CPSC 631 - Programming Environments in AI:
Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Fall 2007
Professor: Dr. Thomas R. Ioerger
Office: 322C Bright Bldg.
Phone: 845-0161
email: ioerger@cs.tamu.edu
office hours: make appointment by email
Meeting: Tues/Thurs, 3:55-5:10, 104 Bright
Course Web Page: http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/ioerger/cs631-fall07/index.html
Prerequisites: CPSC 625 (Artificial Intelligence) - or an equivalent AI course as an undergrad
Textbooks
The textbook used in the course (which will be liberally supplemented with papers from the literature) will be:
Wooldridge, M. (2002). An Introduction to Multiagent Systems. Wiley.
Other good textbooks on agents:
- Ferber, J. (1999). Multi-Agent Systems. Addison-Wesley.
- Weiss, G. (1999). Multi-Agent Systems. MIT Press.
- Bradshaw, G. (1997). Software Agents. AAAI Press.
- Huhns, M. and Singh, P. (1998). Reading in Agents. Morgan Kaufmann.
- Wooldridge, M. and Rao, A. (1999). Foundations of Rational Agency. Applied Logic Series, Vol. 14, Kluwer.
- Wooldridge, M. (2000). Reasoning about Rational Agents. MIT Press.
Grading
The course will be primarily project-based, and grades will be based
on the quality of the projects implemented.
Goals of this Course
To learn about extended topics in AI, with a focus on intelligent agents.
Specifically, we will cover the following major topics/perspectives:
- Agents: characteristics, environments, and architectures
- Reactive Agents
- Knowledge-based agents
- Planning and Agents
- BDI Architecture (intentions and beliefs)
- Agent Communication Languages and Protocols (e.g. KQML)
- Utility-based Agents, Decision Theory (e.g. Markov Decision Processes)
- Multi-Agent Systems and Cooperative Behavior
- PGP - partial-global plans and plan interleaving
- contract nets
- DCSP - distributed constraint satisfaction algorithms
- negotiation
- auctions
- voting
- coalition formation
- teamwork
Schedule:
Tues, Sep 4: Agent characteristics, environments, and applications
Thurs, Sep 6: Agent architectures; read Ch 1-2 in Wooldridge, Ch. 2 in Russell and Norvig
Tues, Sep 11: read Ch. 3 in Wooldridge; knowledge-based agents; example of decision-making in Prolog
Thurs, Sep 13: read AOP (Shoham, 1990); discussed epistemic and temporal logics and their role in decision-making
Tues, Sep 18: practical reasoning, planning, and intentions in agents
Thurs, Sep 20: Planning
Tues, Sep 25: (class cancelled)
Thurs, Sep 27: BDI and modal logic; read Ch 12 in Wooldridge
Tues, Oct 2: Rao and Georgeff (1991)
Thurs, Oct 4: Cohen and Levesque (1990)
Tues, Oct 9: MDP's, read Ch. 17 from Russell and Norvig; also read Ch. 6 from Wooldridge
Thurs, Oct 11: example of solving an MDP using value iteration, policy iteration, and linear programming
Tues, Oct 16: games, strategies, and equilibria
Thurs, Oct 18: auctions
Tues, Oct 21: negotiation
Thurs, Oct 23:
Tues, Oct 30: contract nets (Smith, 1980)
Thurs, Nov 1: bidding with marginal-costs (Sandholm, 1993), leveled commitments
(Sandholm and Lesser, 2002)
Tues, Nov 6: project 1 demos!
Thurs, Nov 8: partial global planning,
Durfee
and Lesser (1987),
Ephrati and Rosenschein (1994)
Tues, Nov 13:
Reinforcement Learning: A Survey. Kaelbling, Littman, and Moore
(1996).
Thurs, Nov 15: coalition formation; (Rosenschein and Zlotkin, 1994)
Tues, Nov 20: (Shehory and Kraus, 1995)
Thurs, Nov 22: (Thanksgiving)
Tues, Nov 27: DCSP (Yokoo and Durfee, 1998)
Thurs, Nov 29: voting
Tues, Dec 4: ???
References
- Agent-Oriented Programming (Yoav Shoham, 1993)
- The Model-Checker SPIN (Holzmann, 1997) - a nice overview with examples
- A Survey of Concurrent METATEM (Fisher, 1994) - a nice overview with examples
- Model Checking (Clarke and Schlingloff, 2001) - the ultimate review of model checking for temporal logics
- Bratman, Israel, and Pollock (1988)
- Ingrand et al (1992) - IEEE Expert, Ingrand et al (1996) - ICRA
- Rao and Georgeff (1991)
- Cohen and Levesque (1990)
- (Durfee and Lesser, 1991)
- (Yokoo and Durfee, 1998)
- KQML, COOL
- Smith, Reid G. 1980. The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communicaation and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver. IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-29(12), 1104--1113.
- Rao and Georgeff (1995)
- E. Ephrati and J. S. Rosenschein. The clarke tax as a consensus mechanism among automated agents. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 173--178, San Jose, California, July 1991.
- Zlotkin, G., and Rosenschein, J. S., "Coalition, Cryptography, And Stability: Mechanisms For Coalition Formation In Task Oriented Domains", Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 432-437, 1994.
- O. Shehory and S. Kraus. Task allocation via coalition formation among autonomous agents. In Proceedings of IJCAI'95, pages 655--661, 1995.
- M. Tambe. Towards flexible teamwork. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 7:83--124, 1997.
- Makoto Yokoo and Edmund H. Durfee. The distributed constraint satisfaction problem: Formalization and algorithms. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 10(5), 1998.
- A. Rao and M. Georgeff, "Modeling rational agents within a BDI architecture," Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Cambridge, MA, 1991, pp. 473-484.
- Durfee,
E. H., and Lesser V. R. (1991). Partial Global Planning: A
Coordination Framework for Distributed Hypothesis Formation, IEEE
Trans. Syst. Man and Cyber. SMC-21(5) pp 1167-1183.
- E. H. Durfee
and V.R. Lesser (1987). Using partial global plans to coordinate
distributed problem solvers. In Proceedings of the Tenth International
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-87), pages 875-883.
- VSK logic
- Communicative Actions
- Sandholm, T. and Lesser, V. (2002). Leveled commitment contracting: A backtracking instrument for multiagent systems. AI Magazine, 23(3):89--100.
-
Ephrati E., Rosenschein J.S. (1994). Divide and conquer in
multiagent planning. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth National
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'94), pages 375-380.
Links