Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities <s> Virtual societies <s> While there are many Web services which help users find things to buy, we know of none which actually try to automate the process of buying and selling. Kasbah is a system where users create autonomous agents to buy and sell goods on their behalf. In this paper, we describe how Kasbah works. We also discuss the implementation of a simple proof-of-concept prototype. <s> BIB001 </s> Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities <s> Virtual societies <s> We propose an architecture for an agent-based virtual market that includes all elements required for simulating a real market. These elements include a communication infrastructure, mechanisms for storage and transfer of goods, banking and monetary transactions, and economic mechanisms for direct or brokered producer-consumer transactions. We report findings that resulted from implementing and conducting experiments with a free-market agent architecture (MAGMA). MAGMA is an extensible architecture that provides all services essential to agent-based commercial activities. These services are available through an open-standard messaging API, which allows using a heterogeneous set of agents, independently of the platform and language. <s> BIB002 </s> Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities <s> Virtual societies <s> Market mechanisms such as auctions will likely rep resent a common interaction medium for agents on the Internet The Michigan Internet AuctionBot is a ex ible scalable and robust auction server that supports both software and human agents The server manages many simultaneous auctions by separating the interface from the core auction procedures This design provides a responsive interface and tolerates system and network disruptions but necessitates careful timekeeping proce dures to ensure temporal accuracy The AuctionBot has been used extensively in classroom exercises and is available to the general Internet population Its exi ble speci cation of auctions in terms of orthogonal pa rameters makes it a useful device for agent researchers exploring the design space of auction mechanisms <s> BIB003 </s> Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities <s> Virtual societies <s> This paper describes an agent- based artificial market system whose underlying interaction protocols provide advanced features. Using the system, actors (i. e., customers and merchants) can delegate a variety of tasks to personal intelligent agents that act as their artificial employees. Contrary to other approaches, where a new agent is launched when their associated actors intend to perform a buying or selling transaction and “lives” only while this transaction is processed, our approach builds on a personalization of agents that permanently “live” in the market representing their actors' interests. Beyond just requesting and proposing an offer, agents in our system maintain a profile of their owners, which is updated upon the actor- agent interaction type. Furthermore, they can proactively ask their owners permission to initiate a transaction (e. g., when a new product, which match ones profile, appears in the market). The system is also enabled with a highly interactive multiple criteria decision making tool that can handle ill- structured information during a purchase transaction, and perform a progressive synthesis and comparative evaluation of the existing proposals. <s> BIB004 </s> Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities <s> Virtual societies <s> The design and development of open multi-agent systems (MAS) is a key aspect in agent research. We advocate that they can be realised as electronic institutions. In this paper we focus on the execution of electronic institutions by introducing AMELI, an infrastructure that mediates agentsý interactions while enforcing institutional rules. An innovative feature of AMELI is that it is of general purpose (it can interpret any institution specification), and therefore it can be regarded as domain-independent. The combination of ISLANDER [5] and AMELI provides full support for the design and development of electronic institutions. <s> BIB005 </s> Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities <s> Virtual societies <s> A web site presents an intrinsic graph-like spatial structure composed of pages connected by hyperlinks. This structure may represent an environment in which agents related to visitors of the web site are positioned and moved in order to track their navigation. To consider this structure and to keep track of these movements allows the monitoring of the site and its visitors, in order to support the enhancement of the site itself through forms of adaptivity, but also to introduce new forms of interaction among registered visitors. This paper presents a model supporting the collection of information related to user's behaviour in a web site, and an application supporting the proposal of hyperlinks based on the history of user's movement in the web site environment. Moreover the paper briefly describes a system implementing a context-aware form of interaction, supporting the communication among visitors of a web site through the exploitation of its structure. <s> BIB006 </s> Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities <s> Virtual societies <s> In this paper, we report on experiments with a software multi-agent electronic market where intelligent behaviors are due to both agents internal capabilities and advanced mechanisms in the environment. Our aim is to demonstrate how the environment can be a degree of freedom in the design of intelligent systems. <s> BIB007
The environment has been implicitly exploited in the design of agent societies. Such societies are for instance auction systems BIB001 and other electronic market places BIB004 BIB002 . Although the environment is not a major concern in most of these systems, the current perspective on this legacy work sets forth specific traits of the environment. For example, the AuctionBot was a running agent platform where users could create an auction and welcome client agents to participate in BIB003 . The platform provides virtual auction rooms to facilitate agent interactions and auction runs. These 'rooms' could be thought of as environment-mediated interaction channels. Agents would enter those rooms in a publish-subscribe fashion. Although the environment was not considered then as a first-class entity, it is arguably present to various extents in each of these platforms as shown with the room analogy. The mapping between the room requirement and an environment mechanism seems natural and reasonable. The combination of environment-mediated interaction channel and resource and context manager could help designing the environment for such systems. Beyond the possible applications in legacy systems, environment mechanisms can serve in the design of electronic institutions. Laws and norms are global characteristics of such systems. Current approaches like AMELI can be thought of as centralized interaction mechanisms to ensure that agents respect norms in their interactions BIB005 . The functioning of the institution can be hidden from agents by providing appropriate mechanisms for a separation between agents internal logics and regulation of the system. Overlay data structures enable the coordination of agents in virtual societies on the Internet. One illustration is an agent-based web-site with recommendation systems BIB006 . Visitors of the web-site become the application agents and the hyperlink structure of the site is considered as the topology of the environment. Registered users are tracked on the environment to identify emerging patterns from the repeated use of links of the site. The patterns form paths in the environment that become recommendations to the registered user and, to lower extent, simple visitors. Overlay data structures yield major techniques to track agents in the system and to adapt the environment contextual information accordingly. In combination, the resource and context manager is appropriate whenever centralized mechanisms can be used (for instance if one node of the web-site points to a database), but this point of view remains an extension of the work presented above. In electronic markets, recent work exploit resource and context management and notification of context events mechanisms to augment the interaction capabilities of market actors. In addition to usual interaction protocols, agents can overhear conversations of others, as allowed in some markets (bazaar type), and they can also be annotated with relevant information such as the type of items they are searching in the market BIB007  . The overhearing mechanism is executed by the environment to enforce the phenomenon in agent communications (some malicious agents could hide some messages). In the annotation approach, the environment is in charge of two responsibilities that are separate concerns: Publication and regulation of the annotations in the system. The publication automated by the environment allows seller agents to be notified about the presence of potential buyers, so that they can initiate sell attempts. The regulation by the environment prevents the spread of fake annotations that would mislead trading agents and harm the market. For example, a market can authorize the trade of some items only. Buyers cannot trade other types of items as the environment does not diffuse the corresponding tag informations to sellers. The mechanisms of this section contribute in the above applications to the coordination of agents and the separation of concerns. They permit the system designer to introduce supplementary coordination and other functionalities independently from agents.