The allocation of resources within a system of autonomous agents, that not only have preferences over alternative allocations of resources but also actively participate in computing an allocation, is an exciting area of research at the interface of Computer Science and Economics. This paper is a survey of some of the most salient issues in Multiagent Resource Allocation. In particular, we review various languages to represent the preferences of agents over alternative allocations of resources as well as different measures of social welfare to assess the overall quality of an allocation. We also discuss pertinent issues regarding allocation procedures and present important complexity results. Our presentation of theoretical issues is complemented by a discussion of software packages for the simulation of agent-based market places. We also introduce four major application areas for Multiagent Resource Allocation, namely industrial procurement, sharing of satellite resources, manufacturing control, and grid computing.

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Ideally, open multi-agent systems (MAS) involve heterogeneous and autonomous agents whose interactions ought to conform to some shared conventions. The challenge is how to express and enforce such conditions so that truly autonomous agents can adscribe to them. One way of addressing this issue is to look at MAS as environments regulated by some sort of normative framework. There have been significant contributions to the formal aspects of such normative frameworks, but there are few proposals that have made them operational. In this paper a possible step towards closing that gap is suggested. A normative language is introduced which is expressive enough to represent the familiar types of MAS-inspired normative frameworks; its implementation in JESS is also shown. This proposal is aimed at adding flexibility and generality to electronic institutions by extending their deontic components through richer types of norms that can still be enforced on-line.

Most normative systems make use of explicit representations of norms (namely, obligations, prohibitions, and permissions) and associated mechanisms to support the self-regulation of open societies of self-interested and autonomous agents. A key problem in research on normative systems is that of how to synthesise effective and efficient norms. Manually designing norms is time consuming and error prone. An alternative is to automatically synthesise norms. However, norm synthesis is a computationally complex problem. We present a novel online norm synthesis mechanism, designed to synthesise compact normative systems. It yields normative systems composed of concise (simple) norms that effectively coordinate a multiagent system (MAS) without lapsing into overregulation. Our mechanism is based on a central authority that monitors a MAS, searching for undesired states. After detecting undesirable states, the central authority then synthesises norms aimed to avoid them in the future. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through experimental results.

Abstract.We study Normative Temporal Logic (ntl), a formalism intended for reasoning about the temporal properties of normative systems. ntl is a generalisation of the well-known branching-time temporal logic ctl, in which the path quantifiers A ("on all paths. . . ") and E ("on some path. . . ") are replaced by the indexed deontic operators Oη ("it is obligatory in the context of the normative system η that . . . ") and Pη ("it is permissible in the context of the normative system η that. . . "). After introducing the logic, we give a sound and complete axiomatisation. We then present a symbolic representation language for normative systems, and we identify four different model checking problems, corresponding to whether or not a model is represented symbolically or explicitly, and whether or not we are given a concrete interpretation for the normative systems named in formulae to be model checked. We show that the complexity of model checking varies from p-complete in the simplest case (explicit state model checking where we are given a specific interpretation for all normative systems in the formula) up to exptime-hard in the worst case (symbolic model checking, no interpretation given). We present examples to illustrate the use of ntl, and conclude with discussions of related work (in particular, the relationship of ntl to other deontic logics), and some issues for future work.