Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) represent troublesome and potentially fatal side effects of medication treatment. To address the burden induced by ADRs, a preventive approach is necessary whereby clinicians are provided with new data-driven decision-support systems to foresee the factors leading to ADRs and plan precautionary activities effectively. We develop a multi-agent system which monitors the factors leading to the onset of ADRs using information found in the patient records in a hospital setting. The system uses a fuzzy rule-based reasoning engine utilising decision rules developed by clinicians. We evaluate the ability of the framework to identify the cause of ADRs from patient records in a case study involving records of metal health patients. Our work is the first preventive agent-based aid tool.

User profiles have an important role in multi-agent recommender systems. The information stored in them improves the system's generated recommendations. Multi-agent recommender systems learn from previous recommendations to update users' profiles and improving next recommendations according to the user feedback. However, when the user does not evaluate the recommendations the system may deliver poor recommendations in the future. This paper presents a mechanism that explores user information from social networks to update the user profile and to generate implicit evaluations on behalf of the user. The mechanism was validated with travel packages recommendations and some preliminary results illustrate how user information gathered from social networks may help to improve recommendations in multi-agent recommender systems.

Construction of agent based model systems is often difficult considering the dynamic and complex nature of real world problems and various implicit factors affecting their behavior. This presents a problem in building accurate and valid systems for use as decision support tools. In this paper, we present an approach for handling some of these factors, specifically acceptance rate, retention rate and social influence, and enable simulated social agent models to evolve in a dynamic environment.The objective is to achieve a more reliable behavior and outcome for the agents in the simulation, despite unpredictable environmental changes. The agents’ knowledge, in terms of their observed responses to the environment and corresponding outcomes, is captured in a semantic tree. A metric is used to detect changes in the environment and the threshold of response of the agent, thereby triggering the agent to adapt its decision tree to maintain a reasonable response beyond its historical knowledge. The results reveal the ability of agents to detect changes in the environment more quickly and with better accuracy, using a case study, and as a result learn to adapt by modifying their decision tree under the influence of considered factors.

The aim of the special track is to bring researchers from related but still separated areas of robotics and artificial intelligence together to study how high-level AI techniques such as action planning and knowledge representation may help in increasing capabilities of robotic systems.

Efficient collaborative decision making is an important challenge for multiagent systems. Finding optimal joint actions is especially challenging when each agent has only imperfect information about the state of its environment. Such problems can be modeled as collaborative Bayesian games in which each agent receives private information in the form of its type. However, representing and solving such games requires space and computation time exponential in the number of agents. This article introduces collaborative graphical Bayesian games (CGBGs), which facilitate more efficient collaborative decision making by decomposing the global payoff function as the sum of local payoff functions that depend on only a few agents. We propose a framework for the efficient solution of CGBGs based on the insight that they posses two different types of independence, which we call agent independence and type independence. In particular, we present a factor graph representation that captures both forms of independence and thus enables efficient solutions. In addition, we show how this representation can provide leverage in sequential tasks by using it to construct a novel method for decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes. Experimental results in both random and benchmark tasks demonstrate the improved scalability of our methods compared to several existing alternatives.

We propose a timed and soft extension of Concurrent Constraint Programming. The time extension is based on the hypothesis of bounded asynchrony: the computation takes a bounded period of time and is measured by a discrete global clock. Action prefixing is then considered as the syntactic marker which distinguishes a time instant from the next one. Supported by soft constraints instead of crisp ones, tell and ask agents are now equipped with a preference (or consistency) threshold which is used to determine their success or suspension. In the paper we provide a language to describe the agents behavior, together with its operational and denotational semantics, for which we also prove the compositionality and correctness properties. After presenting a semantics using maximal parallelism of actions, we also describe a version for their interleaving on a single processor (with maximal parallelism for time elapsing). Coordinating agents that need to take decisions both on preference values and time events may benefit from this language. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

The intent of this research is to generate a set of non-dominated policies from which one of two agents (the leader) can select a most preferred policy to control a dynamic system that is also affected by the control decisions of the other agent (the follower). The problem is described by an infinite horizon, partially observed Markov game (POMG). At each decision epoch, each agent knows: its past and present states, its past actions, and noise corrupted observations of the other agent's past and present states. The actions of each agent are determined at each decision epoch based on these data. The leader considers multiple objectives in selecting its policy. The follower considers a single objective in selecting its policy with complete knowledge of and in response to the policy selected by the leader. This leader-follower assumption allows the POMG to be transformed into a specially structured, partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP). This POMDP is used to determine the follower's best response policy. A multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) is used to create the next generation of leader policies based on the fitness measures of each leader policy in the current generation. Computing a fitness measure for a leader policy requires a value determination calculation, given the leader policy and the follower's best response policy. The policies from which the leader can select a most preferred policy are the non-dominated policies of the final generation of leader policies created by the MOGA. An example is presented that illustrates how these results can be used to support a manager of a liquid egg production process (the leader) in selecting a sequence of actions to best control this process over time, given that there is an attacker (the follower) who seeks to contaminate the liquid egg production process with a chemical or biological toxin.

This article focuses on the problem of patterns of life (POL), which emerge from human social systems. It describes conflicting requirements for this problem and potential AI solutions.

Judgment aggregation is a mathematical theory of collective decision-making. It concerns the methods whereby individual opinions about logically interconnected issues of interest can, or cannot, be aggregated into one collective stance. Aggregation problems have traditionally been of interest for disciplines like economics and the political sciences, as well as philosophy, where judgment aggregation itself originates from, but have recently captured the attention of disciplines like computer science, artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. Judgment aggregation has emerged in the last decade as a unifying paradigm for the formalization and understanding of aggregation problems. Still, no comprehensive presentation of the theory is available to date.

Mechanism design is considered in the context of fair allocations of indivisible goods with monetary compensation, by focusing on problems where agents' declarations on allocated goods can be verified before payments are performed. A setting is considered where verification might be subject to errors, so that payments have to be awarded under the presumption of innocence, as incorrect declared values do not necessarily mean manipulation attempts by the agents. Within this setting, a mechanism is designed that is shown to be truthful, efficient, and budget-balanced. Moreover, agents' utilities are fairly determined by the Shapley value of suitable coalitional games, and enjoy highly desirable properties such as equal treatment of equals, envy-freeness, and a stronger one called individual-optimality. In particular, the latter property guarantees that, for every agent, her/his utility is the maximum possible one over any alternative optimal allocation. The computational complexity of the proposed mechanism is also studied. It turns out that it is #P-complete so that, to deal with applications with many agents involved, two polynomial-time randomized variants are also proposed: one that is still truthful and efficient, and which is approximately budget-balanced with high probability, and another one that is truthful in expectation, while still budget-balanced and efficient.