Sharif Digital Repository

Service oriented architecture is based on the provision of services. To enhance the performance of the systems by providing a better combination of services, it is necessary to extract more information compared to the one in the service registry. In this regard, the accomplished works have been focusing on the basic concepts of service-oriented architecture. The service composition is based on the information in service registry, provided by the service provider. Further, centralized combination with insufficient information does not meet the system performance requirements. This solution helps to facilitate resource distribution and reduces tasks of the central unit. In this paper, efforts... 

In a multi-agent system, the number and initial position of informed agents play a major role in the convergence of uninformed agents. In this paper, three different patterns of informed agents' initial positions are studied to see how the convergence percentage can be affected by the number of informed agents. The proposed initial locations are intuitive and inferred from the collective behavior in humans. To evaluate efficiency of the proposed methods and to compare them from different points of view, large number of computer simulations is performed and results are analyzed  

This paper presents a multi agent system which can help type 2 diabetic patients. Because of diabetes nature, medical care and lifestyle can both prevent the complications of this illness, so self-managing is very crucial for these patients. Therefore, each effective factor of controlling diabetes and increasing patients' knowledge including: suitable diet and monitoring blood glucose level, is assigned to be an agent which works independently whilst coordinates and cooperates with other agents. The proposed architecture of this multi agent system organizes all the various agents of this system in a way that not only each of them can accomplish their responsibility, but also they can have... 

In this study, flocking of multi-agent systems with virtual leader and linear dynamics is investigated. It is assumed that the dynamics of agents in each dimension is represented by a general second-order linear model. The proposed control protocol is composed of two terms, one for feed backing each agent's states and one for cooperative control. At first, the flocking problem of multi-agent systems with identical agents is discussed and then the proposed protocol is generalised to flock heterogeneous multi-agent systems. Under the proposed algorithm, the velocity convergence of whole group to a velocity of virtual leader is guaranteed while the connectivity of network is preserved and... 

Demand response enabled by time-varying prices can propel the power industry toward a greater efficiency. However, a noncoordinated response of customers may lead to severe peak rebounds at periods with lower prices. In this regard, a coordinated demand response scheme can mitigate concerns about the peak rebounds. This paper presents a system-wide demand response management model to coordinate demand response provided by residential customers. The objective of the model is to flatten the total load profile that is subject to minimum individual cost of customers. The model is first formulated as a bi-level optimization problem. It is then casted into equivalent single-level problems, which... 

One of the challenging problems in artificial intelligence is credit assignment which simply means distributing the credit among a group, such as a group of agents. We made an attempt to meet this problem with the aid of the reinforcement learning paradigm. In this paper, expertness framework is defined and applied to the multi-agent credit assignment problem. In the expertness framework, the critic agent, who is responsible for distributing credit among agents, is equipped with learning capability, and the proposed credit assignment solution is based on the critic to learn to assign a proportion of the credit to each agent, and the used proportion should be learned by reinforcement... 

One of the most important issues discussed in multi-agent systems, is communication between agents. Usually, a predefined communication protocol is used, but predefining a protocol between agents causes some problems; for example it is possible that agents recognize a subject that is not defined in their protocol so they can't express anything about it. In this paper we propose a new method for evolution of a communication protocol between intelligent agents by using natural selection mechanism. Experimental results will be discussed in detail. © 2006 IEEE  

One of the most important issues that be discussed in multi-agent systems, is the communication between agents. In existing applications usually a communication protocol defined between agents. But defining a protocol between agents cause some problems; for example it is possible that agents recognize a subject, but because it is not defined in their protocol, they can't express any thing about that. In this paper we propose a new method for evolution of a communication protocol between intelligent agents, after that the experimental results will be discussed and at the end of the paper future works and conclusion. Copyright - World Automation Congress (WAC) 2006  

Integration of advice is intended to acquire knowledge from an agent with more comprehensive information. This paper describes Arian, a general architecture for advice integration. Advice is injected into the system using the advice model which is a case in a CBR system. The architecture comprises an advice adapter to model incomming advice as cases of a CBR system. The Arian architecture is a 2-layered structure in which a refiner component in the top layer is used to modify agent behaviors. The paper also discusses how trust is modelled to distinguish between multiple sources of advice including humans. Arian, the champion team of RoboCup'02 Rescue Simulation Competitions, as an example of... 

In this paper, we propose and analyze flocking algorithms in a network of second-order agents with bounded control inputs and nonlinear intrinsic dynamics. We consider a general switching network topology, for velocity information exchange, rather than undirected or fixed directed network topology with a directed spanning tree. The proposed adaptive controller architecture applies a leader-following strategy in which the pinning scheme is defined based on the interaction topology. Finally, some examples are presented to illustrate the theoretical results  

In this paper the problem of cooperative tracking of multiple targets for multi-agent systems is investigated. Defining problem of target tracking as gathering maximum rewards associated with the targets, an optimization-based algorithm is presented. A cooperative receding horizon controller for reaching moving targets is proposed. Agents are controlled by adjusting their headings toward the moving targets. A notable advantage of the proposed approach is the estimations of target's motion and planning the agent's heading based on them. Simulation results are provided to verify the efficiency of the proposed method  

Multi-agent systems can be seen as an apparatus for testing the performance of real distributed systems. One problem encountered in multi-agent systems with the learning capability is credit assignment. This paper presents two methods for solving this problem. The first method assigns credit to the agents according to the history of the interaction while the second method assigns credit to the agents according to the knowledge of agents, and thus the shares of the agents are extracted from the feedback of the environment. The computer experiments show that critic learning has a positive impact in credit assignment problem  

In this work, we study the flocking problem of multi-agent systems with uncertain dynamics subject to actuator failure and external disturbances. By considering some standard assumptions, we propose a robust adaptive fault tolerant protocol for compensating of the actuator bias fault, the partial loss of actuator effectiveness fault, the model uncertainties, and external disturbances. Under the designed protocol, velocity convergence of agents to that of virtual leader is guaranteed while the connectivity preservation of network and collision avoidance among agents are ensured as well. © 2017 ISA  

This paper investigates a new algorithm for flocking of multi-Agent systems with virtual leader. In this algorithm, unlike the existing algorithms, receiving of information by agents are not continuous and it is assumed that each agents receives information of neighbors and virtual leader as sampled data in fixed time intervals. A sufficient condition on sampling period is derived to guarantee the velocity convergence of agents to that of virtual leader, preserve network connectivity, and ensure collision avoidance. Finally, a numerical simulation is provided to illustrate the theoretical results. © 2017 IEEE  

These days, considering the importance of reliability in industries, utilities’ role for preparing high levels of reliability becomes more important. This can be done by adding numbers of switches and Tie switches which impose high expenses to system. These expenditures should be provided by customers. Level of reliability in different points of network is different. So customers which pay more, receive higher level of reliability. If a customer raises its payment, utility change the location of switches in order to raise level of reliability of that customer. all customers change their payment and then utility fixes the switches at a point that all customers reach their favorable... 

This paper deals with defining the concept of agent-based time delay margin and computing its value in multi-agent systems controlled by event-triggered based controllers. The agent-based time delay margin specifying the time delay tolerance of each agent for ensuring consensus in event-triggered controlled multi-agent systems can be considered as complementary for the concept of (network) time delay margin, which has been previously introduced in some literature. In this paper, an event-triggered control method for achieving consensus in multi-agent systems with time delay is considered. It is shown that the Zeno behavior is excluded by applying this method. Then, in a multi-agent system... 

In this paper, we propose a class of second-order continuous-time consensus protocols in networks with bounded communication delay and switching interaction topologies. We present a sufficient condition under which the information states of all agents approach common values. The convergence analysis relies on properties of nonnegative matrices and graph theory and requires that the union of communication graphs has a spanning tree over a bounded period of time. In addition, convergence in leader-following consensus is proved for switching topology and time-varying agents' awareness. Also the appropriate feedback gains are computed via given mathematical relations  

Multi-agent systems (MAS) is a solution to the nowadays encountered problems, which have the characteristics such as distributiveness, dynamism and the need to adaptation, robustness, efficiency, and reusability. This paper proposed a solution to multi-agent credit assignment problem. The contribution is to equip the critic agent (who is responsible for distributing reinforcements among agents) with learning capability. Some criteria are used to propose an inner feedback to the critic. Results of simulation show the applicability of the method to a task, which has the characteristic that the agent has to decide from a large set of actions. The research is a preliminary step to more in-depth... 

In this paper we have proposed a multi-agent architecture for an Intelligent Tutoring System using TROPOS methodology. Basic assumptions of constructivist learning have been taken into account in analysis and design activities. Nine types of agents are distinguished in the presented system. We have centralized management in the proposed architecture which is done by an agent called Manager Agent. This strategy of centralized management will result in a more coherent and effective Tutoring System than other systems not using such an agent, since it applies control flow of agents and decreases agents ' useless communications which may cause destructive congestion in system. This text discusses... 

This paper presents a new approach to economic dispatch (ED) problem with non-continuous and non-smooth cost functions using a hybrid evolutionary programming (EP) algorithm. In the proposed method the concept of multi-agent (MA) systems and EP are integrated together to form a new multi-agent evolutionary programming (MAEP) approach. In MAEP, an agent represents a candidate solution to the optimization problem in hand, and all agents live together in a global environment. Each agent senses its local environment, competes with its neighbors, and also learns by using its own knowledge. MAEP uses these agent-agent interactions and the evolutionary mechanism of EP to obtain the optimal...