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represent and know the individual interests and capabilities of all members, and
incorporate them into communication with outside agents. The delegate is also
commonly referred to as a broker, facilitator, or mediator. Again, federation is
a common style to handle subsystem interoperability by adding an extra agent
with the delegate role. The natural disadvantage is, of course, that the delegate
will become a candidate for bottlenecks and a single point of failure.
10.7
Markets
Markets are based on the producer versus consumer or buyer versus seller agents
principle, where one group of agents (buying or consumers) places bids on shared
resources, tasks, or services (the producers or sellers) and the best incoming offer
will be chosen. In a market, agents are designed to be competitive, with the
potential risk of malicious behavior among the agents, but fairness could also
be increased by repeated bidding. The market style is very common for manu-
facturing systems, as it is rather easy to set up a price calculation function that
contains all the relevant factors to prioritize a task, such a deadline, processing
time, competences of staff, and similarity with previous items.
10.8
Matrix
A matrix organization is also a common construct in human organizations, where
the
worker
agents might have several relationships to different groups or man-
agers. The style is appropriate for project organizations, where the workers belong
to different functional groups but at least part time participate in projects led by
other managers. The disadvantage is, of course, the potential risk of conflicts,
where a worker agent has more managers, but the advantage is that capabilities
of the agents can be shared and benefit several places.
11
CASE STUDY 1: BAGGAGE HANDLING SYSTEM (BHS)
It might be clear from the previous sections that multiagent systems span different
dimensions on how to classify the system, and in most cases the systems are
hybrids, where some part of the system might contain highly cognitive agents
that communication a lot as part of their reasoning process, while other parts of
the system use simple reactive agents that might solve more trivial tasks.
The two real-life examples that will be presented in this chapter well represent
(for real applications) extremes in the space of these dimensions. The baggage
handling system, which will be described first, is a complex system of many
collaborating and negotiating agents with a cognitive behavior, where the actions
of the individual agent are highly dependent on the results of communication with
other agents in the systems.
Handling of baggage in airports is shadowed by matters of complexity and
uncertainty from the perspective of most passengers, similar to all other issues
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