AGENTS VIC Meeting

Friday, 28th July 2006
9-30am - 11am

Swinburne University of Technology
AGSG Building, 2nd Floor, Room 211, John Street, Hawthorn Victoria 3122

How do you get there?

Get off at Glenferrie station if you take train (take any of the Alamein,Belgrave or Lilydale trains). From the station, walk along 'Swinburne walk', turn left into John St. You'll see the AGSE building after 50m on the right side. Park your car on Swinburne's public car park building or on SAFEWAY car park if you drive a car. You can drive through Glenferrie Rd and enter to Wakefield St at McDonald's. Please visit http://www.swin.edu.au/agse/contact/map.htm to see the ASSG Building location.

Xuan Thang Nguyen, PhD student

Modeling and Solving QoS Composition Problem Using Fuzzy DisCS

Multi-agent systems are a promising paradigm in distributed problem solving and optimisation, in particular distributed constraint satisfaction problems (DisCSP). We discuss different agent-based DisCSP algorithms, including ADOPT (Asynchronous Distributed OPTimization) and address their shortcomings in a real environment where delay of messages is inevitable. We present an application of agent-based DisCSP algorithms in the Web service domain. In particular, we investigate the problem of QoS guarantees for multi-Web service compositions and show that this problem can be modeled as an instance of DisCSP and solved by cooperating agents. We propose an agent-based Fuzzy DisCSP algorithm that solves the QoS guarantee problem while maximizes the minimum preference of all providers over the final solution and maintains their different levels of importance to the compositions. We also present our experimental data to show the improvement of our algorithm over other existing algorithms.

Jian Feng Zhang, PhD student

Agent-based Distributed Planning

In distributed agen-based planning (e.g. service compositions), a single agent may not have access to all services which can make up a composition to fulfill a given goal. Cooperation among multiple agents, each of whom has a limited set of services, can increase the chance of generating a valid/effective composition. However, the agents may be reluctant to reveal their services to other agents during cooperation due to the concerns to privacy, security, and difficulty of heavy communication overhead. We developed an algorithm that allows agents to cooperate and form a composition in such a situation. This algorithm can be viewed as a distributed variation of the reputed planning paradigm, i.e. Graph planning + CSP. We adapt classical planning graph to distributed planning graph, represent the graph in distributed CSP (DisCSP) instead of CSP, and solve the DisCSP using existing DisCSP search algorithm. The agents are of equal authority and there is no need of centralized coordinator all through the process.