PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF AGENT-BASED TECHNOLOGY Edited by Haiping Xu Practical Applications of Agent-Based Technology Edited by Haiping Xu Published by InTech Janeza Trdine 9, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia Copyright © 2012 InTech All chapters are Open Access distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles even for commercial purposes, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. After this work has been published by InTech, authors have the right to republish it, in whole or part, in any publication of which they are the author, and to make other personal use of the work. Any republication, referencing or personal use of the work must explicitly identify the original source. As for readers, this license allows users to download, copy and build upon published chapters even for commercial purposes, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. Notice Statements and opinions expressed in the chapters are these of the individual contributors and not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the published chapters. The publisher assumes no responsibility for any damage or injury to persons or property arising out of the use of any materials, instructions, methods or ideas contained in the book. Publishing Process Manager Ivona Lovric Technical Editor Teodora Smiljanic Cover Designer InTech Design Team First published March, 2012 Printed in Croatia A free online edition of this book is available at www.intechopen.com Additional hard copies can be obtained from orders@intechweb.org Practical Applications of Agent-Based Technology, Edited by Haiping Xu p. cm. ISBN 978-953-51-0276-2 Contents Preface VII Chapter 1 Agent-Based System Applied to Smart Distribution Grid Operation 1 D. Issicaba, M. A. Rosa, W. Franchin and J. A. Peças Lopes Chapter 2 Conflict Resolution in Resource Federation with Intelligent Agent Negotiation 21 Wai-Khuen Cheng and Huah-Yong Chan Chapter 3 Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Agents in Electronic Auctions 45 Jacob Sow, Patricia Anthony and Chong Mun Ho Chapter 4 Developing a Multi-Issue E-Negotiation System for E-Commerce with JADE 71 Bala M. Balachandran Chapter 5 Adaptive Virtual Environments: The Role of Intelligent Agents 87 Marcus S. de Aquino and Fernando da F. de Souza Chapter 6 Software Agent Finds Its Way in the Changing Environment 111 Algirdas Sokas Preface Over the past decade, there has been a strong revival of interest in agent-based technology, with a recognition that it impacts many areas such as artificial intelligence, distributed computing, and software engineering. Agent-based technology can be used to solve a variety of business and technology problems. Examples of such applications include electronic commerce, grid computing, social networks, and adaptive virtual environment. In an agent-based system, software agents with sufficient intelligence and autonomy are adopted to perform tasks such as sensing, planning, scheduling, reasoning and decision-making. An agent can either work independently or coordinate with other agents to accomplish tasks and missions. In the former case, an agent typically generates a set of goals based on its motivation, and also a list of plans for achieving its goals. In the later case, a collection of agents are structured as a multi-agent system (MAS), where a coordination model based on message passing among agents is defined to provide a uniform interface for their interactions. In this book, we provide a collection of practical applications of agent- based technology. Chapter 1 demonstrates how agent-based technology can be applied to smart distribution grid operation. It presents an agent-based architecture which can be developed to support the smooth modernization of the power distribution grids. Chapter 2 discusses how to resolve conflicts in resource federation with agent negotiation. A scenario of resource federation in grid computing is illustrated to show the adoption of creative negotiation for conflict resolution. Chapter 3 and 4 provide two application examples of agent-based technology in electronic commerce, where homogeneous and heterogeneous agents are defined and adopted for electronic auctions (Chapter 3), and a multi-issue e-negotiation system is developed for electronic commerce (Chapter 4). Chapter 5 presents an innovative application of intelligent agents in adaptive virtual environments. By using intelligent agents, a three-dimensional (3D) virtual environment can be tuned into an adaptive system, which improves the quality of human-computer interface. Chapter 6 provides another example of using intelligent agent to find the shortest path between two points in a changing drawing environment. Although we present quite a few practical application examples of using agent-based technology in this book, the collection of such application areas is far from completion. The purpose of this book is to provide examples of recent advances in agent-based VIII Preface systems and demonstrate how agent-based technology can be used to solve practical problems. It is our hope that this book will not only help the researchers and practitioners to understand the practical usage of agent-based technology, but also provides them hints of using agent-based technology in innovative ways. This book has been a collaborative effort, which wouldn’t be possible for us to complete it without the substantial contribution and generous assistance we received from many people. We are most grateful, of course, to the authors of the chapters for the quality of their research. We are also especially grateful for the generous support from the InTech Open Access Publisher. At InTech, we thank all those who assisted in this book, especially Ivona Lovric for her much hard work on communicating with the authors and helping put all chapters together. Haiping Xu, PhD Associate Professor Director of Concurrent Software Engineering Laboratory Computer and Information Science Department University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Massachusetts USA [...]... energy technology laboratory, a system view of the modern grid (appendix a1: Self-heals), Technical report, U.S Department of Energy Northcote-Green, J & Wilson, R G (2006) Control and Automation of Electrical Power Distribution Systems, CRC Press 20 20 Practical Applications of Agent-Based Technology Will-be-set-by-IN-TECH Pagdgham, L & Winikoff, M (2007) Developing Intelligent agents systems – A practical. .. 2010) In general, these works do not describe the deployment of a software engineering methodology In addition, none of them provide one of the most important issue for the practical implementation and acceptance of agent-based technology in distribution grid applications: an environment which emulates the system operation to evaluate the agent-based solutions according to standardized (and regulated)... source interpreter of an extended version of AgentSpeak A didactic case study illustrates how service adequacy and security can be improved with the application of the proposed agent-based decision planning 2 2 Practical Applications of Agent-Based Technology Will-be-set-by-IN-TECH 1.1 Problem statement Electrical power grids are designed to provide electricity with a certain level of adequacy and security... are applied in the performance evaluation of the electric distribution grids 1 System Average Interruption Frequency Index: This index measures how many sustained interruptions an average customer will experience over the course of a year SAIFI = Total number of customer interruptions Total number of customer served (2) 14 Practical Applications of Agent-Based Technology Will-be-set-by-IN-TECH 14 2 System... Extensibility connotes the ability of augmenting, upgrading or adding new functionality to a system Finally, robustness stands for a degree of system fault tolerance 4 4 Practical Applications of Agent-Based Technology Will-be-set-by-IN-TECH a platform as well as discusses the physical/hardware implementation of the proposed solutions, how the environment is influenced by them in terms of modeling, and some agent... these features are of most importance to a smooth modernization of distribution grids The tangible product of the work is an agent-based simulation platform where the smart grid operation and control solutions can be tested and evaluated The target group of the work includes software engineering researchers and power engineers 2 Brief discussion about the state of the art Regarding applications related... server/computer of each block, or under a combination with both local block agent and central decision making with human intervention remotely 8 8 Practical Applications of Agent-Based Technology Will-be-set-by-IN-TECH Now, in order to illustrate the automation process, consider an automated system for switching all switch-breakers of the Fig 4, where the main goal is to minimize the number of interruptions... satisfaction of policy criteria Fig 1 Resource usage policies with various policy criteria 22 Practical Applications of Agent-Based Technology Those criteria listed out the terms and conditions during resource federation, such as the resources to be shared, the participants who are allowed to utilize the resources, and also restrictions of sharing Policy criteria can utilize a full range of qualitative... integration The operation states are sequentially evaluated up to the convergence of performance indices following a Sequential Monte Carlo approach (Rubinstein & Kroese, 2008) Numerical integration was implemented using the fourth-order 12 Practical Applications of Agent-Based Technology Will-be-set-by-IN-TECH 12 Fig 8 Sequence of operation states in the combined discrete-continuous simulation model Runge-Kutta... behavior, presence of vegetation near the overhead network, interaction with human-being and so forth From a centralized DMS perspective, the decision-making process involves directly at least one operator (human intervention) which should decide whether to change or not the operational status of a remote controlled device Additionally, it requires 6 6 Practical Applications of Agent-Based Technology Will-be-set-by-IN-TECH . PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF AGENT-BASED TECHNOLOGY Edited by Haiping Xu Practical Applications of Agent-Based Technology Edited by Haiping. collection of practical applications of agent- based technology. Chapter 1 demonstrates how agent-based technology can be applied to smart distribution grid operation. It presents an agent-based. d eployment of a software engineering methodology. In addition, none of them provide one of the most important issue for the practical implementation and acceptance of agent-based technology in