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Intelligent Agent Technology Research

Aim

To research and develop new methods, techniques and software solutions for intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, focusing on autonomous negotiation and decision-making, coordination and adaptation mechanisms, and their application in building and managing complex software systems and services.

Background

Intelligent agents and multi-agent systems emerge as a key enabling technology in building open, large-scale, and distributed systems for operation in complex dynamic environments. It includes a wide range of application areas in today’s knowledge society and networked economy such as dynamic e-commerce, collaborative e-business, virtual enterprises, smart environments, and web/grid service-oriented applications. Intelligent software agents with their abilities of autonomous operations, learning, adaptation, interactions and cooperation offer many benefits to individual users and organisations. It includes the automation of routine tasks and business processes, adaptive decision and collaboration support, and coordinated service and resource sharing within and across organisations, leading to new efficiencies, productivity gains and better services for individuals and businesses.

An intelligent multi-agent system comprises a number of intelligent software agents that can autonomously function and interact in a complex dynamic environment. The agents are intelligent software entities that have the abilities to perceive the environment, reason about own and other agents' goals, strategies and actions, and make decisions about the best course of actions in order to achieve desired outcomes. Each agent is autonomous as it controls its internal states, decision-making processes, behaviour and interactions. The agents can adapt to changes in the environment, behaviour of other agents and learn from experience. They interact with other agents through direct communication or indirectly through their actions on the environment. The overall behaviour and performance of the system depends on the individual agents' behaviours and interactions that can often result in an emergent behaviour of the system.

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Research Scope

Our research in Intelligent Agents and Multi Agent Systems focuses on autonomous negotiation, decision-making, adaptation and coordination mechanisms for agent systems situated in open dynamic environments characterised by the presence of changing, incomplete and uncertain information. The research areas include:

  • Automated negotiations and collective decision-making
  • Distributed learning and adaptation in multi-agent systems
  • Dynamic interactions and organisational mechanisms
  • Intelligent social agents and service-oriented agents

The application areas involve:

  • Web/Cloud Services Management: service discovery, composition, SLA negotiation, control and adaptation, and agreement-based management of service-oriented environments
  • E-commerce/E-business: dynamic trading, aggregations, negotiated contracting, collaborative e-business and virtual organisations
  • Virtual Enterprises and Organisations: dynamic formation, coordination and evolution of virtual organisations, integration of inter-organisational business processes, collaborative virtual environments and organisations
  • Smart Environments and Pervasive Computing: context-aware and collective management, control and diagnosis of networked, mobile and embedded devices
  • Social Systems: trusted social networks, virtual presence, profiling and privacy protection
  • Complex Adaptive Systems: modelling and simulation of socio-economical systems, collective resource allocation and optimisation, autonomic transport and smart electricity management systems

We are actively involved in research collaboration with industry and research partners in Australia and overseas including Everyday Interactive Networks, Vastpark, Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Telstra and the EU FP6 Adaptive Services Grid Consortium. Some of our external R&D projects include:

  • Quality-of-Service in Service Aggregation (Smart Services CRC)
  • Managing Conflicts in Requirements Engineering with Argumentation Framework (ARC)
  • Agent-Enabled Social Networks (ARC, EIN)
  • Agent-based Coordination and Negotiation Technologies for Decentralised Service Workflow Management (ARC, Wollongong University)
  • Market-based Resource Allocation in Utility Grid (DEST, MU)
  • Adaptive Services Grid (EU FP6 ASG Consortium)
  • Service Environment Networks for Virtual Organisations (EIN)
  • Adaptive Service Agreement & Process Management (DEST, DSTO, EIN, Telstra, VU, UQ)
  • Agent-based Smart Information Environments (DSTO)

New initiatives and projects include:

  • Smart Energy Management
  • Trusted Social Networks
  • Computing Everywhere
  • Adaptive Quality-of-Service Optimisation in Cloud Computing
  • Trusted Enterprise Social Networks
  • Capability-oriented Management of Business Ecosystems
  • Peer-to-Peer Social-Mobile Applications
  • Improving Child Safety over the Internet through Intelligent Monitoring and Detection of "At-Risk" Online Social Interactions
  • Virtual Sensor Networks for Coordinated Monitoring and Detection of Security Threats over the Internet
  • Autonomic Traffic Coordination and Optimisation
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