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Michael Winikoff

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44 papers
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44

AAMAS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

A Scoresheet for Explainable AI

  • Michael Winikoff
  • John Thangarajah
  • Sebastian Rodriguez

Explainability is important for the transparency of autonomous and intelligent systems and for helping to support the development of appropriate levels of trust. There has been considerable work on developing approaches for explaining systems and there are standards that specify requirements for transparency. However, there is a gap: the standards are too high-level and do not adequately specify requirements for explainability. This paper develops a scoresheet that can be used to specify explainability requirements or to assess the explainability aspects provided for particular applications. The scoresheet is developed by considering the requirements of a range of stakeholders and is applicable to Multiagent Systems as well as other AI technologies. We also provide guidance for how to use the scoresheet and illustrate its generality and usefulness by applying it to a range of applications.

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AAMAS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Requirements-based Explainability for Multi Agent Systems

  • Sebastian Rodriguez
  • John Thangarajah
  • Michael Winikoff

Explainability is essential for building trust in intelligent and autonomous systems. However, existing techniques for explainability focus on the behaviour of the system, but do not go back to the system’s requirements. We provide fully traceable explanations that link back to requirements, expressed as User and System stories, by extending previous work on explainable agents (XAg) that uses an agent design pattern. Our implementation leverages industry-grade mainstream monitoring tools.

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AAMAS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

30 Years of Engineering Multi-Agent Systems: What and Why?

  • Michael Winikoff

Research on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS) aims to provide software engineers with what they need to be able to effectively develop multi-agent systems. The field is broad, covering foundational concepts, notations, processes, techniques, tools, and languages. Although it is difficult to pin down a precise year, it can be argued that the community is now 30 years old [1]. This talk will review where the field is, and outline some challenges and future directions. In addition to answering the question “What is EMAS? ” the talk aims to raise the profile of the field and the community, answering the question “Why should I care? ”.

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AAMAS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

A Behaviour-Driven Approach for Testing Requirements via User and System Stories in Agent Systems

  • Sebastian Rodriguez
  • John Thangarajah
  • Michael Winikoff

Testing is a critical part of the software development cycle. This is even more important for autonomous systems, which can be challenging to test. In mainstream software engineering, Behaviour- Driven Development (BDD) is an Agile software development practice that is well accepted and widely used. It involves defining test cases for the expected system behaviour prior to developing the associated functionality. In this work, we present a BDD approach to testing the behavioural requirements of an agent system specified via User and System Stories (USS). USS is also based on established Agile processes and is shown to be intuitive and readily mapped to agent concepts. More specifically we extend USS so that they can be used for testing, and develop a behaviour-driven testing framework based on USS. We show how test cases can be developed, and how to evaluate the test cases by using a state-of-the-art mutation testing system, PITest, which we have integrated into our test framework. A key feature of our work is that we leverage a range of state-of-the-art development tools, inheriting the rich set of features they provide.

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AAMAS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Evaluating a Mechanism for Explaining BDI Agent Behaviour

  • Michael Winikoff
  • Galina Sidorenko

We conducted a survey to evaluate a previously proposed mechanism for explaining Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents using folk psychological concepts (belief, desires, and valuings). We also consider the relationship between trust in the specific autonomous system, and general trust in technology. We find that explanations that include valuings are particularly likely to be preferred by the study participants. We also found evidence that single-factor explanations, as used in some previous work, are too short.

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AAMAS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Testing Requirements via User and System Stories in Agent Systems

  • Sebastian Rodriguez
  • John Thangarajah
  • Michael Winikoff
  • Dhirendra Singh

Agile software development is a popular and widely adopted practice due to its flexible and iterative nature that facilitates rapid prototyping. Recent work presented an agile approach to capturing requirements in agent systems via user and system stories. User and system stories present the requirements from the user and system perspective, respectively. Each story contains a set of acceptance criteria, which are a set of statements that identify the conditions under which the system behaviour can be accepted by the users or stakeholders. In this paper, we present a novel approach to testing the requirements that are specified via User and System stories in an agent system. We do this by developing a systematic approach to validating the execution traces output by the system against the specified acceptance criteria for each story. The approach identifies acceptance criteria that are met successfully in execution and those that fail. We present a fault model that categorizes the failures providing insight to the developers to address the failed cases. We classify three kinds of faults for a given acceptance criterion: (a) the trigger condition is never met; (b) when the trigger occurs the preconditions are not met; or (c) the trigger and preconditions are met but the resulting actions are not as expected. The motivating application of our work, which is also the test-bed for evaluation, is an agent-based simulation application for modelling the behaviours of civilians in a bushfire emergency scenario that is used in practice. We show our approach is able to successfully test and uncover requirements that were not met in this application.

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IJCAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Why Bad Coffee? Explaining BDI Agent Behaviour with Valuings (Extended Abstract)

  • Michael Winikoff
  • Galina Sidorenko
  • Virginia Dignum
  • Frank Dignum

An important issue in deploying an autonomous system is how to enable human users and stakeholders to develop an appropriate level of trust in the system. It has been argued that a crucial mechanism to enable appropriate trust is the ability of a system to explain its behaviour. Obviously, such explanations need to be comprehensible to humans. Due to the perceived similarity in functioning between humans and autonomous systems, we argue that it makes sense to build on the results of extensive research in social sciences that explores how humans explain their behaviour. Using similar concepts for explanation is argued to help with comprehensibility, since the concepts are familiar. Following work in the social sciences, we propose the use of a folk-psychological model that utilises beliefs, desires, and ``valuings''. We propose a formal framework for constructing explanations of the behaviour of an autonomous system, present an (implemented) algorithm for giving explanations, and present evaluation results.

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JAAMAS Journal 2021 Journal Article

Special issue on Current trends in research on software agents and agent-based software systems

  • Matteo Baldoni
  • Federico Bergenti
  • Michael Winikoff

Abstract This special issue of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems sought research articles that discuss relevant topics for the current trends in research on software agents and agent-based software systems. Topics of interest included techniques and technologies to engineer agent-based software systems, as well as languages, frameworks, and infrastructures broadly related to software agents and agent-based software systems.

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AAMAS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

User and System Stories: An Agile Approach for Managing Requirements in AOSE

  • Sebastian Rodriguez
  • John Thangarajah
  • Michael Winikoff

The agile software development life cycle is widely used in industry today due to its highly flexible and iterative processes that facilitate rapid prototyping. There has been recent work in bringing concepts and processes from agile methodologies to agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE). We contribute to this effort by presenting in this paper a novel approach to capturing requirements of agent systems in AOSE using and extending agile concepts. In this paper, we propose to adopt and extend the well-known concept of User Stories to facilitate the development of agent systems. We introduce a novel concept, System Story, that defines requirements from the perspective of the system. These System Stories are refinements of User Stories and provide more intuitive mappings to agent concepts in the design and implementation. We show how our approach allows better traceability of requirements between stories and the different software development artifacts. We validate our proposal with a feature-based comparison to recent related work, and a preliminary user evaluation based on a drone simulation of a simple search and rescue case study.

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AIJ Journal 2021 Journal Article

Why bad coffee? Explaining BDI agent behaviour with valuings

  • Michael Winikoff
  • Galina Sidorenko
  • Virginia Dignum
  • Frank Dignum

An important issue in deploying an autonomous system is how to enable human users and stakeholders to develop an appropriate level of trust in the system. It has been argued that a crucial mechanism to enable appropriate trust is the ability of a system to explain its behaviour. Obviously, such explanations need to be comprehensible to humans. Due to the perceived similarity in functioning between humans and autonomous systems, we argue that it makes sense to build on the results of extensive research in social sciences that explores how humans explain their behaviour. Using similar concepts for explanation is argued to help with comprehensibility, since the concepts are familiar. Following work in the social sciences, we propose the use of a folk-psychological model that utilises beliefs, desires, and “valuings”. We propose a formal framework for constructing explanations of the behaviour of an autonomous system, present an (implemented) algorithm for giving explanations, and present evaluation results.

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AAMAS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

On Enactability of Agent Interaction Protocols: Towards a Unified Approach

  • Angelo Ferrando
  • Michael Winikoff
  • Stephen Cranefield
  • Frank Dignum
  • Viviana Mascardi

Interactions between agents are usually designed from a global viewpoint. However, the implementation of a multi-agent interaction is distributed. This difference can introduce problems. For instance, it is possible to specify protocols from a global viewpoint that cannot be implemented as a collection of individual agents. This leads naturally to the question of whether a given (global) protocol is enactable. We consider this question in a powerful setting (trace expressions), considering a range of message ordering interpretations (specifying what it means to say that an interaction step occurs before another), and a range of possible constraints on the semantics of message delivery, corresponding to different properties of the underlying communication middleware.

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AAMAS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

A new Hierarchical Agent Protocol Notation

  • Michael Winikoff
  • Nitin Yadav
  • Lin Padgham

Agent interaction protocols are a key aspect of the design of multiagent systems. However, commonly-used notations are, we argue, difficult to use, and lack expressiveness in certain areas. In this paper we present a new notation for expressing interaction protocols, focussing on key issues that we have found to be problematic. The notation is evaluated against criteria, and using a human subject evaluation of usability.

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JAAMAS Journal 2017 Journal Article

A new Hierarchical Agent Protocol Notation

  • Michael Winikoff
  • Nitin Yadav
  • Lin Padgham

Abstract Agent interaction descriptions (or protocols) are a key aspect of the design of multi-agent systems. However, in the authors’ extensive experience, the notations commonly used for specification are both difficult to use, and lack expressiveness in certain areas. Some desired modular representations are impossible to express, while others result in specifications that are unwieldy and difficult to follow. In this paper we present a new notation for expressing interaction protocols, focussing on key issues that we have found to be problematic: the ability to define flexible data-driven protocols; representation of roles including their mapping to agents; and hierarchical modularity. We provide the semantics for our notation and illustrate its use with three diverse case studies. Finally we evaluate this notation using objectively assessable criteria that we argue contribute substantially to pragmatic usability, and using a human subject evaluation of the notation’s usability.

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JAAMAS Journal 2017 Journal Article

BDI agent testability revisited

  • Michael Winikoff

Abstract Agent-based systems are deployed to solve a wide range of problems in a wide range of domains. Before software is deployed, it is important to obtain assurance that it will function correctly. Traditionally, this assurance is obtained by testing. However, there is an intuition that agents exhibit more complex behaviour than traditional software, which raises the question: how testable are agent systems? We focus on BDI agent programs, and analyse their testability with respect to the all edges test adequacy criterion (also known as “branch coverage”). Our results augment earlier results that considered the all paths criterion to provide a richer and more nuanced understanding of the testability of BDI agents. We show that the number of tests required with respect to the all edges criterion is much lower than that required with respect to the all paths criterion. We also show that, as for the previous analysis, BDI programs are harder to test than equivalently-sized procedural programs, even if exception handling is introduced. Overall, our conclusions lend strength to the earlier work, and motivate the need for work on formal methods for agent systems.

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AAMAS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

BDI Agent Testability Revisited (JAAMAS Extended Abstract)

  • Michael Winikoff

This paper extends our understanding of BDI agent program testability. It considers this with respect to the all edges test adequacy criterion, comparing with previous work that considered the all paths criterion. Our findings extend the earlier analysis to give a more nuanced understanding of the difficulty of testing BDI agents. In particular, we include analysis comparing BDI programs with procedural programs that allow for an exception handling construct.

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AAMAS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Debugging Agent Programs with Why? Questions

  • Michael Winikoff

Debugging is hard, and debugging cognitive agent programs is particularly hard, since they involve concurrency, a dynamic environment, and a complex execution model that includes failure handling. Previous work by Ko & Myers has demonstrated that providing Alice and Java programmers with software that can answer “why? ” and “why not? ” questions can make a dramatic difference to debugging performance. This paper considers how to adapt this approach to cognitive agent programs, specifically AgentSpeak. It develops and formalises definitions for “why? ” and “why not? ” questions and associated answers, and illustrates their application using a scenario.

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IJCAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

No Pizza for You: Value-based Plan Selection in BDI Agents

  • Stephen Cranefield
  • Michael Winikoff
  • Virginia Dignum
  • Frank Dignum

Autonomous agents are increasingly required to be able to make moral decisions. In these situations, the agent should be able to reason about the ethical bases of the decision and explain its decision in terms of the moral values involved. This is of special importance when the agent is interacting with a user and should understand the value priorities of the user in order to provide adequate support. This paper presents a model of agent behavior that takes into account user preferences and moral values.

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AAMAS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

How Testable are BDI Agents? An Analysis of Branch Coverage (Extended Abstract)

  • Michael Winikoff

In this paper we extend our understanding of the feasibility of testing BDI agent programs by analysing their testability with respect to the all edges test adequacy criterion, and comparing with previous work that considered the all paths criterion. Our findings extend the earlier analysis with respect to the all paths criterion to give a more nuanced understanding of the difficulty of testing BDI agents.

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AAMAS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Requirements Specification in the Prometheus Methodology via Activity Diagrams (JAAMAS Extended Abstract)

  • Yoosef Abushark
  • John Thangarajah
  • Tim Miller
  • Michael Winikoff
  • James Harland

In this work we extend a popular agent design methodology, Prometheus, and improve the understandability and maintainability of requirements by automatically generating UML activity diagrams from existing requirements models; namely scenarios and goal hierarchies. The approach is general to all the methodologies that support similar notions in specifying requirements.

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IJCAI Conference 2015 Conference Paper

On the Testability of BDI Agent Systems (Extended Abstract)

  • Michael Winikoff
  • Stephen Cranefield

Before deploying a software system we need to assure ourselves (and stakeholders) that the system will behave correctly. This assurance is usually done by testing the system. However, it is intuitively obvious that adaptive systems, including agent-based systems, can exhibit complex behaviour, and are thus harder to test. In this paper we examine this “obvious intuition” in the case of Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents, by analysing the number of paths through BDI goalplan trees. Our analysis confirms quantitatively that BDI agents are hard to test, sheds light on the role of different parameters, and highlights the enormous difference made by failure handling.

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ECAI Conference 2014 Conference Paper

Checking The Correctness of Agent Designs Against Model-Based Requirements

  • Yoosef B. Abushark
  • Michael Winikoff
  • Tim Miller 0001
  • James Harland
  • John Thangarajah

Agent systems are used for a wide range of applications, and techniques to detect and avoid defects in such systems are valuable. In particular, it is desirable to detect issues as early as possible in the software development lifecycle. We describe a technique for checking the plan structures of a BDI agent design against the requirements models, specified in terms of scenarios and goals. This approach is applicable at design time, not requiring source code. A lightweight evaluation demonstrates that a range of defects can be found using this technique.

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JAAMAS Journal 2014 Journal Article

Dynamically generated commitment protocols in open systems

  • Akın Günay
  • Michael Winikoff
  • Pınar Yolum

Abstract Agent interaction is a fundamental part of any multiagent system. Such interactions are usually regulated by protocols, which are typically defined at design-time. However, in many situations a protocol may not exist or the available protocols may not fit the needs of the agents. In order to deal with such situations agents should be able to generate protocols at runtime. In this paper we develop a three-phase framework to enable agents to create a commitment protocol dynamically. In the first phase one of the agents generates candidate commitment protocols, by considering its goals, its abilities and its knowledge about the other agents’ services. We propose two algorithms that ensure that each generated protocol allows the agent to reach its goals if the protocol is enacted. The second phase is ranking of the generated protocols in terms of their expected utility in order to select the one that best suits the agent. The third phase is the negotiation of the protocol between agents that will enact the protocol so that the agents can agree on a protocol that will be used for enactment. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach using a case study.

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AAMAS Conference 2013 Conference Paper

Generating and Ranking Commitment Protocols

  • Akin Günay
  • Michael Winikoff
  • Pinar Yolum

Interaction is a fundamental part of multiagent systems, and is usually regulated by protocols. Typically, these protocols are defined at design-time. However, there exist situations where it is desirable to generate protocols at runtime. We develop an algorithm to generate commitment protocols considering the agent’s goals, its capabilities and its domain knowledge about the other agents’ goals and services. We then provide a method to rank these protocols in terms of their risk and benefit in order to select the one that best suits the agent’s current state.

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AAMAS Conference 2013 Conference Paper

Mutation Operators for Cognitive Agent Programs

  • Sharmila Savarimuthu
  • Michael Winikoff

Testing multi-agent systems is a challenge, since by definition such systems are distributed, and are able to exhibit autonomous and flexible behaviour. One specific challenge in testing agent programs is developing a collection of tests (a “test suite”) that is adequate for testing a given agent program. This requires a way of assessing the adequacy of a test suite. A well-established technique for assessing test suite adequacy is the use of mutation testing, where a test suite is assessed in terms of its ability to distinguish a program from its variants (“mutants”). However, work in this area has focussed largely on the mutation of procedural and object-oriented languages. This paper proposes a set of (systematically derived) mutation operators for AgentSpeak.

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AAMAS Conference 2011 Conference Paper

A Formal Framework for Reasoning about Goal Interactions

  • Michael Winikoff

A defining characteristic of intelligent software agents is their ability to flexibly and reliably pursue goals, and many modern agent platforms provide some form of goal construct. However, these platforms are surprisingly naive in their handling of interactions between goals. Whilst previous work has provided mechanisms to identify and react appropriately to various sorts of interactions, it has not provided a framework for reasoning about goal interactions that is generic, extensible, formally described, and that covers a range of interaction types.

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AAMAS Conference 2011 Conference Paper

Agent-Based Container Terminal Optimisation

  • Stephen Cranefield
  • Roger Jarquin
  • Guannan Li
  • Brent Martin
  • Rainer Unland
  • Hanno-Felix Wagner
  • Michael Winikoff
  • Thomas Young

Container terminals play a critical role in international shipping and are under pressure to cope with increasing container traffic. The problem of managing container terminals effectively has a number of characteristics that suggest the use of agent technology would be beneficial. This paper describes a joint industry-university project which has explored the applicability of agent technology to the domain of container terminal management.

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JAAMAS Journal 2011 Journal Article

An agent-oriented approach to change propagation in software maintenance

  • Hoa Khanh Dam
  • Michael Winikoff

Abstract Software maintenance and evolution is a lengthy and expensive phase in the life cycle of a software system. In this paper we focus on the change propagation problem: given a primary change that is made in order to meet a new or changed requirement, what additional, secondary, changes are needed? We propose a novel, agent-oriented, approach that works by repairing violations of desired consistency rules in a design model. Such consistency constraints are specified using the Object Constraint Language (OCL) and the Unified Modelling Language (UML) metamodel, which form the key inputs to our change propagation framework. The underlying change propagation mechanism of our framework is based on the well-known Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent architecture. Our approach represents change options for repairing inconsistencies using event-triggered plans, as is done in BDI agent platforms. This naturally reflects the cascading nature of change propagation, where each change (primary or secondary) can require further changes to be made. We also propose a new method for generating repair plans from OCL consistency constraints. Furthermore, a given inconsistency will typically have a number of repair plans that could be used to restore consistency, and we propose a mechanism for semi-automatically selecting between alternative repair plans. This mechanism, which is based on a notion of cost, takes into account cascades (where fixing the violation of a constraint breaks another constraint), and synergies between constraints (where fixing the violation of a constraint also fixes another violated constraint). Finally, we report on an evaluation of the approach, covering effectiveness, efficiency and scalability.

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AAMAS Conference 2011 Conference Paper

Rich Goal Types in Agent Programming

  • Mehdi Dastani
  • M. Birna van Riemsdijk
  • Michael Winikoff

Goals are central to the design and implementation of intelligent software agents. Much of the literature on goals and reasoning about goals in agent programming frameworks only deals with a limited set of goal types, typically achievement goals, and sometimes maintenance goals. In this paper we extend a previously proposed unifying framework for goals with additional richer goal types that are explicitly represented as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulae. We show that these goal types can be modelled as a combination of achieve and maintain goals. This is done by providing an operationalization of these new goal types, and showing that the operationalization generates computation traces that satisfy the temporal formula.

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ECAI Conference 2010 Conference Paper

A unified interaction-aware goal framework

  • Michael Winikoff
  • Mehdi Dastani
  • M. Birna van Riemsdijk

Goals are central to the design and implementation of intelligent software agents. Much of the literature on goals and reasoning about goals only deals with a limited set of goal types, typically achievement goals, and sometimes maintenance goals; and much of the work on interactions between goals only deals with achievement goals. We aim at extending a previously proposed unifying framework for goals with additional richer goal types, including a combined "achieve and maintain" goal type. We propose to provide an operationalization of these new goal types, proving that the operationalization meets desired properties.

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AAMAS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Cost-Based BDI Plan Selection for Change Propagation

  • Khanh Hoa Dam
  • Michael Winikoff

Software maintenance is responsible for as much as two thirds of the cost of any software, and is consequently an important research area. In this paper we focus on the change propagation problem: given a primary change that is made in order to meet a new or changed requirement, what additional, secondary, changes are needed? We build on previous work that has proposed to use a BDI (belief-desire-intention) agent framework to propagate changes by fixing violations of consistency constraints. One question that needs to be answered as part of this framework is how to select between different applicable (repair) plan instances to fix a given constraint violation? We address this issue by defining a suitable notion of repair plan cost that incorporates both conflict between plans, and synergies between plans. We then develop an algorithm, based on the notion of cost, that finds cheapest options and proposes them to the user.

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AAMAS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Goals in Agent Systems: A Unifying Framework

  • M. Birna van Riemsdijk
  • Mehdi Dastani
  • Michael Winikoff

In the literature on agent systems, the proactive behavior of agents is often modeled in terms of goals that the agents pursue. We review a number of commonly-used existing goal types and propose a simple and general definition of goal, which unifies these goal types. We then give a formal and generic operationalization of goals by defining an abstract goal architecture, which describes the adoption, pursuit, and dropping of goals in a generic way. This operationalization is used to characterize the discussed goal types.

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AAMAS Conference 2007 Conference Paper

AUML Protocols and Code Generation in the Prometheus Design Tool

  • Lin Padgham
  • John Thangarajah
  • Michael Winikoff

Prometheus is an agent-oriented software engineering methodology. The Prometheus Design Tool (PDT) is a software tool that supports a designer who is using the Prometheus methodology. PDT has recently been extended with two significant new features: support for Agent UML interaction protocols, and code generation.

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AAMAS Conference 2007 Conference Paper

Implementing Commitment-Based Interactions

  • Michael Winikoff

Although agent interaction plays a vital role in MAS, and messagecentric approaches to agent interaction have their drawbacks, present agent-oriented programming languages do not provide support for implementing agent interaction that is flexible and robust. Instead, messages are provided as a primitive building block. In this paper we consider one approach for modelling agent interactions: the commitment machines framework. This framework supports modelling interactions at a higher level (using social commitments), resulting in more flexible interactions. We investigate how commitmentbased interactions can be implemented in conventional agent-oriented programming languages. The contributions of this paper are: a mapping from a commitment machine to a collection of BDI-style plans; extensions to the semantics of BDI programming languages; and an examination of two issues that arise when distributing commitment machines (turn management and race conditions) and solutions to these problems.

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EAAI Journal 2005 Journal Article

Adding debugging support to the Prometheus methodology

  • Lin Padgham
  • Michael Winikoff
  • David Poutakidis

This paper describes a debugger which uses the design artifacts of the Prometheus agent-oriented software engineering methodology to alert the developer testing the system, that a specification has been violated. Detailed information is provided regarding the error which can help the developer in locating its source. Interaction protocols specified during design, are converted to executable Petri net representations. The system can then be monitored at run time to identify situations which do not conform to specified protocols. A process for monitoring aspects of plan selection is also described. The paper then describes the Prometheus Design Tool, developed to support the Prometheus methodology, and presents a vision of an integrated development environment providing full life cycle support for the development of agent systems. The initial part of the paper provides a detailed summary of the Prometheus methodology and the artifacts on which the debugger is based.

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IJCAI Conference 2003 Conference Paper

Detecting & Avoiding Interference Between Goals in Intelligent Agents

  • John Thangarajah
  • Lin Padgham
  • Michael Winikoff

Pro-active agents typically have multiple simultaneous goals. These may interact with each other both positively and negatively. In this paper we provide a mechanism allowing agents to detect and avoid a particular kind of negative interaction where the effects of one goal undo conditions that must be protected for successful pursuit of another goal. In order to detect such interactions we maintain summary information about the definite and potential conditional requirements and resulting effects of goals and their associated plans. We use these summaries to guard protected conditions by scheduling the execution of goals and plan steps. The algorithms and data structures developed allow agents to act rationally instead of blindly pursuing goals that will conflict.

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