Bexy Alfonso

A MAS-based infrastructure for negotiation and its application to a water-right market

This paper presents a MAS-based infrastructure for the specification of a negotiation framework that handles multiple negotiation protocols in a coherent and flexible way. Although it may be used to implement one single type of agreement mechanism, it has been designed in such a way that multiple mechanisms may be available at any given time, to be activated and tailored on demand (on-line) by participating agents. The framework is also generic enough so that new protocols may be easily added. This infrastructure has been successfully used in a case study to implement a simulation tool as a component of a larger framework based on an electronic market of water rights.

An Open Architecture for Affective Traits in a BDI Agent

Recently an increasing amount of research focuses on improving agents believability by adding affective features to the traditional agent-based modeling. This is probably due to the demand of reaching ever more realistic behaviors on agent-based simulations which extends to several and diverse application fields. The present work proposes O3A: an Open Affective Agent Architecture, which extends a traditional BDI agent architecture improving a practical reasoning with more “human” characteristics. This architecture tries to address disperse definitions combining the main elements of supporting psychological and neurological theories.

Integrating jason in a multi-agent platform with support for interaction protocols.

Agent communication is a core issue when studying all possible ways for agents to organize and collaborate to achieve their goals. We can count on communication standards, as the FIPA Interaction Protocols. On the other hand we can count on high level agent programming languages, like AgentSpeak, which allow us to model and represent the agent and its knowledge and behavior. In this paper we present a proposal to add to Jason (an interpreter of an extended version of AgentSpeak) a new level of abstraction in the task of programming conversations between agents. The agent communication follows the FIPA interaction protocols. A new entity called Communicator Manager acts as an interface between the agent programming language (Jason) and the platform communication facilities (Magentix 2). This approach allows the programmer to focus on programming the agent knowledge and reasoning parts instead of the interaction protocols. An agent can call the communication manager to start a conversation. The communication manager will control the different steps of the conversation and will modify the agent belief base to represent the results of the different steps of the conversation protocol. Therefore, the agents can use this knowledge in its reasoning process. This approach can be easily transfered to others agent programming languages and platforms.

Toward Formal Modeling of Affective Agents in a BDI Architecture

Affective characteristics are crucial factors that influence human behavior, and often, the prevalence of either emotions or reason varies on each individual. We aim to facilitate the development of agents’ reasoning considering their affective characteristics. We first identify core processes in an affective BDI agent, and we integrate them into an affective agent architecture (GenIA3). These tasks include the extension of the BDI agent reasoning cycle to be compliant with the architecture, the extension of the agent language (Jason) to support affect-based reasoning, and the adjustment of the equilibrium between the agent’s affective and rational sides.

Modeling Personality in the Affective Agent Architecture GenIA3.

In the last few years there has been a growing interest in affective computing. This type of computation tries to include and use emotions in different software processes. One of the most relevant areas is the simulation of human behavior where various affective models are used to represent different affective characteristics such as emotions, mood, or personality. Personality is defined as a set of individual characteristics that influence motivations and behaviors when a human being faces a particular circumstance. Personality plays a very important role in modeling affective processes. Through the simulation of emotions we can improve, among others, the experience of users dealing with machines, and human simulations in decision-making processes using multi-agent systems. In this work we propose a model for the use of personality in the general purpose architecture for affective agents GenIA3, as well as the development of the model in the current GenIA3

Un modelo para representar el estado anímico de los estudiantes en el aula

El estado animico de los estudiantes tiene una infuencia directa en el proceso de ensenanza-aprendizaje. En concreto, un estado positivo permite mejorar aspectos como la motivacion y los logros conseguidos. A pesar de que el estado animico representa un estado a largo plazo, este puede ser modicado a traves de las emociones que tienen los estudiantes en funcion de las clases. En este articulo, presentamos un modelo para representar el estado animico de los estudiantes con la finanalidad de identificar que factores infuyen para conseguir estados positivos que faciliten su aprendizaje. Considerando este modelo, hemos recogido resultados midiendo las emociones que tienen los alumnos durante las distintas sesiones de varias asignaturas. Los resultados demuestran que las clases que generan mas emociones positivas son aquellas en donde se trabaja por proyectos y en las que se repasan conceptos anteriores. Keywords: estado anmico, estudiantes, emociones.

Integrating Expectations into Jason for Appraisal in Emotion Modeling.

Emotions have a strong influence on human reasoning and behavior, thus, in order to build intelligent agents which simulate human behavior, it is necessary to consider emotions. Expectations are one of the bases for emotion generation through the appraisal process. In this work we have extended the Jason agent language and platform for handling expectations. Unlike other approaches focused on expectations handling, we have modified the agent reasoning cycle to manage expectations, avoiding complex additional mechanisms such as monitors. This tool is part of the GenIA3architecture and, hence, is a step towards the standardization of the emotion modeling process in BDI (Beliefs-Desires-Intentions) agents.

An Agent Model of Student’s Affect for Adapting Schooling Strategies

In this paper, we present a student’s affective model that considers a temporal and multi-dimensional view of the student. It considers three dimensions (i.e., individual, environmental, and social dimension), which contain static and dynamic features. Based on this model, we define a MAS, that includes emotional agents able to simulate student’s and their affective state. This system allows to simulate the effects of changes in lessons over the affective state of students.