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.

Provenance in Agent-mediated Healthcare Systems

Agent-oriented cooperation techniques and standardized electronic healthcare record exchange protocols can be used to combine information regarding different facets of a therapy received by a patient from different healthcare providers at different locations. Provenance is an innovative approach to trace events in complex distributed processes, dependencies between such events, and associated decisions by human actors. We focus on three aspects of provenance in agent-mediated healthcare systems: first, we define the provenance concept and show how it can be applied to agent-mediated healthcare applications; second, we investigate and provide a method for independent and autonomous healthcare agents to document the processes they are involved in without directly interacting with each other; and third, we show that this method solves the privacy issues of provenance in agent-mediated healthcare systems.

Interaction among agents that plan

The development of practical agent languages has progressed significantly over recent years, but this has largely been independent of distinct developments in aspects of multiagent cooperation and planning. For example, while the popular AgentSpeak(L) has had various extensions and improvements proposed, it still essentially a single-agent language. In response, in this paper, we describe a simple, yet effective, technique for multiagent planning that enables an agent to take advantage of cooperating agents in a society. In particular, we build on a technique that enables new plans to be added to a plan library through the invocation of an external planning component, and extend it to include the construction of plans involving the chaining of subplans of others. Our mechanism makes use of plan patterns that insulate the planning process from the resulting distributed aspects of plan execution through local proxy plans that encode information about the preconditions and effects of the external plans provided by agents willing to cooperate. In this way, we allow an agent to discover new ways of achieving its goals through local planning and the delegation of tasks for execution by others, allowing it to overcome individual limitations.