Patricia Charlton

Evaluating the FIPA standards and their role in achieving cooperation in multi-agent systems

Focuses on the analysis and evaluation of certain aspects of the current specification standards provided by FIPA (Foundation of Intelligent Physical Agents). The work reported in this paper is based on the development of a multi-agent application-an audio-visual entertainment broadcasting (AVEB) system. This has resulted in determining the advantages and limitations of using the FIPA standards to build complex multi-agent systems (MASs). The development and testing of the AVEB application are part of an EU project called FACTS (FIPA Agent Communication Technologies and Services, ACTS Project No. AC317). A main result of using FIPA has been the identification of the usefulness and power of its protocols. The reason for the importance of the protocols in developing MASs is that it provides a degree of expressing cooperation within the MAS architecture. As the protocols stand currently, they are not sufficient to capture a complete explicit model of the cooperative requirements in MASs. However, they do provide a basis from which to start. We examine this feature of FIPA further, in order to evaluate its role as a bridge between the mental agency and social agency requirements in the development of cooperation in MASs.

A Developer's Perspective on Multi-agent System Design

This paper draws upon the practical experience gained in the development of software agents for the deployment of intelligent distributed services and information access. We review a set of multi-agent architectures starting from the communication and co-ordination requirements of such systems. The aim is to illustrate the common components in current designs and implementations of MAS which are often based on the communication nature of these systems. Further to this we show some benefits and drawbacks of these systems that are developed form this aspect. Part of the limitations of these systems is due to basing their communication semantic interpretation on the belief desire and intention model (BDI) which is a mental agency. The mental agency is used for the internal reasoning part of the agent and places implicit assumptions on the communication behaviour. We examine this limitation and report on how two MASs overcome some of the constraints. In light of these practical solutions we outline some pragmatic design concepts in reducing potential constraints of the BDI model on the communication layer. The result is a discussion about how to bridge between mental agency dependencies and the role of social agency when developing multi-agent systems.

Using an Asset Model for Integration of Agents and Multimedia to Provide an Open Service Architecture

KIMSAC — Kiosk-based Integrated Multimedia Service Access for Citizens — is a project supported by EUs ACTS program (030). It aims to provide a flexible way for citizens to access intricate and complex information provided on public information kiosks. An open agent architecture is used to co-ordinated, enhance and extend service provision and the necessary information flow which characterises satisfaction of service requests. The metaphor of a personal service assistant (PSA) builds on this architecture and is used to provide citizens with flexible and efficient access to services and information to realise a client-centred design which is targeted to use. An appropriate technology for providing information services is multimedia in terms of information visualisation and user interaction. Information services are provided by agents, which will simplify the addition of new services to the kiosk. An open agent architecture is used and it requires a comprehensive asset model to support the integration of multimedia services. This paper explains how to achieve integration, from defining assets, supporting the PSA metaphor, rendering the dynamically created assets to the requirements of the agent technology to provide open services.

The re-use of Multimedia Objects by Software Agents in the Kimsac system

The Kimsac system is an agent mediated multimedia system running on a touchscreen kiosk and providing real-time information on jobs vacancies, training and income support to Irish citizens. The distributed system accesses legacy databases. Multimedia objects are described (using an asset description tool which associates a script with each asset) and this description is used by the agent infrastructure for the rendering of screen assets through a Presentation System. Content Handlers, written in Java, allow for the reuse of the multimedia objects by enabling the display of atomic or composite objects.

Modelling interface agents for personality-based behaviour

Visually synthesising the metaphor of life-like visual personal service assistants (PSAs) is the focus of much current research. Often the complex visual requirements of the PSA means that little attention is given to the underlying infrastructure necessary to support the reasoning requirements of such a metaphor. This lack of support, from a software engineering perspective, means that many designs and implementations are application specific thus re-use of the designs and implementations are limited. To address this problem our research goes behind the scenes of visual stage representation to provide a technical infrastructure enabling the creation of more believable life-like interface characters based on a structured meta-representation called the Asset Description Language (ADL). The language is extended to enable agents to communicate emotions with other agents (software or human). Hence this explicit representation of emotions within the communication means that an agent can reason about these emotions and respond in an appropriate manner either visually to a human or through communication with another agent. This response permits an agent to exhibit personality. Through the provision of a structured meta-representation we aim to evaluate the effect personality-based behaviour on interactive user interfaces as well as on other service agents in a multi-agent environment. As the representation provides some basic general design primitives which are not application specific means that re-use of our infrastructure by other developers is possible.

Development and deployment of a multi-agent system for public service access

In this paper we summarise the technology developments and results of a large-scale hardware and software technology development that required both multimedia and multi-agents. The KIMSAC project (a European acts project Kiosk-based Integrated Multimedia System Access to Citizens) started in September 95 with the vision of using the Personal Service Assistant Metaphor to provide public services to a variety of users. The project anticipated that the users would be of varying ages, education and technology awareness as the application to be supported included social services (e.g. income support) and employment services (e.g. finding jobs and training courses). Hence any solution would have to support a diverse set of users and be able to support distributed information and service access. The distributed solution was required as the two user organisations supporting the domain requirements were independent government organisations, the hardware and location requirements, the development partners themselves were distributed over five major European countries and the end-user was the public. The KIMSAC solution was tested on two sets of real user trials based in Ireland. Trial 1 completed in June 97 and the second trial started July 98. As the project nears completion, we summarise in this paper an analysis of the software design and development.

Supporting personality in personal service assistants from metaphor to implementation

In this paper we examine the Personal Service Assistant (PSA) metaphor and analyse the requirements to support public information and service access. The PSA is still in the evaluation stage as researchers develop an understanding of the metaphor and a process for implementing it. An emerging dimension to realising this metaphor is the desire to physically visualise the PSA in a life-like figure that appears intelligent not only in the manner it reacts to human interaction, but further by portraying itself as an individual with character. We discuss the experience gained from using the PSA in the KIMSAC project, providing an analysis of the metaphor and its implementation requirements, as well as, providing an evaluation of its development and usability criteria. The paper concentrates on describing a base-system for supporting PSA development and considers how this can be expanded to support a richer set of social features that form an infrastructure for developing Personal Service Assistants with life-like qualities.