Birgit Burmeister

Application of multi-agent systems in traffic and transportation

Agent-oriented techniques offer a new approach to support the whole software development process. All the phases in the software development process are treated with a single uniform concept, namely that of agents, and a system modelled by a collection of agents is called a multi-agent system. AOTs as a new advance in information technology can help to respond to the growing interest in making traffic and transportation more efficient, resource-saving and ecological. The authors give an overview of a diverse range of applications where multi-agent systems promise to create a great impact in this domain. To demonstrate the ideas behind AOTs and their applicability in this domain, two applications under development at Daimler-Benz Research are described in some detail.

Generic, configurable, cooperation protocols for multi-agent systems

In this paper we propose a unified and general mechanism for developing cooperation protocols in multi-agent systems. The protocols are essentially speech act based but have considerable advantages as compared to previous approaches: First, they are generic in the sense that a protocol execution algorithm can treat the domain independent parts separately from the application dependent reasoning and deciding processes involved. And second, they are recursively defined from primitives which allow a designer (or eventually the agents themselves) configure the appropriate general or domain-specific cooperation protocols.

A practical approach to multi-attribute auctions

In most electronic auctions conducted over the Internet price is still the only decision criteria for the best bid. This is true for all sorts of auctions in the electronic business areas consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B). Especially for many situations in the B2B area there are other important attributes apart from price to be considered for decision making. Therefore the area of multi-attribute auctions gains more and more interest in the scientific community as well as from software vendors of electronic business products. But the approaches offered so far suffer from some limitations. Theoretical approaches are not applicable to (B2B) real world scenarios, commercial software does not cover all situations. To overcome these limitations we developed a practical approach to multi-attribute auctions, that is presented in this paper.

Agile processes through goal- and context-oriented business process modeling

Todays methods for business process modeling like extended event-process-chains only allow the definition of static graph structures. They are not flexible enough for instance to model the change management process of the Mercedes Car Group (MCG) since it requires dynamic selection of process variants, process schema evolution and their (partial) propagation on running workflows, arbitrary dynamic process jumps and changes, etc. We have developed an approach for modeling agile processes based on goals and context rules, which enables the required flexibility. Additionally it is possible to map such a process model to a run-time infrastructure for process execution.

Go4Flex: Goal-Oriented Process Modelling

Many companies consider business process management strategies a fundamental source for successful business operation. Despite this importance of business processes a conceptual and operational gap still exists between the business and the IT view of processes. In this paper we argue that an important reason for this gap is the strong focus of IT on the behaviour and execution perspective of workflows while more abstract and higher-level process properties are often neglected. This is especially apparent in the way processes are modelled and described on the IT-side using state of the art modelling approaches like BPMN. The presented Go4Flex research project, which is conducted in cooperation with Daimler AG, has the objective of bringing together both sides by establishing higher-level modelling concepts for workflows, which results both in increased intelligibility of workflow descriptions for business people and greater consideration for the way processes are described on the business side. The core idea of the approach is to strengthen the context perspective of a workflow by introducing different kinds of goals and goal relationships in addition to the established activity-centred behaviour model. The applicability of the approach is further illustrated with an example workflow from Daimler AG.

Agent-oriented techniques for traffic and manufacturing applications: progress report

We view agent-oriented techniques (AOT) as a further development of techniques in object-oriented systems and distributed systems. AOT extend object-oriented techniques in that the analysis, design, and realization of complex systems are performed on a higher level of abstraction, and in that agents are active, concurrent objects, collectively embedded in a ‘society.’ Furthermore, agents are a specialization of objects in that the internal states of objects are typed by intentional states, for example, and in that messages exchanged among agents are classified by message types (Shoham, 1993). AOT can lean upon techniques provided by distributed systems (like sharing resources and synchronization), but they complement these techniques by making subsystems more autonomous and enabling them to co-ordinate their activities actively instead of being co-ordinated by design.

Cooperative problem-solving guided by intentions and perception (abstract)

The formalization of multi-agent autonomous systems requires a rich ontology for capturing a variety of collective behaviours and a powerful semantics for distinguishing between collective agents having, executing, and jointly intending a plan. In this paper, we introduce the notion of social agents and social plans. A definition of joint intentions is provided that avoids some of the problems encountered by previous formalizations. In particular, it models cooperation by requiring that agents adopt a joint goal and a joint plan of action before forming a joint intention. The paper also stresses the planning capability of agents and outlines a process for means-end reasoning by multiple agents.

Industrial application of agent systems: lessons learned and future challenges

Challenges in modern industry such as high complexity inside companies and in the environment, ever increasing dynamics to react to, integration of many different partners and world-wide distribution of supply and production networks seem to really demand for the promises of agent systems. Multi agent systems handle complex systems by dividing them into smaller pieces. Agents can react to changing environments. Distribution, autonomy and interaction are basic concepts at the heart of agent systems.