Welcome to DiSC 2002
SIGMOD 2001
PODS 2001
SIGMOD RECORD 2001
CIKM 2001
CoopIS 2001
= CoopIS'01 Website
= Invited Talks
<<< = CoopIS'01 papers>>>
DASFAA 2001
DASFAA 2000
DBPL 2001
Data Engineering Bul
DEXA_EC-WEB 2001
DMKD 2001
DPDJ 2001
HYPERTEXT 2001
ICDE 2001
ICDM 2001
ICDT 2001
JCDL 2001
KDD 2001
KDD_EXPLORATIONS 20
KRDB 2001
MDM 2001
MIR 2001
MIS 2001
RIDE 2001
SBBD 2001
SIGIR 2001
SIGIR FORUM 2001
SSDBM 2001
SSTD 2001
TODS 2001
TIME 2001
VLDB 2001
VLDBJ 2001

Extending Multi-agent Cooperation by Overhearing


Paolo Busetta, Luciano Serafini, Dhirendra Singh, and Floriano Zini

  View Paper (PDF)  

Return to Agent Systems


Abstract

Much cooperation among humans happens following a common pattern: by chance or deliberately, a person overhears a conversation between two or more parties and steps in to help, for instance by suggesting answers to questions, by volunteering to perform actions, by making observations or adding information. We describe an abstract architecture to support a similar pattern in societies of artificial agents. Our architecture involves pairs of so-called service agents (or services) engaged in some tasks, and unlimited number of suggestive agents (or suggesters). The latter have an understanding of the work behaviours of the former through a publicly available model, and are able to observe the messages they exchange. Depending on their own objectives, the understanding they have available, and the observed communication, the suggesters try to cooperate with the services, by initiating assisting actions, and by sending suggestions to the services. These in effect may induce a change in services behaviour. Our architecture has been applied in a few industrial and research projects; a simple demonstrator, implemented by means of a BDI toolkit, JACK Intelligent Agents, is discussed in detail.


DiSC'02 © 2003 Association for Computing Machinery