Eastern Mediterranean University

Department of Computer Engineering

Master Thesis Defense

Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Zeki Bayram

Student: Bijan Zamanian

 Introduction
 What is an agent?
 What is coordination?
 Why coordination.
 Coordination models.
 Concerns about coordination models.
 Our model
 How to coordinate
 Proposed architecture
 Demonstration of proposed architecture
 Agent ,coordinator and web service architecture
 Conclusion
 References

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Complex tasks are often carried out by teams consisting of individuals, because no one
individual has the collective expertise, information, or resources required for the
effective completion or performance of a task.

Agents can cooperate to facilitate achieving a common, complicated and large scale
goal using some of their characteristic like Intelligence , autonomy. In such a case each
agent is responsible for a part of the goal .
 
 But to ensure a community of individual agents acts in a coherent manner they need
coordination.
 
Coordination may require cooperation, but cooperation among a set of agents does not
necessarily results in coordination.

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1) A software agent is a piece of software that acts for a
user or other programs.
2) An agent is defined in terms of its behavior.
3) Agents commonly include the following concepts
 persistence (code is not executed on demand but runs continuously and decides for
itself when it should perform some activity)
 autonomy (agents have capabilities of task selection, prioritization, goal-directed
behavior, decision-making without human intervention)
 sociability (agents are able to engage other components through some sort of
communication and coordination, they may collaborate on a task)
 reactivity (agents perceive the context in which they operate and react to it
appropriately).
 Intelligence (agent are able of reasoning and learning )

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4. A cooperative system of agents may fall into one or
more of these categories :
 distributed agents (being executed on physically distinct computers),
 multi-agent systems (distributed agents that do not have the capabilities to achieve
an objective alone and thus must communicate),
 mobile agents (agents that can relocate their execution onto different processors).

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1. Coordination in general :
Act of making different people or things work together for a goal or effect.

2. Agent coordination.
The process by which agents reason about their local actions and the (anticipated)
actions of others .

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1. Coordination model:
An agent coordination model is a conceptual framework .

2. Coordination architecture:
A coordination architecture is a software infrastructure.

3. Some well known coordination models are:

 Direct, Meeting oriented,
 Blackboard-based
 Linda-like

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1. Direct
In Direct coordination models, agents usually coordinate using RPC-like primitives
or synchronous message passing.
2. Meeting oriented
In Meeting oriented models, agents coordinate using implicit or known meeting
points.
3. Blackboard-based
In Blackboard-based models, agents coordinate via shared data spaces to store
and retrieve information under the form of messages .
4. Linda-like
In Linda-like models, agents coordinate through tuple spaces which allow for
Insertion of tuples and retrieval of tuples using associative pattern matching.

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1. Dynamics
Coordination strategies that scale highly dynamic task environments may cannot
keep up with all environment
2. Agent population properties
A coordinator (specially centralized ) can quickly degrade and becomes incapable
of processing the interactions if population of agents increases.
3. Quantity of interaction
If each agent interacts with every other agent, the number of paired interactions
will grow quadratically

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1. Our model is combination of meeting oriented and
blackboard-based coordination.

2. Our model obviates some coordination concerns

(Dynamics, Agent population properties, Quantity of interaction)

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 Web
service

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Modeled armed forces:

WS- Coordinator
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How agents can achieve some sort of coordination,
depends on the chosen model and architecture of
coordination.
 Agents Direct Interaction
 Agents Indirect Interaction
 Examining the Goal Situation
 Observing the Environment
 Effecting the Environment

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Our architecture is made of four main parts coordinator,
Agents, Environment and web service.

Web EJB
Service Coordinator

perceive /effect/ query send /receive task

environment send/ receive task result

Environment

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16
17
18
19
20
21
Environment

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 Web
Service

Environment

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 Web
EJB Service
Coordinator

Environment

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1. Logic of mission creation
Coordinator makes missions for its under command units based on the units types
and enemy types

2. How it percepts
Initially the coordination do not know about the presence of the enemy units unless
they are instanced with a true value of their visibility field.

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 Mission request
 Mission oriented behavior
 Observation and decision making

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 mid
Run() Go()
Miss.1

Askmission() type

Miss.2
DoMission()
Agent ammo
runne
RI_lookup() r
health

Observe()

x,y,z
IsAccomplished(
)

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 Agent() Go()

run() DoMission()

Action

KillMe() Resign() Observe()

AddLog()
AskMission()
EnemyAlive()
LookUp()

SaveLog() Report()

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29
 Web Service
Data
Source

AgendDb

Method 1 Method 2 Method n

Ws-Method 1 Ws-Method 2 Ws-Method n

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 agents can exist in different java virtual machines or
even on different physical machines.
 Coordinators can be distributed on different machines
 Coordinators can be splited and then distributed.
 Hierarchy model is resistant versus bottlenecks.
 Our architecture is both extendable and scalable for
multi agent systems

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 Dieter Fensel;Holger Lausen;Jos de Bruijn;Michael Stollberg;Dumitru Roman
(2007):"Enabling Semantic Web Services". The Web Service Modeling Ontology.
Springer Berlin Heidelberg Publishing. ISBN 978-3-540-34519-0 (Print) 978-3-540-
34520-6 (Online).
 H S Nwana, L Lee and N R Jennings, (1996): “Co-ordination in software agent
systems.” BT Technol J Vol 14 No 4 October 1996.
 Stollberg, M.; Haller, A.(2005): "Services Computing", 2005 IEEE International
Conference on Volume 2,  11-15 July 2005 Page(s):xv vol.2
 Stollberg, M.; Haller, A. (2005):" Semantic Web services tutorial", Mar-Apr
2001Volume: 2, Issue: 2 On page(s): On page(s): xv vol.2 ,Number of Pages: 2 vol.
(xxi+660) ,ISBN: 0-7695-2408-7 INSPEC Accession Number:8652031 ,,Date Published
in Issue: 2005-11-21 08:54:29
 Weiming Shen; Hamada Ghenniwa; Yinsheng Li (2006): "Agent-Based Service-
Oriented Computing and Applications", Pervasive Computing and Applications, 2006
1st International Symposium on.3-5 Aug. 2006 Page(s):8 – 9.

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 Noh-sam Park; Gil-haeng Lee (2003):"Agent-based Web services middleware",
Global Telecommunications Conference, 2003. GLOBECOM '03. IEEE Volume 6,  1-
5 Dec. 2003 Page(s):3186 - 3190 vol.6
 Zhi-Zhong Sun; Bin Li; Liang Li (2007):"An Adaptive Agent Coordination
Framework for Web Services Composition", Machine Learning and Cybernetics,
2007 International Conference on Volume 7,  19-22 Aug. 2007 Page(s):3870 - 3875
 R. Scott Cost, Yannis K Labrou,Tim Finin:"Agent Communication Languages and
Agent Coordination", Coordination of Internet Agents: Models, Technologies and
Applications. July 01, 2000.
 Willmott, S.; Pena, F.O.F.; Merida-Campos, C.; Constantinescu, I.; Dale, J.; Cabanillas,
D. (2005): "Adapting agent communication languages for semantic Web service
inter-communication", Web Intelligence, 2005. Proceedings. The 2005
IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on
19-22 Sept. 2005 Page(s):405 – 408

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