Agent and multi-agent applications to support distributed communities of practice: a short review

Abstract

This paper concerns the relationship between agents or multi-agent systems and distributed communities of practice. It presents a review of a number of agent and multiagent applications with features that could contribute to supporting distributed communities of practice. The association is promising because of features like autonomy, pro-activity, flexibility or ability to integrate systems that characterize agents and multi-agent systems. Furthermore, such an association is a step towards building mixed communities of humans and artificial agents. To understand how agents and multi-agent systems could answer some of the needs of distributed communities of practice, we organize the analyzed applications into five different categories defined by considering the main activities of a community, namely: Individual Participation, Synchronous Interactions, Asynchronous Interactions, Publishing and Community Cultivation. Such a classification helps us identify the relevant features of the current technology and determine some that should be further developed, e.g. to support community coordination or gather information related to virtual communities. For each application we selected, we present its main approach and point out its potential interest.

Towards adaptive normative systems for communities of agents

“…The evolving notion of communities of practice has been surveyed on different stages of development: individual participation, synchronous interactions, asynchronous interactions, publishing, community cultivation [19]. One of their conclusion was that the association between multi-agent technologies ant the distributed communities of practice has the potential to bear fruits that could affect, in the long term, the way humans and artificial agents interact [19].…”

“…One of their conclusion was that the association between multi-agent technologies ant the distributed communities of practice has the potential to bear fruits that could affect, in the long term, the way humans and artificial agents interact [19]. We consider in this paper how normative agents could improve the interaction within such communities, but based on norms.…”

“…With agent applications for supporting communities of practice many features already available have been revealed [19], among which community cultivation. Still, the potential of agent technology is expected to contribute to bear fruits affecting the way humans and agents interact.…”

信息系统功能增强的多活性代理方法研究

“…文献 [1 ∼ 3] 根据活性自组织机理的充要条件或完备必要条件集丧失的可能性来表征代理 "活性", 而活性的大小的描述是多活性代理理论的重要研究内容之一, 本节从如下两个方面给出活性大小的度 量与表示: 一方面结合香农信息量的定义 [9,10] , 提出了 "活性度" 的概念及其表征; 另一方面从系统功 能层次整体上给出了活性度的表征与描述方法.…”

Research on Quality Grade Classification Method of Daily-use Porcelain Based on Multi-agent Technology

“…In this paper, multi-agent alliance network structure was used to analyze data, a small multi-agent alliance network used for detection and classification is rebuilt on the basis of the fully multi-agent network structure of ceramic production process control system [5][6][7][8]. When the multi-agent alliance network detects and classifies ceramic products, an agent begins to interact with other agents.…”