PhD Student

Personal Details

PhD Student- SAFE Agents
Queensland Research Laboratory

National ICT Australia Limited
PO Box 10161
Brisbane QLD 4000
Tel.   +61 7 3000 0492
Fax.   +61 7 3000 0480
Email: duyhoang.pham@nicta.com.au
Web.  www.nicta.com.au

Research topic

Efficient Representation and Reasoning in Multi-agent Systems

A multi-agent system consists of a collection of agents which interact with each other to fulfil their tasks. Individual agents can have different motivations to act. Also, agents possibly recognise the goals of other agents. In order to successfully interact, an agent should exhibit an ability to balance reactivity, pro-activeness (autonomy), and sociability. Multi-agent systems proven tools for modelling and  solving problems that exhibit complex and distributed structures. Examples include real-time traffic control and monitoring; work-flow management; and information retrieval on computer networks.

There are two broad challenges that the agent community is currently addressing. One is the development of formalisms for representing knowledge agents have about their actions, goals, plans for achieving their goals and other agents. The second challenge is the development of reasoning mechanisms agents use to achieve autonomy during the course of their interactions.

Our research focuses mainly on how to effectively represent agents’ knowledge about their working environment (including about other agents) and to derive unknown information from agents’ knowledge by considering the fact that agents could only obtain a partial image of their working environment. The research also deals with reasoning about knowledge of other agents to achieve better coordination.

Our approach is to apply modal logics and non-monotonic reasoning to formalise and tackle with the problem of multi-agent systems. The approach maintains the richness in the description of logical methods while providing an efficient and easy to implementation reasoning mechanism. Besides of theoretical analysis of the performance, the empirical assessments are carried out based-on investigations of the implementation of the system.