The agent computing paradigm is rapidly emerging as one of the powerful technologies for the development of large-scale distributed systems to deal with the uncertainty in a dynamic environment. The ...domain of traffic and transportation systems is well suited for an agent-based approach because transportation systems are usually geographically distributed in dynamic changing environments. Our literature survey shows that the techniques and methods resulting from the field of agent and multiagent systems have been applied to many aspects of traffic and transportation systems, including modeling and simulation, dynamic routing and congestion management, and intelligent traffic control. This paper examines an agent-based approach and its applications in different modes of transportation, including roadway, railway, and air transportation. This paper also addresses some critical issues in developing agent-based traffic control and management systems, such as interoperability, flexibility, and extendibility. Finally, several future research directions toward the successful deployment of agent technology in traffic and transportation systems are discussed.
Mobile Agent systems are prevalent in Distributed Environment due to the autonomy and adaptability in diversified situations. Mobile Agents are capable of movement from one platform to another and ...hence it is a need to ensure the safety of the Mobile Agent during the phase of transit. Since Mobile Agents are capable of deciding their itinerary dynamically, a decision support system which helps to ensure the trustworthiness of a platform would complement the decision. A Trust Scoring System is therefore proposed to measure the trustworthiness of a platform based on a metric termed Trust Score. Trust Score varies dynamically with respect to time and is based on a function comprising of five parameters namely Persistence, Competence, Reputation, Credibility and Integrity. In order to reduce the computational latency, another metric named Trust Rank for platforms, based on Trustability co-efficient of variation is introduced. The experimentation is done in cloud environment with platforms located at different geographic regions. The performance is evaluated in terms of response time and accuracy of decision. From the experimental results, it is evident that the Trust Ranking mechanism consumes less response time and improves the accuracy of decision of Mobile Agents during their itineraries, compared to that of the prototype system that uses Trust Score alone as a measure of decision-making.
Currently, the sampling problem has gained wide popularity in the field of autonomous mobile agent control due to the wide range of practical and fundamental problems described with its framework. ...This paper considers a combined decentralized control strategy that incorporates both elements of biologically inspired and gradient-based approaches. Its key feature is multitasking, consisting in the possibility of solving several tasks in parallel included in the sampling problem: localization and monitoring of several sources and restoration of the given level line boundaries.
Intelligent vehicles and their applications increasingly demand high computing power and low task delays, which poses significant challenges for providing reliable and efficient vehicle services. ...Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a new model that reduces the completion time of tasks and improves vehicle service by performing computation offloading near the moving vehicles. Considering the high-speed mobility of the vehicles and the unstable connection of the wireless cellular network, symmetric and geographically distributed edge servers are regarded as peers in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, and a P2P-based vehicle edge offloading model is proposed in this paper to determine the optimal offloading server for the vehicle and the offloading ratio of tasks to achieve the goal of minimizing execution time. Because the edge computing infrastructure is deployed at the edge of the network, the data in the edge nodes are easily damaged or lost. Therefore, a P2P-based edge node fault tolerance mechanism is proposed to improve the reliability and fault tolerance of the system. The feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed system have been verified through simulation experiments, which greatly reduces the task completion delay.
The finite-time consensus problem in the networks of multiple mobile agents is comprehensively investigated. In order to resolve this problem, a novel nonlinear information exchange protocol is ...proposed. The proposed protocol ensures that the states of the agents are converged to a weighted-average consensus in finite time if the communication topology is a weighted directed graph with a spanning tree and each strongly connected component is detail-balanced. Furthermore, the proposed protocol is also able to solve the finite-time consensus problem of networks with a switching topology. Finally, computer simulations are presented to demonstrate and validate the effectiveness of the theoretical analysis under the proposed protocol.
Interoperability is a key issue for a wider adoption of mobile agent systems (MASs) in heterogeneous and open distributed environments where agents, in order to fulfill their tasks, must interact ...with non-homogeneous agents and traverse different agent platforms to access remote resources. To date, while several approaches have been proposed to deal with different aspects of MAS interoperability, they all lack the necessary flexibility to provide an adequate degree of interoperability among the currently available MASs. In this paper, we propose an application-level approach grounded in the software layering concept, which enables execution, migration and communication interoperability between Java-based mobile agent systems, thus overcoming major setbacks affecting the other approaches currently proposed for supporting MAS interoperability. In particular, we define a Java-based framework, named JIMAF, which relies on an event-driven, proxy-based mobile agent model and supports interoperable mobile agents which can be easily coded and adapted to existing MASs without any modifications of the MAS infrastructures. Results from the performance evaluation of MAS interoperability was carried by using JIMAF atop Aglets, Ajanta, Grasshopper, and Voyager, demonstrating that the high-level JIMAF approach offers high efficacy while maintaining overhead at acceptable levels for target computing environments.
In this paper a modeling framework for urban traffic systems (UTS) is presented. The model, used for agent based micro-simulation, describes both the traffic network and dynamic entities, namely ...vehicles, traffic lights, and pedestrians. The framework allows defining systematically the necessary components and their behavior of a model oriented to event driven simulation, which can be executed in a distributed way. In the model, the vehicles are conceived as mobile agents with decision making capabilities that interact with the environment and other entities within the traffic network, performing diverse activities according to numerous situations arisen during the simulation. A multi-level Petri net based formalism, named
n-LNS is used for describing the structure of the UTS and the components behavior. The first level describes the traffic network; the second level models the behavior of diverse road network users considered as agents, and the third level specifies detailed procedures performed by the agents, namely travel plans, tasks, etc.
As the ratio of transport costs to total product cost increases, manufacturers try to fulfil the demands of each geographical region with products manufactured within the same region. Since the ...manufacturing resources available at each venue can be varied, it is necessary to adapt the manufacturing process plan for each production facility. Traditionally, this process is carried out manually by engineers utilizing computer-aided design (CAD) files. With the advances in artificial intelligence technology and emergence of integration standards such as STEP, it is now possible to automate the CAD/computer-aided manufacturing (CAM)/computer numerical control (CNC) interface. Distributed artificial intelligence techniques and mobile agents in particular can be used to transfer information throughout the manufacturing network and construct the distributed knowledge-base required for the intelligent interoperable integration of product data models and manufacturing resources. This paper explores the application of mobile agents as enablers of interoperability in a global manufacturing enterprise. A novel manufacturing chain based on the STEP-NC standard is proposed and the application of agents for transfer of manufacturing information is studied. The research is demonstrated through the use of a prototype manufacturing decision support system developed using agents.
The purpose of this article (based on an earlier draft available as technical report: Gruner S,
Mobile agent systems and cellular automata
. LaBRI Research Reports, 2006) is to make a step towards ...uniting the paradigms of cellular automata and mobile agents, thus consequentially the fields of artificial life and multi agent systems, which have significant overlap but are still largely perceived as separate fields. In Chalopin et al. (Mobile agent algorithms versus message passing algorithms, pp. 187–201, 2006) the equivalent power of classical distributed algorithms and mobile agent algorithms was demonstrated for asynchronous systems with interleaving semantics under some further constraints and assumptions. Similar results are still being sought about mobile agent systems and distributed systems under other constraints and assumptions in search of a comprehensive general theory of these topics. This article investigates the relationship between mobile agent systems and a generalized form of cellular automata. With a particular notion of local equivalence, a cellular automaton can be translated into a mobile agent system and vice versa. The article shows that if the underlying network graph is finite, then the degree of pseudo-synchrony of the agent system simulating the cellular automaton can be made arbitrarily high, even with an only small number of active agents. As a possible consequence of this theoretical result, the Internet might be used in the future to implement large cellular automata of almost arbitrary topology.
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