International journal of agent technologies and systems最新文献

{"title":"Epistemological Aspects of Simulation Models for Decision Support","authors":"A. Dekker","doi":"10.4018/jats.2013040103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/jats.2013040103","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, the author explores epistemological aspects of simulation with a particular focus on using simulations to provide recommendations to managers and other decision-makers. The author presents formal definitions of knowledge (as justified true belief) and of simulation. The author shows that a simple model, the Kuramoto model of coupled-oscillators, satisfies the simulation definition (and therefore generates knowledge) through a justified mapping from the real world. The author argues that, for more complex models, such a justified mapping requires three techniques: using an appropriate and justified theoretical construct; using appropriate and justified values for model parameters; and testing or other verification processes to ensure that the mapping is correctly defined. The author illustrates these three techniques with experiments and models from the literature, including the Long House Valley model of Axtell et al., the SAFTE model of sleep, and the Segregation model of Wilensky. Epistemological Aspects of Simulation Models for Decision Support","PeriodicalId":93648,"journal":{"name":"International journal of agent technologies and systems","volume":"50 1","pages":"55-77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88306881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hierarchical Multi-Agent Plans Using Model-Based Petri Net","authors":"Said Brahimi, R. Maamri, Z. Sahnoun","doi":"10.4018/jats.2013040101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/jats.2013040101","url":null,"abstract":"Agents evolving in complex and dynamic multi-agent systems need to plan their tasks and to adapt their behavior in order to react to unpredictable events. Therefore they must have plans that remain subject to continual updating, even during its execution. Although this property is important in dynamic environments, it is difficult to have a trade-off between the convergence towards the goal to be reached and the reaction to unanticipated events. To cope with this issue, it is needed to have a model allowing to represent plans less sensitive to execution contexts, and to support flexible execution. This paper aims to provide an adequate plan representation, by taking advantage of hierarchical plans and extensions to Petri net. The authors extend the Petri net to take into account the different abstraction levels of plans and the resources required by tasks. To cope with the interdependence of tasks, the authors include in the model, a synchronization mechanism between concurrent transitions. The proposed model can be used to reason on abstract levels of plans and to analyze, in a dynamic way, situations in which the execution of the plan can be performed in any ways, in some ways, or cannot be performed. Hierarchical Multi-Agent Plans Using Model-Based Petri Net","PeriodicalId":93648,"journal":{"name":"International journal of agent technologies and systems","volume":"20 1","pages":"1-30"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74686868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the Epistemological, Ontological, Teleological and Methodological Currents in Modeling and Simulation: An Overview","authors":"I. Bozkurt, J. Padilla","doi":"10.4018/jats.2013010101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/jats.2013010101","url":null,"abstract":"Modeling and Simulation (M&S) has been used to solve problems, make decisions, and understand complex phenomena. Scholars have tried to understand and formulate the epistemic value of gained insights through models and simulations. Questions such as how insights are considered knowledge, what the tradeoff between perspectives and objectivity is, what kind of purpose models and simulations fulfill, and how M&S is used within a research methodology paradigm are a starting point of discussing the philosophical underpinnings. The epistemological, ontological, teleological and methodological (E/O/T/M) considerations of M&S is the main motivation of this paper. A comprehensive literature review on E/O/T/M considerations provides an initial roadmap to study the nature of M&S leading to the following questions: How can the authors define canons of research for M&S based on E/O/T/M? How can they define an E/O/T/M-based meta-model to characterize models and simulations? And how can the authors study validation of models and simulations based on E/O/T/M considerations? DOI: 10.4018/jats.2013010101 2 International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems, 5(1), 1-18, January-March 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. at those commonalities is by looking at E/O/T/M foundations (premises and assumptions) of the use of M&S across disciplines. From a high-level perspective, M&S uses models to represent a phenomenon of interest and simulates these models to gain insight or to predict. Gaining insight or prediction suggests that knowledge is generated from the modeling and/or simulation activity. This knowledgegeneration activity has been under deliberation on questions such as: Can simulations generate knowledge? What kind of knowledge do simulations generate? Does simulation need its own epistemology? Although these are epistemological questions, they are not separate from ontological, methodological, and teleological issues regarding the modeler’s perspective, approach, and intent. Frigg and Reiss (2009), for instance, argue that despite simulation creating parallel worlds on more ideal conditions than the “real world”, this is not unique to simulation; ergo it does not warrant a new philosophy of science. Humphreys (2009), on the other hand, states that with the introduction of computational science new issues also have arisen within the discipline of philosophy of science, namely: epistemic opacity, semantics, temporal dynamics, and practice not principle. Epistemic opacity refers to cognitive agents’ limited access to knowledge; semantics refers to how simulations are applied to real system given the detachment of simulations from reality, how computer simulations are limited by syntax of computer code, and how semantics are subsumed under that syntax; temporal dynamics refers to the temporal representations of dynamic processes involved in simulation ","PeriodicalId":93648,"journal":{"name":"International journal of agent technologies and systems","volume":"40 1","pages":"1-18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88557465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Distributed Agency","authors":"E. Suárez, M. Castañón-Puga","doi":"10.4018/jats.2013010103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/jats.2013010103","url":null,"abstract":"Distributed Agency is the name of a conceptual framework for describing complex adaptive systems that this paper develops. To understand the complexity of the world in a holistic fashion, the field of Modeling and Simulation is currently lacking a common terminology in which different bodies of knowledge can communicate with each other in a general language. In this work, agency is proposed as the common link between the different dimensions of reality, expressing the influence of one dimension on another. This conceptualization is based on a process of backwards induction where nested actors such as an evolved organism or a human choice can be represented as the resulting force of intertwined aims and constraints. The theoretical framework can serve as a point of reference for the social and computational researcher by communicating structural and emergent properties that are essential for the understanding of social and evolutionary phenomena such as companies, economies, governments, and ecosystems. DOI: 10.4018/jats.2013010103 International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems, 5(1), 32-52, January-March 2013 33 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. (Nonaka & Nishiguchi, 2001). In such a world, the independence of events that is assumed in classical statistics theory no longer holds true and a holistic approach is necessary (Crutchfield, 1994; Biggiero, 2001). In order to appropriately model complex human behavior we must define a canvas in which multiple dimensions of our existence can be defined (Stepney, Polack, & Turner, 2006; Tolk, 2012). Emergent phenomena are ubiquitous in systems that are separated into distinct ontological levels, such as it is in human societies full of consumers, coalitions, families, loyalties, firms, laws, cartels, institutions and governments (Márquez, Castañón-Puga, Castro, & Suarez, 2011). In this sense, our proposal cannot be tied to any one particular model. Instead, the intent is to create a way in which a myriad of non-orthogonal but distinct bodies of knowledge can be expressed in a meta-model of translatable terminology. If we think of a model as a song, then DA could be more accurately compared to a musical staff in which any song can be written than to any particular composition. While the ultimate aim of this work is to foster the discussion for the development of a common interdisciplinary language to describe multiple levels of reality, the immediate aim is to propose a framework that can be used in the computational description of a multidimensional reality. The rapidly expanding world of the computer simulation—a paradigm with foundations generally related to Multi-Agent Systems (MAS)—is based on independent agents that strategically interact with each other (Van der Hoek & Wooldridge, 2008). The independence granted to the agents in MAS is a computational one, in the sense that each agent pro","PeriodicalId":93648,"journal":{"name":"International journal of agent technologies and systems","volume":"65 1","pages":"32-52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85793673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Simulation of HIV Infection Propagation Networks: A Review of the State of the Art in Agent-Based Approaches","authors":"Alfredo Tirado-Ramos, Chris Kelley","doi":"10.4018/jats.2013010104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/jats.2013010104","url":null,"abstract":"Simulating the transmission of HIV requires a model framework that can account for the complex nature of HIV transmission. In this paper the authors present the current state of the art for simulating HIV with agent-based models and highlight some of the significant contributions of current research. The authors then propose opportunities for future work including their plan that involves identifying and monitoring high-risk drug users that can potentially initiate high-risk infection propagation networks. DOI: 10.4018/jats.2013010104 54 International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems, 5(1), 53-63, January-March 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. this paper we explore simulation approaches to the propagation of infection networks, specifically the state of the art in agent-based models, a type of approach that has consistently proved to be a significant tool to simulate the spread of infection disease. Some of the more cited agent-based approaches found in the literature are presented, along with a discussion of future work in the context of our efforts on monitoring the pandemic within high-risk, drug abusing HIV+ populations.","PeriodicalId":93648,"journal":{"name":"International journal of agent technologies and systems","volume":"8 1","pages":"53-63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85519242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Contribution of Social Simulation in the Advancement of Marketing Issues and Challenges","authors":"Mario Gonzalez-Fuentes","doi":"10.4018/jats.2013010102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/jats.2013010102","url":null,"abstract":"For some years now, marketers have been praising for a more holistic approach of a company’s marketing efforts across all areas. However, traditional models show serious limitations to address the complexities of managing all of a company’s touch points with a customer. Agent-based modeling (ABM) has opened the door to explore the unfolding behaviors and outputs of an increasingly connected and interactive marketplace. The contribution of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it provides researchers with a state-of-the-art repository for this strand of research. This facilitates the identification of relevant gaps in the literature and future research avenues. Second, it contributes to assess the way ABM has improved our understanding of the dynamics of markets and its participants when marketing strategies are implemented. Both goals aim at showing the various ways that social simulation has expanded our understanding of marketing and the future research opportunities for both, marketing and computer scientists. DOI: 10.4018/jats.2013010102 20 International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems, 5(1), 19-31, January-March 2013 Copyright © 2013, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. limitation relates to the constrained number of factors these approaches can incorporate as well as the level of detail they can accommodate. Kiesling et al. (2012) highlight that some of these traditional methodologies are not properly designed to account for the pervasive effect of interaction and community-building on an agent’s behavior. They argue this limitation significantly constraints the utility of traditional approaches to address policy implementation (what-if) questions, which are quite frequent in managerial decisions. Finally, these traditional techniques fail to explicitly incorporate consumers’ heterogeneity and the complexity behind social phenomena (North et al., 2010; Kiesling et al., 2012); two features that are bound to be present in every marketing interaction between two or more agents. It is until recently that marketing scholars started to explore the complexities of marketplaces by applying social simulation approaches. This rising interest is motivated by the possibility, opened by these simulation models, to more effectively monitor and evaluate the outcomes of marketing actions and policies. In particular, agent-based modeling (ABM) is one of the most popular simulation approaches applied by marketing scholars thanks to its ground-up or bottom-up nature. This is because, in ABM, the group-level structures emerge as a result of the simulation, based on a population of heterogeneous agents and the operational rules of their interactions. In other words, the model is defined at the individual or micro-level, and the representation of these features in a simulation result in the emergence of collective or macrolevel phenomena. In more traditional linear a","PeriodicalId":93648,"journal":{"name":"International journal of agent technologies and systems","volume":"40 1","pages":"19-31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88593399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Asynchronous Modeling and Simulation with Orthogonal Agents","authors":"R. Tankelevich","doi":"10.4018/jats.2012100102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/jats.2012100102","url":null,"abstract":"This paper considers a class of systems of autonomous self-governed agents with purpose-specific behavior. Agents of this class contribute most to the overall performance if they have an unobstructed transparent access to the environment. Many examples of such systems can be found in swarm technologies and asynchronous simulation of discrete and continuous systems. An efficiency metric for a multi-agent system operating within a given environment is proposed as a dot product of the system's characteristic time-vectors: one of an agent's demands for resources and the other of the resources' availability. It is shown that the smaller the dot product the higher the efficiency of the agents. In some cases, the better efficiency of individual agents translates into improvement of the overall performance of the system. This observation is postulated as the principle of orthogonality: under some conditions, the asynchronous, ungoverned systems outperform the systems with synchronized actions. It is shown that the asynchronous \"chaotic\" multi-agent models, properly devised to achieve a higher level of transparency, can produce a better throughput beyond the level achieved by simply improving the latency of the system. Examples of orthogonal systems include many discrete-continuous physical, financial, control and some machine learning multi-agent models. Conditions of convergence of asynchronous models are presented. Some experimental results are shown, as well. More general observations are made in the context of natural decomposition.","PeriodicalId":93648,"journal":{"name":"International journal of agent technologies and systems","volume":"9 1","pages":"17-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78997721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Agent-Based Model of the Spread of Devil Facial Tumor Disease in an Isolated Population of Tasmanian Devils","authors":"C. Knadler","doi":"10.4018/jats.2012100101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/jats.2012100101","url":null,"abstract":"The Tasmanian devil population is being reduced in the wild at an alarming rate due to an epidemic, which is the result of an unusual disease mechanism. Infected animals \"inject\" cancer cells into other devils, which then clone the cells, developing tumors. These tumors are invariably fatal. Field observers have developed hypotheses that include a life-history change for the species. It is hypothesized that this change has the potential to improve the population's survivability. An agent-based model of Tasmanian devils is used to evaluate these hypotheses. The model results suggest that the devils' intra-gender aggression as well as their aggressive mating practices render the life-history change hypotheses' correctness improbable.","PeriodicalId":93648,"journal":{"name":"International journal of agent technologies and systems","volume":"80 1","pages":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80035481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On Modeling and Verification of Agent-Based Traffic Simulation Properties in Alloy","authors":"J. Valente, F. Araujo, Rym Zalila-Wenkstern","doi":"10.4018/jats.2012100103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/jats.2012100103","url":null,"abstract":"The advances in Intelligent Transportation Systems ITS call for a new generation of traffic simulation models that support connectivity and collaboration among simulated vehicles and traffic infrastructure. In this paper we introduce MATISSE, a complex, large scale agent-based framework for the modeling and simulation of ITS and discuss how Alloy, a modeling language based on set theory and first order logic, was used to specify, verify, and analyze MATISSE's traffic models.","PeriodicalId":93648,"journal":{"name":"International journal of agent technologies and systems","volume":"3 1","pages":"38-60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84436230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Falsifying an Enzyme Induction Mechanism within a Validated, Multiscale Liver Model","authors":"Glen E. P. Ropella, Tempus Dictum, R. Kennedy","doi":"10.4018/jats.2012070101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4018/jats.2012070101","url":null,"abstract":"The focus is an In Silico Liver ISL model family and an evolving suite of mechanistic hypotheses about rat liver-drug interactions. ISLs are multiscale and hierarchical. A medium grain Enzyme Induction mechanism was implemented. Validation falsification of complicated, knowledge-based models requires integrating distinct aspects and methods for multi-aspect validation. For ISLs, such integration has not been straightforward. Falsification is crucial for formulating, testing, and iteratively evolving hypotheses about liver mechanisms. During multi-aspect falsification, the authors can falsify a hypothesis in one aspect while simultaneously validating it in another aspect. The authors demonstrate a multi-scalar validation/falsification event in which they validate the mechanism against coarse grain measures of liver perfusate drug levels and falsify it against a medium grained measure of hepatic zonation. The authors also discuss how falsification is guiding mechanism hypothesis refinement. The ability to scale validation efforts is necessary for effective scientific use models such as ISLs.","PeriodicalId":93648,"journal":{"name":"International journal of agent technologies and systems","volume":"126 1","pages":"1-14"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88164581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}