AGENTLINK UPDATE # 13 --- 11 February 1999 This is the email newsletter of AgentLink -- Europe's Network of Excellence for Agent-based Computing. The AgentLink WWW site is http://www.AgentLink.org/ IMPORTANT: Please take the time to ensure that every member of your group receives a copy of the AgentLink update. If you have a group mail alias, why not get this alias to be added to the mailing list? To subscribe/unsubscribe to this mailing list simply send a request to mailto:coordinator@agentlink.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents: * New SIG: Coordination and Control - Info & Kick off meeting * AgentLink/COMPULOG Workshop on Logic & Agents - Travel Support ---------------------------------------------------------------------- * New SIG: Coordination and Control - Info & Kick off meeting Multi-agent concepts and methodologies are finding increasing application in controlling complex, unpredictable systems in real time. Agent-like approaches routinely accept uncertainty and distribution, leading to control schemes where decision-making and responsibility are distributed much more widely than in conventional engineering practice. The successes that they have begun to produce are likely to lead to their heavier use, including use in applications that have time-critical aspects. In order for them to succeed in such situations, however, they will need development that addresses real-time and time-critical properties explicitly. This is the motivation for our SIG. The subdivisions following the one immediately below are labelled in terms of applications, because at present we consider it desirable to drive the selection of basic-research topics by reference to concrete problems that are turning up in specific applications. This SIG will bring together researchers from a number of areas fitting into the paradigm, including: * Adaptive real-time systems with knowledge-based components * Manufacturing systems * Robotics including multiple robot systems and robot football. Adaptive real-time systems with knowledge based components includes traffic engineering applications. Multiple robot systems could include collections of robots which cooperate to perform some form of useful activity such as assembly operations or playing football or other games. The area of intelligent manufacturing systems aims to use multi-agent systems both as a modelling tool and a control software system. The challenge for the SIG is to identify and focus on the general issues of coordination and control which are important for such applications, and to use the applications to stimulate and test advances in research on the issues, for example: * How and where to represent information about the systems and the agent groups that operate on them * Mechanisms (e.g. varieties of caching) for delivery of adequate responses to time-critical demands * Coordination methods that are computationally economical enough for real-time use * Decentralised management of limited common resources * Adaptation of results from machine learning to collective learning in multi-agent systems * New schemes of decentralised control to take account of the "real time" dimension The "coordination and control" emphasis in this SIG is because the development of adequate methods for coordination and for control are crucial for the successful operation of multi-agent systems when a real-time discipline is imposed. Progress in other multi-agent topics is desirable too for real-time applications, but it will not be particularly helpful unless the problems of coordination and control are resolved adequately. The SIG kick-off meeting will be over 2 days on 21-22 April 1999, co-located with the PAAM-99 event and other SIG meetings, in London, UK. If you would like to attend the meeting, please email a *short* statement of interest including your name, affiliation, topic of interest (try to include one of the above) and full contact address by email to the SIG coordinator: John Perram (mailto:jperram@mip.ou.dk) to arrive no later than *19 February 1999*. AgentLink (AL) will fund a *maximum* of one person from each AL member node to attend *each* SIG meeting, provided that these people are *actively participating* (e.g. by presenting something). AL won't pay people to come and watch. AL will allow up to 2 people from each AL node to attend each SIG meeting (i.e., if 2 people attend a single SIG meeting, then at most one will be funded.) Please indicate your need to be funded in your statement of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- * AgentLink/COMPULOG Workshop on Logic & Agents - Travel Support AgentLink and COMPULOG (the ESPRIT Network of Excellence in Computational Logic) are jointly organising a 1-day workshop on Logic & Agents, on 8 March 1999, on Monday 8 March, in the Department of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK. Logic has an important role to play in the conceptualization and development of agent-based systems. It can play a part in the formalization of the knowledge, beliefs and goals of the agents, the perception of the environment, the reasoning component of agents, the construction of plans, the generation of timely and appropriate reactions to the environment and the other agents and the process of negotiation and communication amongst agents. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers from the two communities to discuss a strategy for the future of logic-based agents and to identify short and long term research and development goals and possible applications to strengthen and future the contributions in this area. Details of this workshop are available via the workshop WWW site: http://www.cs.unitn.it/~pgiorgio/workshop Travel support is available for a number of AgentLink members to attend this workshop. To request this travel support, please send a *short* email to the AgentLink workshop organiser: Paolo Giorgini mailto:pgiorgini@cs.unitn.it no later than *19 February 1999* explaining your interest in the workshop. END ------------------------------------------------------------