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.

Sociological Agents for Effective Social Action

This paper is concerned with the problem of how effective social interaction arises from individual social action and mind. The need to study the individual social mind, suggests a move towards the notion of sociological agents who can model their social environment as opposed to acting socially within it. This does not constrain such social behaviour; on the contrary, we argue that it provides the requisite information and understanding for such behaviour to be effective. We argue that effective social agents must be sociological in modelling agents and agent relationships. In this paper, we show how an existing agent framework leads naturally to the enumeration of a map of inter-agent relationships that can be modelled and exploited by sociological agents to enable more effective operation.

BDI4JADE: a BDI layer on top of JADE

Several agent platforms that implement the belief-desire-intention (BDI) architecture have been proposed. Even though most of them are implemented based on existing general purpose programming languages, e.g. Java, agents are either programmed in a new programming language or Domain-specific Language expressed in XML. As a consequence, this prevents the use of advanced features of the underlying programming language and the integration with existing libraries and frameworks, which are essential for the development of enterprise applications. Due to these limitations of BDI agent platforms, we have implemented the BDI4JADE, which is presented in this paper. It is implemented as a BDI layer on top of JADE, a well accepted agent platform.

Desenvolvimento de um sistema de indicadores de desempenho para empreendimentos em construção civil, utilizando a abordagem macroergonômica

This paper presents the validation of the Performance Indicator System for Projects under Construction - SIDECC. The goal was to develop a system of performance indicators from the macroergonômica approach, considering criteria of usefulness, practicality and applicability and the concept of continuous improvement in the construction industry. The validation process SIDECC consisted of three distinct models. Modeling I corresponded to the theoretical development and validation of a system of indicators. Modeling II concerns the development and validation of multi- indicator system. For this modeling, we used the Mother of Use and Importance and Multivariate Analysis. Modeling III corresponded to the validation situated, which consisted of a case study of a work of construction of buildings, which were applied and analyzed the results of modeling II. This work resulted in the development of an applied and tested for the construction of an integrated system of performance indicators methodology, involving aspects of production, quality, environmental, health and safety. It is inferred that the SIDECC can be applied, in full or in part, the construction companies as a whole, as well as in other economic sectors