Agent Technology.ppt

Oct 1,2002 ?Gao Yang, Ai Lab NJU Agent Technology Communication in multi-agent system Communication Message Types Communication Levels Speech Acts Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language Knowledge Interchange Format Ontology ACL Summary Introduction Motivation for Agent Communication Communication is required for cooperation between agents. Societies can perform tasks no individual agent can. Autonomy encourages disregard for other agents’ internal structure. Communication agents need only know a “common knowledge”. Supports heterogeneous agents. Introduction Characterization Interactions occur when agents exist and act in close proximity shared environment shared resources Communication occurs when agents send messages to one another with a view to influencing beliefs and intentions. Implementation details are irrelevant via communication links through shared memory because of shared conventions signalling vs “talking” “body language” Introduction Communication The primary reason for communication among agents is to coordinate activities Agents may coordinate without communication, provided they have models of others’ behaviour Communication involves the dimensions of who what when how (resources and protocol) why To facilitate cooperation, agents often need to communicate their intentions, goals, results, and state Introduction Coordination and cooperation Coordination is a property of interaction among agents performing some activity in a shared state. The degree of coordination is the extent to which they avoid extraneous activity reduce resource contention avoid livelock avoid deadlock maintain safety conditions Cooperation is coordination among non-antagonistic agents Typically, agents must maintain models of other agents develop model of future interactions Introduction Communication versus computation Communication is generally more expensive and less reliable recomputing is often faster than requesting information over a communication channel communic