Transactional Agents: Towards a Robust Multi-Agent System (Lecture Notes in Computer Science (2249))

The Term “agent” Is One Of Those Catchwords That Mean Widely Differing Things To Different People. To Telecommunications People It Is Little More Than A Mobile Piece Of Code That May Be Executed At Any Place. At The Other Extreme, Ai People Often Associate With Agents Human-like Traits Such As Social Behavior. In Between, Software People View Agents As Fairly Self-contained Pieces Of Software That, At The Low End, Pretty Much Act Like Objects And, At The High End, More Or Less Auto- Mously Decide When And How To React To Stimuli Or Proactively Initiate Effects That Can Be Observed From Their Environment. Software Agents Are Particularly Important When It Comes To Distributed En- Ronments. There, Much Of The Communication Takes Place Asynchronously, That Is The Sequence Of Events Cannot Be Planned Ahead In All Detail. Instead, Agents Are Given Rules As To How To Interpret The Current Situation And, Given A Common Goal, So That They Adjust Their Response Accordingly. Application Scenario -- Overview Of Agent Technology -- Overview Of Transaction Processing -- Proposed Approach: Transactional Agents -- The Agent Transaction Model -- Robustness Guaranteeing Mechanisms -- Interacting With The Execution Agent -- Simulation Study -- Simulation Results -- Summary And Future Work. Khaled Nagi. Thesis (doctoral)--universität Karlruhe, 2001. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. This book enhances the robustness of MAS applied in the information systems domain through an underlying middleware; this middleware provides formal guarantees on the robustness of the system by itself and independently of the original structure of the MAS architecture. Much of today`s progress in IT is due to interdisciplinary approaches - or to changing viewpoints on a particular problem. This monograph is an excellent example of such an interdisciplinary approach that brings together database knowledge rarely concerned with agents, and agent techniques that have had little to do with database technology Introduction....Pages 1-4 Application Scenario....Pages 5-19 Overview of Agent Technology....Pages 21-39 Overview of Transaction Processing....Pages 41-61 Proposed Approach: Transactional Agents....Pages 63-78 The Agent Transaction Model....Pages 79-115 Robustness Guaranteeing Mechanisms....Pages 117-133 Interacting with the Execution Agent....Pages 135-150 Simulation Study....Pages 151-159 Simulation Results....Pages 161-181 Summary and Future Work....Pages 183-185 Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) emerged from the domain of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI).