SURVEY OF MULTIAGENT SYSTEM

NAME: MUHAMMAD USMAN ALI

Reg. No.: L1S17MSEE0019
 Survey of Multi Agent Systems.
Muhammad Usman Ali1
1
Electrical Engineering Department,
University of Central Punjab,
Lahore, Pakistan.
1
engr.usman62@gmail.com

Abstract—Multi Agent Systems (MASs) is a mean used to solve the difficult problems by dividing them into
small parts. It’s been in the attention of students from different field of lines like Electrical, Civil and Computer
science etc. Each task assigned to independent entity, which are called agents. That agent had to decide a action
which is best for solving the task by using multiple inputs. Multiple applications in the world had been founded
MASs which are smart grids, more complex problems and different kind of networks in computers. On one side
MASs had a large number of applicability still on the other side it had to face many challenges. This paper is
expected to be a detailed note on MASs for researchers of this field.

Keywords— MAS (Multi Agent Systems), MAS applications.

I. INTRODUCTION
In a past couple of years DAI: Distributed - Artificial
Intelligence had gain an attention of large number of
researchers due its very complex problems [1]. Its
algorithms had been divided into three parts: Parallel
Artificial Intelligence (PAI), Distributed Problem
Solving (DPS) & Multi Agent Systems (MASs). PAI
includes construction of parallel algorithms their
languages and their architectures to enhance the
efficiency of its algorithms. DPS includes the division
of a main task into the sub tasks in which each is
assigned to a node with the sets of neighboring nodes
which are called the computing entities. These identities
limits the flexibilities by having their resources and
shared knowledge. The main focus in this paper is on
MAS which contains the independent entity called
agent. Agents communicates along with their neighbors
agents to learn the new actions and strategies. These
agents used their knowledge to solve the assigned task Figure 1. Paper Overview.
by performing the different kind of actions on
environments. This capability of MAS makes it a
suitable and very important tool to solve the complex
II. AGENT INTRODUCTION
problems of different fields include civil & electrical
engineering etc. In order to develop MAS a wide range Russell et al. [8] define the agent as: “A flexible
of addressing is required of difficult challenges like autonomous entity capable of perceiving the
coordination among agents [2], learning [1] & security environment through the sensors connected to it.''. It is
[1]. defined by a different way in [3] as: “An encapsulated
Agents can be implemented on many disciplines like computational system that is situated in some
Electrical & Civil engineering etc. So a detailed field environment and this is capable of flexible, autonomous
study is required of the concepts of MAS. action in that environment in order to meet its design
objective.'' These are the different definitions of
different researchers we defined it as:
Agent: An entity which is placed in an environment and
senses different parameters that are used to make a
decision based on the goal of the entity. The entity
performs the necessary action on the environment based
on this decision.
In the above definition four words are used whose
description are as follows:
1. Entity:
It belongs to the agent type. Agent can be different
things it can be a software, its can any electrical
parameter it can be a robot etc.
2. Environment:
The location of the agent is environment. Now this
environment can be anything it can be a network is case
of computer systems. The different features of
environment can affect the complexity of agent based
system [1]:
 Accessibility:
The accuracy/perfectness by which the agents from the
environment sense the data. If the environment is
accessible it means the data sensed by agent is up to date
and accurate. Vice versa is same, if the environment is
inaccessible then the data sensed will not be an accurate
or up to date data.
 Determinism:
Determinism states to the expectedness of the outcome
of an action. If the environment is deterministic it
means the outcome will be predictable. Similarly vice
versa if the environment is non deterministic the result
of an action will not be predictable.
 Dynamism:
Dynamism bring up to the variations that happen in the
environment that are self-determining of the actions
taken by the agent. Environment can be static if changes
in environment only occurs as the significance of the act
of agents. And in the remaining cases it will be
dynamic. When the environment variates, the formerly
sensed information may not be longer precise.
 Continuity:
It refers to the discreetness and continuity of the
environment of the agent. In contrast two this MAS is
categorized in two: discrete & continuous. If the
environment is continuous it then through a continuous
function it affects the state of an agent. If the
environment is discrete, it forces the agent to go in to a
set of encoded states.
3. Parameters:
Agent sense different type of data from the environment
which are called parameters. For example if a robot is
moving then its parameters are its velocity and position.
4. Entity:
Every agent can execute an action that can cause the change
in environment. This agent can perform two types of action it
can be discrete or continuous. I case of continuous agent can
perform the infinite actions. Where as in discrete agent can
perform only a finite number of actions.
The main objective of each agent is to solve the task that is
assigned to it. To achieve this goal first of all agent sense all
the parameters from the environment. By using this data
agent can analyze the environment better. Agent can also use
the information from its neighbor agents. The figure 2
describes the structure of an agent.
Figure 2: Agent Structure
Following are the features that gives agent the
capability to solve the most complex problems [4], [5].
 Sociability:
As information request agents can share their
knowledge in order to enhance their performance in
reaching the goal.
 Autonomy:
Independently every agent can make its own decisions
and can take the suitable action.
 Proactivity:
Using the history of agent it can predict the possible
actions of future.
Agent can take its actions independently, the real
advantage is that the agents can share the information
with one another and can take its future actions. These
agents together can solve the complex tasks and
problems. This is called Multi Agent Systems (MAS).
III. MULTI AGENT SYSTEMS (MAS)
The main features of MAS include that it had a very low
lost, they are more reliable and they are more flexible.
These properties make it a very effective solution to
solve the complex tasks. In this a complex task is sub
divided into small tasks. And to each task an agent will
be assigned [13].
MAS agents usually have an incomplete information
the main thing is that agents communicate with each
other. It reduces the communication overhead in return
it confirms the scalability but the overheads remain low
as the quantity of agents increase. For locating an agent
in order to minimize the outlined overhead, mainly for
a larger scale MAS, the concept of middle agent is used.
Middle agents can be categorized as:
 Facilitator:
The implementation of a facilitator is shown is figure 3
(a). This facilitator plays a role of a mediocre between
the agent which is sending the request known as
requester and the agent that is giving the service known
as requestee. The facilitator courses the request to the
suitable agent. The reaction is sent back to the facilitator
which communicates it to the requester. As is obvious
that facilitator had become a bottleneck and a potential
single point of failure [6]. To reimburse the effects of a
central facilitator, numerous cooperative facilitators are
employed to answer to the requests [7]. This method
needs the facilitators to communicate to remain
coordinated and balance the load.
Figure 3: Implementation of (a) Facilitator (b)
Mediator.
 Mediator:
This employment varies from the above in that the
requester and requester agents can communicate
directly with each other as shown in Figure 3b. This
reduces the load on the mediator agent as compared to
the facilitator employment.
A. MAS Features:
Following seven important features of MAS had been
outlined and discuss the different categorizations that
arise while considering each feature. Table 1 shows a
summary of these features.
Table 1: MAS features.
B. Distinguishing MAS with Alike systems:
Wooldridge [1], Zhao et al. [9], and Sadeghi et al. [10]
compared MAS with expert systems and object-
oriented programming language, two concepts that also
involve decision-making and knowledge sharing. An
expert system detects the environment and learns the
knowledge, then makes a decision on Wooldridge [1],
Zhao et al. [11], and Sadeghi et al. [12] compared the
MFA to expert systems and an object-oriented
programming language, two concepts that also involve
decision-making and knowledge sharing. An expert
system detects environment and learn knowledge, then
make a decision. Solving a task Unlike MAS, where
each agent can communicate with any other agent, an
expert system can communicate and exchange data with
predefined entities. Although both the MAS and the
expert systems use a decision-making function, the
input is different, which affects the original decision. In
an expert system, the decision is based on the collected
environmental data and on the knowledge of the expert
system, while an agent also uses his goal. According to
the decision,
 Table 2: A study on the differences of MAS with
expert systems and object-oriented programming.
Figure 4: MAS Summary application
An expert system advises a controller to perform an
action. The controller can reject the decision of the
expert system, since it is a separate system that also uses
other inputs. However, an agent acts directly on the
environment after making a decision.
IV. MAS APPLICATION
In this section, we present a taxonomy of MAS
applications based on a vast discipline: i) Computer
networks (VAT section), ii) Robotics (section IV-B),
iii) Modeling (section IVC), iv) Cities and built
environments section IV-D), and v) smart grids (section
IV-E). A summary of these applications is described in
Figure 4.
A. Cloud Computing
The difficulty in the networks of computers
meaningfully grows because of the appearance of latest
technologies. This difficulty is removed by the help of
these agents. MAS is further divided into the four
different categories:
1) Cloud Computing [12].
2) Social Networking [13].
3) Security [14].
4) Routing [15].
B. Agents in Robotics
Hardware agents mention to the corporal hardware that
builds up the robot, whereas the agents of software are
the decision makers, path planners, task managers and
communicating agents. The hardware agents uses the
different type of sensors like cameras, to seizure
pictures of the environment. The groups of agents had
been made into the teams. Now these teams works on
their experience. Strengthening knowledge is used
sideways with the Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNN)
to rise the correctness of final decision made by an
agent.
C. Agents for modelling complex systems
It is expensive and suffers important processing
overhead because of the need for powerful modeling
platforms and huge difficulty. ABM: Agent Based
Modeling [17] a low-cost and inferior source resolution
for modeling complex systems.
V. MAS CHALLENGES
MAS is facing many challenges including localization,
task allocation, fault detection, learning, security,
organization and coordination control. Coordination
control includes consensus, controllability,
synchronization, connectivity and formation [18].
VI. AGENT COMMUNICATION
There are three approaches that used in agent
communication:
 Speech act: An agent can perform as a speaker
(S) that can produce utterance to change the
views of the hearer (H).
 Message passing: Agents directly message to
each other in this method as shown in figure 5.
The agents use point to point which can be
called as broadcast communication to talk to
other agents.
Figure 5: Broadcast communication.
 Blackboard: the agents shared the data with a
common blackboard as shown in figure 6. All
the agents store the data in a common
blackboard which other agents can easily
access. Each agent can access data of multiple
agents from blackboard [19].
Figure6: Blackboard communication.
VII. MODELLING & SIMULATION FOR AGENT
BASED SYSTEMS
This section consist of multiple modeling and
assessment methods which are used to examine the
performance metrics, which differently dependent on
the MAS application and goal, of the calculated agent-
based system associated to the state-of-the-art [20]. In
the following we outline three fundamental evaluation
methods:
 JADE: Java agent development framework in
one of the most widely used simulation
methods. It is Java based and paybacks from
third-party libraries. It is a standard based on
written FIPA. It also supports the simulating
distributed system. It has a graphical interface
of for designing MAS. It hides the complexity
of MAS from the designers. It is also an open
source. It can also be linked to the simulation
software MATLAB.
 GAMA: It is also a platform for simulation for
the systems which are agent based systems. In
any kind of application it can simulate the
MAS. It also supports the GAML, which is a
high level language which can be used to
simulate the MAS.
 MATLAB: When it is related to complex
mathematical evaluation it is used to study the
MAS performance. MATLAB can also be
linked with JADE for further analysis of MAS.
 Mathematical Analysis: This mathematical
analysis is also used to evaluate MAS.
Table 2: Summary of MAS simulator.
The methods are specially designed to evaluate the
MAS. Because of the wide application the evaluation
methods can be engaged to assess the performance of
the agent based systems.
 [11] A. P. Garcia, J. Oliver, and D. Gosch, ``An intelligent
agent-based distributed architecture for smart-grid integrated
network management,'' in Proc. IEEE 35th Conf. Local
VIII. SUMMARY Comput. Netw. (LCN), Oct. 2010, pp. 1013_1018.
In this survey, a high-level inclusive discussion is [12] S. D. J. McArthur et al., ``Multi-agent systems for power
engineering applications_Part I: Concepts, approaches, and
proposed concerning miscellaneous features of MAS
technical challenges,'' IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 22, no.
which benefits the newcomers to grip and clear the 4, pp. 1743_1752, Nov. 2007.
basic concepts of MAS, study the latest applications in [13] H. Rezaee and F. Abdollahi, ``Average consensus over
numerous disciplines, the challenges in developing high-order multiagent systems,'' IEEE Trans. Autom. Control,
MAS, and the different methods to analyses the vol. 60, no. 11, pp. 3047_3052, Nov. 2015.
performance of MAS. Firstly MAS, agents and their [14] L. Ma, H. Min, S. Wang, Y. Liu, and S. Liao, ``An
key features are defined. Then the main challenges and overview of research in distributed attitude coordination
applications were discussed while presenting references control,'' IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica,
for the studies. Then, communications among the vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 121_133, Apr. 2015.
agents was discussed and the paper is concluded by a [15] J. Qi, R. Vazquez, and M. Krstic, ``Multi-agent
deployment in 3-D via PDE control,'' IEEE Trans. Autom.
conversation on evaluation methods to analyze the
Control, vol. 60, no. 4, pp. 891_906, Apr. 2015.
effectiveness of an MAS agent-based system. [16] R. Merris, ``Laplacian matrices of graphs: A survey,''
Linear Algebra
REFERENCES Appl., vols. 197_198, pp. 143_176, Jan./Feb. 1994.
[17] C. Godsil and G. F. Royle, Algebraic Graph Theory, vol.
207. Springer,
[1] M. Wooldridge, An Introduction to Multiagent Systems. 2013
New York, NY, [18] H. F. Ahmad, ``Multi-agent systems: Overview of a new
USA: Wiley, 2009. paradigm for distributed systems,'' in Proc. 7th IEEE Int.
[2] A. H. Bond and L. Gasser, Readings in Distributed Symp. High Assurance Syst. Eng., Oct. 2002, pp. 101_107.
Arti_cial Intelligence. San Mateo, CA, USA: Morgan [19] Q. Liu, L. Gao, and P. Lou, ``Resource management
Kaufmann, 2014. based on multiagent technology for cloud manufacturing,'' in
[3] S. Shamshirband, N. B. Anuar, M. L. M. Kiah, and A. Proc. Int. Conf. Electron., Commun. Control (ICECC), Sep.
Patel, ``An appraisal and design of a multi-agent system 2011, pp. 2821_2824.
based cooperative wireless intrusion detection computational [20] F. M. Al-Shrouf, ``Facilitator agent design pattern of
intelligence technique,'' Eng. Appl. Artif. Intell., vol. 26, no. procurement business systems,'' in Proc. 32nd Annu. IEEE
9, pp. 2105_2127, 2013. Int. Comput. Softw. Appl. (COMPSAC), Aug. 2008, pp.
[4] A.-M. Zou, K. D. Kumar, and Z.-G. Hou, ``Distributed 505_510.
consensus control for multi-agent systems using terminal
sliding mode and Chebyshev neural networks,'' Int. J. Robust
Nonlinear Control, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 334_357, Feb. 2013.
[5] M. H. Bowling, ``Convergence and no-regret in
multiagent learning,'' in Proc. NIPS, 2004, pp. 209_216.
[6] A. Zidan et al., ``Fault detection, isolation, and service
restoration in distribution systems: State-of-the-art and future
trends,'' IEEE Trans. Smart Grid, vol. 8, no. 5, pp. 2170_2185,
Sep. 2016.
[7] P. Balaji and D. Srinivasan, ``An introduction to multi-
agent systems,'' in Innovations in Multi-Agent Systems and
Applications. Berlin, Germany: Springer, 2010, pp. 1_27.
[8] S. Russell and P. Norvig, Arti_cial Intelligence: A
Modern Approach,
vol. 25. Egnlewood Cliffs, NJ, USA: Prentice-Hall, 1995, p.
27.
[9] L. C. Jain and D. Srinivasan, Innovations in Multi-Agent
Systems and Application. Springer, 2010.
[10] D. Ye, M. Zhang, and A. V. Vasilakos, ``A survey of
self-organization mechanisms in multiagent systems,'' IEEE
Trans. Syst., Man, Cybern., Syst., vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 441_461,
Mar. 2017.