Coalition Formation through Motivation and Trust

Cooperation is the fundamental underpinning of multi-agent systems, allowing agents to interact to achieve their goals. Where agents are self-interested, or potentially unreliable, there must be appropriate mechanisms to cope with the uncertainty that arises. In particular, agents must manage the risk associated with interacting with others who have different objectives, or who may fail to fulfil their commitments. Previous work has utilised the notions of motivation and trust in engendering successful cooperation between self-interested agents. Motivations provide a means for representing and reasoning about agents' overall objectives, and trust offers a mechanism for modelling and reasoning about reliability, honesty, veracity and so forth. This paper extends that work to address some of its limitations. In particular, we introduce the concept of a clan: a group of agents who trust each other and have similar objectives. Clan members treat each other favourably when making private decisions about cooperation, in order to gain mutual benefit. We describe mechanisms for agents to form, maintain, and dissolve clans in accordance with their self-interested nature, along with giving details of how clan membership influences individual decision making. Finally, through some simulation experiments we illustrate the effectiveness of clan formation in addressing some of the inherent problems with cooperation among self-interested agents.

Technology diffusion: analysing the diffusion of agent technologies

Despite several examples of deployed agent systems, there remain barriers to the large-scale adoption of agent technologies. In order to understand these barriers, this paper considers aspects of marketing theory which deal with diffusion of innovations and their relevance to the agents domain and the current state of diffusion of agent technologies. In particular, the paper examines the role of standards in the adoption of new technologies, describes the agent standards landscape, and compares the development and diffusion of agent technologies with that of object-oriented programming. The paper also reports on a simulation model developed in order to consider different trajectories for the adoption of agent technologies, with trajectories based on various assumptions regarding industry structure and the existence of competing technology standards. We present details of the simulation model and its assumptions, along with the results of the simulation exercises.

Modelling and Administration of Contract-Based Systems

Mirroring the paper versions exchanged between businesses today, electronic contracts offer the possibility of dynamic, automatic creation and enforcement of restrictions and compulsions on agent behaviour that are designed to ensure business objectives are met. However, where there are many contracts within a particular application, it can be difficult to determine whether the system can reliably fulfil them all; computer-parsable electronic contracts may allow such verification to be automated. In this paper, we describe a conceptual framework and architecture specification in which normative business contracts can be electronically represented, verified, established, renewed, etc. In particular, we aim to allow systems containing multiple contracts to be checked for conflicts and violations of business objectives. We illustrate the framework and architecture with an aerospace example.