SMA

Multi-Agent Systems

By Pierre Chevaillier, Professor at ENIB.

Part One: Basic concepts, agent architectures and technologies

Handout of the course. First, the document presents the basic principle related to the concepts of agent and multiagent systems. Next it gives a broad overview of the different conceptual solutions and types of technology used to designing agent-oriented software.

IT Laboratory

The objective of this Lab work is to implement a Contract Net Protocol (CNP). It will be implemented on the Gama platform. Here is a basic example that illustrates the facilities the Gama platform provides to implement FIPA compliant communication protocols.

= The protocole

Step by step implementation of the CNP. The objective is to implement the way agents produce and process the different types of communicative acts that support the protocol.

Agents using the protocol

At this point, the agent that initiates the protocole (the initiator) does it only once. We want now to make the agents able to use the protocole on purpose, namely when they have something to do and cannot perform it by their own.

Many agents

Implement a solution where many agents can run the protocole concurrently.