the abstract

Before I start to talk about the agent-based technology stuff, let's talk about my project in the thesis. I will explain it via the abstract of my thesis. Here it is.

"SNet is a prototype environment supporting the representation and dynamic evaluation of designs for inter-organizational networks by integrating an extended version of the i* formalism for static network modeling with ConGolog, a logic based action language. The previous work of SNet has the limitation to model agents evolving over time in the simulation run time. The assignment of roles to agent is statically implemented in the design of the system. This work proposes an additional feature for an agent to allow agents to dynamically perform in different levels of his state during simulation by specifying the evolution through roles and the dependencies towards other network members in the simulation. Furthermore, this model will be translated to the ConGolog framework for the implementation of agent evolution in the simulation. In this study, examples of the application domains will be derived from real world application domains such as stages of entrepreneurs, e-democracy and software process modeling."

As you can see above, I added a new feature of SNet. SNet is developed by my supervisor Dominik Schmitz from informatik 5 faculty Informatik RWTH Aachen university Germany. My thesis work was about how agents are able to have dynamic assignment of roles. It means that there should be a model, agent evolution model, to build how an agent may acquire/lose roles, what is required to make an agent have the capability to evolve through roles, and to which roles an agent may acquire a new roles. And the next important step is how the simulation is added by the capability of agent evolving during simulation based on the agent evolution model.

Then, what is the difference from the previous SNet. The simple answer is that with this new feature, a user doesn't have to stop the simulation, change the role of the agent like it is intended and finally continue the simulation without any guilty feeling :).

So, the user just have to build the agent evolution model as described above, and implement the simulation based on the model, so then an agent in the simulation will change roles automatically based on the requirement in the model.

Does it mean there is no human interference for the decision of agent to evolve during simulation. MMhhh.... If you look to above reason... yes, there is no human interference during simulation. But, there are some special cases where human will also interfere in the decision of agent evolving.

But, I will not discuss it now because you will get bored with this. I will discuss it later when I write about a related method in the agent-based technology. So, Let's talk about agent!! and their contributions. Let's the quest begin.