Title: Cooperation of substantial agents in MAS

Authors: František Čapkovič; Lyubka Doukovska; Vassia Atanassova

Addresses: Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava 845 07, Slovakia ' Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia 1113, Bulgaria ' Institute of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia 1113, Bulgaria

Abstract: In this paper, place/transition Petri nets (P/T PN) are used in order to model the behaviour of the agents as well as the agent communication, which is necessary for their cooperation and negotiation. As the agents, the substantial devices (e.g., industrial robots, machine tools) are understood. Two kinds of the agent communication will be compared. The first kind of the communication assumes that all agents are equal, i.e., no agent has a higher priority than others. The second kind of the communication has the hierarchical structure. Here, a supervisor on the upper level has a higher priority than other agents. It coordinates activities of the agents being on the lower level. Here, the individual agents do not cooperate directly, but through a supervisor. Afterwards, the other problem concerning with the assigning of several jobs to a group of several agents is analysed and simulated.

Keywords: substantial agents; agent-based systems; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent communication; agent cooperation; hierarchy; machine tools; negotiation; industrial robots; supervisor; Petri nets; modelling; agent behaviour; job assignment; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDS.2016.081371

International Journal of Data Science, 2016 Vol.1 No.4, pp.353 - 369

Published online: 06 Jan 2017 *

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