Pubblicazioni

National journals

Marco Alberti and Federico Chesani. The computational behaviour of the SCIFF abductive proof procedure and the SOCS-SI system. Intelligenza Artificiale, II(3):45-51, September 2005.

The high computational cost of abduction has limited the application of this powerful and expressive formalism to practical cases.

SCIFF is an abductive proof procedure used for verifying the compliance of agent behaviour to interaction protocols in multi-agent systems; SCIFF has been integrated in SOCS-SI, a system able to observe the agent interaction, pass it to SCIFF for the reasoning process and to display in a GUI the results of the SCIFF computation.

In order to assess the applicability of SCIFF and SOCS-SI to practical cases, we have evaluated qualitatively and experimentally (not yet formally) their computational behaviour, concerning limitations and scalability. In this paper we show the results of the analysis.

Marco Alberti, Federico Chesani, Marco Gavanelli, Alessio Guerri, Evelina Lamma, Paola Mello, and Paolo Torroni. Expressing interaction in combinatorial auction through social integrity constraints. Intelligenza Artificiale, II(1):22-29, 2005.

Combinatorial Auctions are an attractive application of intelligent agents; their applications are countless and are shown to provide good revenues. On the other hand, one of the issues they raise is the computational complexity of the solving process (the Winner Determination Problem, WDP), that delayed their practical use. Recently, efficient solvers have been applied to the WDP, so the framework starts to be viable. A second issue, common to many other agent systems, is trust: in order for an agent system to be used, the users must trust both their representative and the other agents inhabiting the society: malicious agents must be found, and their violations discovered. The SOCS project addresses such issues, and provided a language, the social integrity constraints, for defining the allowed interaction moves, together with a proof procedure able to detect violations. In this paper we show how to write a protocol for the combinatorial auctions by using social integrity constraints. In the devised protocol, the auctioneer interacts with an external solver for the winner determination problem.