13218093
Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication PrinciplesAchieving flexible task delegation in role-based agent teams
Teamwork has become increasingly important to many disciplines. In our opinion, an effective design of a teamwork language should be able to handle unexpected uncertainties and allow for the conceptual specification of teamwork knowledge for reuse. This paper introduces RoB-MALLET, a teamwork language based on the concepts of role and role variable. An important characteristic of our notion of role is that it includes the specific operations that an agent filling the role must perform in a specific setting as well as their ordering constraints. Taking this view on the definition of role has enabled us to present the responsibility of roles, to reason about the assignment of real agents to roles, and to achieve a certain level of plan reusability. Finally, we present several experiments that explore plan reusability of RoB-MALLET, show that it is flexible in supporting simultaneity of invocation and evaluate its efficiency in supporting teamwork.
1229519
A decision-theoretic approach for designing proactive communication in multi-agent teamwork
Techniques that support effective communication during teamwork processes are of particular importance. Psychological study shows that an effective team often can anticipate information exchange among the team and communicate relevant information proactively. Proactive communication is crucial for understanding and sharing common goals and for cooperative actions. Communication can be valuable if it assists agents with new and timely information; it also has cost because it consumes network resources such as bandwidth. To address these issues, we present a new model that uses information production and need to capture the complex multi-agent communication process and a dynamic decision-theoretic determination of communication strategies. We also introduce a generic utility function and an algorithm, DTPC (Decision-Theoretic Proactive Communication), that focuses on representing information production and need of team members and resolving decision interactions among them for making decisions.
35439746
Role-Based and Agent-Oriental Teamwork Modeling
40423470
Proactive Communication in Observation-Based Agent Team Corporation
5679790
Proactive Information Exchange During Team Cooperation
We are concerned, ultimately, with multi-agent teams involving both software and human agents in which the software agents assist in training the humans, e.g., as virtual team members. The software agents must be capable of utilizing the teamwork mechanisms used by humans. In this paper, we describe how to give agents the same implicit communication capabilities, i.e., observation, that humans use. We show how agents can use observations of the environment and teammates' actions to estimate other agents beliefs without bothering them with unnecessary messages; we also show how agents can anticipate information needs among the team and proactively exchange information, reducing the total communication volume. To achieve these goals, we add sensing capabilities to agents and present algorithms that infer teammates' mental state from the observation. Experimental data is presented that shows that the advantage of observation in proactive information exchange as well as enhanced team performance.
14748203
A history sensitive cascade model in diffusion networks
Diffusion is a process by which information, viruses, ideas and new behavior spread over social networks. The traditional independent cascade model gives activated nodes a one-time chance to activate each of its neighboring nodes with some probability. This paper extends the traditional cascade model to be history dependent. We propose a new model called the History Sensitive Cascade Model (HSCM) that allows activated nodes to receive more than a one-time chance to activate their neighbors. HSCM provides 1) a polynomial algorithm for calculating the probability of activity for any arbitrary node at any arbitrary time in tree structure graphs, and 2) a Markov model for calculating the probability in general graphs. Finally, we perform an empirical study on HSCM under different network settings. These simulations have showed its power to observe and explain the emergent phenomena in the macro level when changing parameters in the micro level.
14517815
Implementing Atomic Section by Using Hybrid Concurrent Control
Atomic section is an important language feather in multi- thread synchronizing. So far, it can only be implemented by using pessimistic or optimistic concurrent control singly. This paper introduces a flexible hybrid concurrent control system which could harmonize the two modes of concurrent control. Accordingly, a new atomic section is proposed as language level support to open an interface for both manual and compiler-assisted optimization.
5082890
An integration architecture for process manufacturing systems
Given the significant differences between discrete and process manufacturing industries, specific integration architectures are required to accommodate the unique characteristics of process industries. In this paper, an architecture that encompasses view models, flow models and O-O models is developed, which gradually specifies the evolving design details through successive lifecycle stages of process manufacturing systems. In the architecture, products are distinctly modelled to reflect the impact of product data and to facilitate the development of customized products. A combination of object and agent concepts is adopted for building the models of process manufacturing systems. System constituent elements are respectively modelled as two types of entities: Namely the objects and agents. Objects are used to describe the passive constituent entities that possess no autonomy and conduct no functions, whereas agents are used to model the active entities that possess decision-making capabilities and perform operations on objects. One important advantage of the architecture is that it provides executable models at the implementation stage, which can be directly converted into application programs coded in object-oriented languages. Some models of the architecture are further discussed in depth and an information infrastructure based on CORBA standards is proposed for integrating the distributed data sources.
62060172
Multi-octagon-grid search algorithm for fast motion estimation
The UMHexagonS algorithm has been accepted for the possible implementation of the block motion estimation process in the H.264 video coding standard due to its high accuracy and low computational requirement. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed, which improves on the UMHexagonS algorithm in three aspects. Firstly, a new prediction vector is added for avoiding being trapped in a local minimum. Secondly, the 5times5 full-search is replaced with an octagon search and possibly two small diamond searches to reduce the computational requirement. Thirdly, the multi-hexagon-grid search is changed to a multi-octagon-grid search to both reduce the computational complexity and better catch the direction of the optimal vector. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can reduce five to ten percent of the computational complexity of the UMHexagonS algorithm without loss of its accuracy.
10021622
Dynamically Maintaining Duplicate-Insensitive and Time-Decayed Sum Using Time-Decaying Bloom Filter
The duplicate-insensitive and time-decayed sum of an arbitrary subset in a stream is an important aggregation for various analyses in many distributed stream scenarios. In general, precisely providing this sum in an unbounded and high-rate stream is infeasible. Therefore, we target at this problem and introduce a sketch, namely, time-decaying Bloom Filter (TDBF). The TDBF can detect duplicates in a stream and meanwhile dynamically maintain decayed-weight of all distinct elements in the stream according to a user-specified decay function. For a query for the current decayed sum of a subset in the stream, TDBF provides an effective estimation. In our theoretical analysis, a provably approximate guarantee has been given for the error of the estimation. In addition, the experimental results on synthetic stream validate our theoretical analysis.
16272826
Analyzing the impact of on-chip network traffic on program phases for CMPs
It is known that the execution of programs exhibits repetitive phases; in other words, the execution of programs can be partitioned into segments of execution, during which the application exhibits unique architectural properties. This property has been used for various optimization goals. In addition, phase information is utilized to reduce the run time of the architectural simulation. Conventionally, an application is examined in an architecture-independent manner (such as the number of times a basic block is executed) to extract information about the phases and then only the representative execution intervals are executed to analyze architectural choices. We claim that such approaches are becoming inadequate in the many-core era as application execution is not dominated by the instructions only, but instead the communication structure of the application is becoming as important as the instruction behavior. Hence, we propose to utilize communication behavior to determine the phases of an application. Our results reveal that the inclusion of the communication information can increase the accuracy of the phase detection significantly. Specifically, for SPLASH2 and MineBench applications, the average (geometric mean) CPI error rate with the instruction-based phase detection is 11.01%, while our phase detection scheme has an average error rate of 3.41% when compared to the simulations that run the applications to completion.