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In the 21st century, enterprises face an increasingly competitive market place. In this context, the success of enterprises depends critically on the quality and efficiency of their product business processes. These processes generally aim to sell products or services. The approach presented in this paper aims at the assistance of teams following these processes. The underlying idea is to help team members in their daily tasks in order to be more efficient according to a specific process. The two main components of the approach are: an ontology for business processes modeling and aMulti-Agent System for providing intelligent assistance to the human workers. The Scrum software development process illustrates this approach. Scrum is an agile softwaredevelopment process widely used in software companies. This paper introduces a specific intelligent assistance software that aims to assist Scrum project teams in their implementation of the Scrum process. This tool aims primarily at helping Scrum Masters to take decisions by monitoring Scrum project teams' activities with their various projects and collecting knowledge about these activities. The proposed Scrum tool is a web-based system, which uses Multi-Agent System and the conceptualization of the Scrum process with a specific ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carpooling is an emerging alternative transportation mode that is eco-friendly and sustainable as it enables commuters to save time, travel resource, reduce emission and traffic congestion. The procedure of carpooling consists of a number of steps namely; (i) create a motive to carpool, (ii) communicate this motive with other agents, (iii) negotiate a plan with the interested agents, (iv) execute the agreed plans, and (v) provide a feedback to all concerned agents. In this paper, we present a conceptual design of an agent-based model (ABM) for the carpooling a that serves as a proof of concept. Our model for the carpooling application is a computational model that is used for simulating the interactions of autonomous agents and to analyze the effects of change in factors related to the infrastructure, behavior and cost. In our carpooling application, we use agent profiles and social networks to initiate our agent communication model and then employ a route matching algorithm, and a utility function to trigger the negotiation process between agents. We developed a prototype of our agent-based carpooling application based on the work presented in this paper and carried out a validation study of our results with real data collected in Flanders, Belgium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Multiagent-based simulations enable us to validate different use-case scenarios in a lot of application domains. The idea is to develop a realistic virtual environment to test particular domain-specific procedures. This paper presents our general framework for interactive multiagent-based simulations in virtual environments. The major contribution of this paper is the integration of the notion of ontology as a core element to the design process of a behavioral simulation. The proposed metamodel describes the concepts of a multiagent simulation using situated agents moving in a semantically enriched 3D environment. The agents perceive the geometric and semantic data in the surrounding environment. They are also able to act in this environment by using high-level actions, which are described by the ontology of the environment. The concepts relating to the environment, the agent, and the entire simulation models are presented. Additionally, guidelines are given to exploit the simulation results to characterize the agents. Finally, a simple application of the metamodel is presented, based upon the use of Industry Foundation Classes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]