Author:
Arne Schuldt
Affiliation:
University of Bremen, Germany
Keyword(s):
Agents, Cooperation, Team formation, Interaction protocol, Protocol design, Complexity analysis.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Cooperation and Coordination
;
Distributed and Mobile Software Systems
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Multi-Agent Systems
;
Negotiation and Interaction Protocols
;
Software Engineering
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Supply network management is a challenging task due to the complexity, dynamics, and distribution of logistics processes. Delegating process control to intelligent software agents that represent logistics objects and act on their behalf helps approach these challenges. The resulting problem decomposition reduces the computational complexity. Dynamics can be dealt with locally. An important prerequisite for coordinated process control is that agents can cooperate with each other. Based on requirements from logistics, this paper presents an interaction protocol for team formation. A thorough complexity analysis for the proposed method is conducted because the arising interaction effort is not obvious as it depends on the number of teams formed. Therewith, agent developers can estimate the interaction effort and thus the applicability of the method in advance. Finally, an application of the introduced protocol is outlined.