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Register a new userAn Introduction to Engineering Multiagent Industrial Symbiosis Systems: Potentials and Challenges
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Added by
Vahid Yazdanpanah
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Multiagent Systems (MAS) research reached a maturity to be confidently applied to real-life complex problems. Successful application of MAS methods for behavior modeling, strategic reasoning, and decentralized governance, encouraged us to focus on applicability of MAS techniques in a class of industrial systems and to elaborate on potentials and challenges for method integration/contextualization. We direct attention towards a form of industrial practices called Industrial Symbiosis Systems (ISS) as a highly dynamic domain of application for MAS techniques. In ISS, firms aim to reduce their material and energy footprint by circulating reusable resources among the members. To enable systematic reasoning about ISS behavior and support firms (as well as ISS designers) decisions, we see the opportunity for marrying industrial engineering with engineering multiagent systems. This enables introducing (1) representation frameworks to reason about dynamics of ISS, (2) operational semantics to develop computational models for ISS, and (3) coordination mechanisms to enforce desirable ISS behaviors. We argue for applicability and expressiveness of resource-bounded formalisms and norm-aware mechanisms for the design and deployment of ISS practices. In this proposal, we elaborate on different dimensions of ISS, present a methodological foundation for ISS development, and finally discuss open problems.
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We present a formal multiagent framework for coordinating a class of collaborative industrial practices called Industrial Symbiotic Networks (ISNs) as cooperative games. The game-theoretic formulation of ISNs enables systematic reasoning about what we call the ISN implementation problem. Specifically, the characteristics of ISNs may lead to the inapplicability of standard fair and stable benefit allocation methods. Inspired by realistic ISN scenarios and following the literature on normative multiagent systems, we consider regulations and normative socio-economic policies as coordination instruments that in combination with ISN games resolve the situation. In this multiagent system, employing Marginal Contribution Nets (MC-Nets) as rule-based cooperative game representations foster the combination of regulations and ISN games with no loss in expressiveness. We develop algorithmic methods for generating regulations that ensure the implementability of ISNs and as a policy support, present the policy requirements that guarantee the implementability of all the desired ISNs in a balanced-budget way.
This paper discusses the dynamics of Transaction Cost (TC) in Industrial Symbiosis Institutions (ISI) and provides a fair and stable mechanism for TC allocation among the involved firms in a given ISI. In principle, industrial symbiosis, as an implementation of the circular economy paradigm in the context of industrial relation, is a practice aiming at reducing the material/energy footprint of the firm. The well-engineered form of this practice is proved to decrease the transaction costs at a collective level. This can be achieved using information systems for: identifying potential synergies, evaluating mutually beneficial ones, implementing the contracts, and governing the behavior of the established relations. Then the question is how to distribute the costs for maintaining such an information system in a fair and stable manner? We see such a cost as a collective transaction cost and employ an integrated method rooted in cooperative game theory and multiagent systems research to develop a fair and stable allocation mechanism for it. The novelty is twofold: in developing analytical multiagent methods for capturing the dynamics of transaction costs in industrial symbiosis and in presenting a novel game-theoretic mechanism for its allocation in industrial symbiosis institutions. While the former contributes to the theories of industrial symbiosis (methodological contribution), the latter supports decision makers aiming to specify fair and stable industrial symbiosis contracts (practical contribution).
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