, J. Cao, S. Zhang, and M. Li. A distributed algorithm for web service composition based on service agent model. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 22(12):2008--2021, 2011.

Digital Library

[47]

D. Weyns, A. Helleboogh, and T. Holvoet. How to get multi-agent systems accepted in industry? International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (IJAOSE), 3(4):383--390, May 2009.

Digital Library

[48]

F. Zambonelli, N. Bicocchi, G. Cabri, L. Leonardi, and M. Puviani. On self-adaptation, self-expression, and self-awareness in autonomic service component ensembles. In Proceedings of the 5th IEEE Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems Workshops (SASOW 2011), pages 108--113, 2011.

Digital Library

Cited By

Ma JPark SShin JKim NSeo JLee JSa J(2018)AI based intelligent system on the EDISON platformProceedings of the 2018 Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Computing Conference10.1145/3299819.3299843(106-114)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3299819.3299843

Index Terms

Multi-Agent System in Practice: When Research Meets Reality
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Distributed artificial intelligence
      1. Multi-agent systems
    2. Planning and scheduling
      1. Multi-agent planning

Recommendations

Multi-agent planning by plan reuse
AAMAS '13: Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems

Generating plans for a single agent has been shown to be a difficult task. If we generalize to a multi-agent setting, the problem becomes exponentially harder in general. The centralized approach where a plan is jointly generated for all agents is only ...
Efficient multi-agent epistemic planning: Teaching planners about nested belief
Abstract
Many AI applications involve the interaction of multiple autonomous agents, requiring those agents to reason about their own beliefs, as well as those of other agents. However, planning involving nested beliefs is known to be ...
Action dependencies in privacy-preserving multi-agent planning

Collaborative privacy-preserving planning (CPPP) is a multi-agent planning task in which agents need to achieve a common set of goals without revealing certain private information. In many CPPP algorithms, the individual agents reason about a projection ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

AAMAS '16: Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems

May 2016

1580 pages

ISBN:9781450342391

General Chairs:
Catholijn M. Jonker
TU Delft, Netherlands
,
Stacy Marsella
University of Southern California, USA
,
Program Chairs:
John Thangarajah
RMIT University. Australia
,
Karl Tuyls
University of Liverpool, UK

Sponsors

IFAAMAS

In-Cooperation

SIGAI: ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence

Publisher

International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

Richland, SC

Publication History

Published: 09 May 2016

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

AAMAS '16

Sponsor:

AAMAS '16: International Conference on Agents and Multiagent Systems

May 9 - 13, 2016

Singapore, Singapore

Acceptance Rates

AAMAS '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 137 of 550 submissions, 25%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,155 of 5,036 submissions, 23%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

1
Total Citations
View Citations
176
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)4
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 03 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Ma JPark SShin JKim NSeo JLee JSa J(2018)AI based intelligent system on the EDISON platformProceedings of the 2018 Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Computing Conference10.1145/3299819.3299843(106-114)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3299819.3299843

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten