Coalition Formation and Cooperation
Coalition formation is an important cooperation method in multi-agent
systems. Within coalitions, agents may be able to jointly perform tasks
that they would otherwise be unable to perform, or will perform poorly. To
allow agents to form coalitions, one should devise a coalition formation
mechanism that includes both a protocol and strategies. Multiple such
coalition formation mechanisms were proposed to date. We will review some
and discuss underlying assumptions and limitations. We will also discuss
recent studies that attempt to relax some of these assumptions thus arrive
at automated coalition formation mechanisms suitable for real domains.
Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE)
Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is a key factor for introducing
agent-based systems to the industry as an engineering approach. At present,
the majority of existing agent applications are developed in an ad-hoc
fashion: little or no rigorous design methodology, limited specification of
the requirements, ad-hoc design of agents and of multi-agent systems as a
whole, and little attention to non-functional requirements such as
mobility, scalability, performance issues, and standards. By adopting AOSE
principles, one gains the advantages of an organized development process
such as reusability, testing, and maintenance. One of the basic principles
of AOSE is using a methodology for developing agent applications. Hence,
this tutorial will concentrate on methodologies and their applicability.
Biography
Onn Shehory is a researcher at IBM, Haifa Research Labs, and an adjunct
faculty at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in
computer science from Bar Ilan University, Israel. Prior to joining IBM Research, Dr. Shehory was
a visiting faculty at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University,
where he conducted research on agents and multi-agent systems. At IBM, he
studied agent applications for electronic commerce and contributed to the
development of a leading electronic commerce product. In the last decade,
he has performed multiple studies of both theory and practice in the fields
of distributed artificial intelligence, agents and multi-agent systems,
electronic commerce, software engineering, networked storage and autonomous
computing. He has a comprehensive knowledge of the leading technologies in
these fields, and published dozens of papers in leading journals and
conferences, of which two have received best paper awards in recent years.
He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and
Multi-Agent Systems and served as a chair of multiple scientific meetings
in the field of agents and electronic commerce.
