Home › Research › ALICA

ALICA - A Language for Interactive Cooperative Agents

ALICA is a behaviour specification language for teams of agents. It provides modeling elements to describe team behaviours and strategies from a global perspective.

Cooperative behaviour of agents within highly dynamic and nondeterministic domains is an active fi eld of research. In particular establishing highly responsive teamwork, where agents are able to react on dynamic changes in the environment while facing unreliable communication and sensory noise, is an open problem. Moreover, modelling such responsive, cooperative behaviour is difficult. ALICA is a novel model for cooperative behaviour geared towards highly dynamic domains. In this approach, agents estimate each other’s decision and correct these estimations once they receive contradictory information. We aim at a comprehensive approach for agent teamwork featuring intuitive modeling capabilities for multi-agent activities, abstractions over activities and agents, and a clear operational semantic for the new model.

Publications

Title Type of Publication Authors Year of Publication
Modelling and Controlling of Behaviour for Autonomous Mobile Robots Book Skubch, H 2013
Solving Non-Linear Arithmetic Constraints in Soft Realtime Environments Conference Paper Skubch, H 2012
Towards a Description Logic Support for ALICA Master Thesis Opfer, S 2012
Resolving Conflicts in Highly Reactive Teams Conference Paper Skubch, H, Saur D, Geihs K 2011
A modelling language for cooperative plans in highly dynamic domains Journal Article Skubch, H, Wagner M, Reichle R, Geihs K 2011
Towards a Comprehensive Teamwork Model for Highly Dynamic Domains Conference Paper Skubch, H, Wagner M, Reichle R, Triller S, Geihs K 2010
A Cooperative Behaviour Model for Autonomous Robots in Dynamic Domains Diploma 1 Thesis Triller, S 2009
A Language for Interactive Cooperative Agents Technical Report Skubch, H, Wagner M, Reichle R 2009
Grafische Verhaltensmodellierung für kooperative autonome Roboter Bachelor Thesis Scharf, A 2008

Related Software

The ALICA runtime engine, together with an Eclipse-based IDE, a monitoring GUI, and some examples are availble within the ROS framework. Click here for details.

Two ontologies were created during a master thesis about the applicability of description logic reasoning support for ALICA. The ALICA ontology can be downloaded from the download area of this hompage or directly access through its IRI: http://carpenoctem.das-lab.net/research/ALICA/alica.owl. The same goes for the MSL ontology and its IRI:http://carpenoctem.das-lab.net/research/ALICA/robocupmsl.owl.