Title: Smart delivery: a cooperative multi-agent framework for optimised delivery service

Authors: Umar Manzoor, Samia Nefti

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, Science and Engineering, The University of Salford, Salford, Greater Manchester, M5 4WT, UK. ' Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, Science and Engineering, The University of Salford, Salford, Greater Manchester, M5 4WT, UK

Abstract: Agent technology offers a large number of unique features which makes it a potential choice for implementing real world applications. Owing to their tremendous capabilities, it is regarded as a promising paradigm for future distributed computing. In this paper, we have proposed smart delivery: a cooperative multi-agent framework for optimised delivery service to transfer packets from source to destinations in randomly varying environment in the most efficient way with the help of mobile agents. We are considering packet moving problem in 2D environment consisting of packets and destinations. The task of each mobile agent is to move the packet from the source to the destination. Simulated environment is dynamically generated with varying graph size (i.e., number of nodes in graph), packet ratio and number of destinations. Packets and destinations are randomly placed in the graph and the graph is divided into societies to encourage an efficient and manageable environment for the agents to work in parallel and share expertise within and outside the society. The proposed framework uses decentralised approach and based on layered agent architecture and once initialised manages all the activities autonomously with the help of mobile agents.

Keywords: automated packet moving; robot handling; cooperative agents; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-based systems; mobile agents; mobile robots.

DOI: 10.1504/IJKL.2010.034756

International Journal of Knowledge and Learning, 2010 Vol.6 No.2/3, pp.240 - 255

Published online: 21 Aug 2010 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article