Norm-based and commitment-driven agentification of the Internet of Things

There are no doubts that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has conquered the ICT industry to the extent that many governments and organizations are already rolling out many anywhere,anytime online services that IoT sustains. However, like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down IoT practical adoption including the passive nature and privacy invasion of things. This paper examines how to empower things with necessary capabilities that would make them proactive and responsive. This means things can, for instance reach out to collaborative peers, (un)form dynamic communities when necessary, avoid malicious peers, and be “questioned” for their actions. To achieve such empowerment, this paper presents an approach for agentifying things using norms along with commitments that operationalize these norms. Both norms and commitments are specialized into social (i.e., application independent) and business (i.e., application dependent), respectively. Being proactive, things could violate commitments at run-time, which needs to be detected through monitoring. In this paper, thing agentification is illustrated with a case study about missing children and demonstrated with a testbed that uses different IoT-related technologies such as Eclipse Mosquitto broker and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol. Some experiments conducted upon this testbed are also discussed

Electronic institutions with normative environments for agent-based E-contracting

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Informática. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

The Development Of Mutual Trust In British Workplaces Through ?Partnership?

This article examines the alleged links between 'partnership' forms ofmanaging workplace relationships in Britain, and the development ofintra-organisational 'trust'. The potential for mutually complementarylinkages between the two are clear, in theory at least: partnership,as defined here, should produce, nurture and enhance levels ofinterpersonal trust inside organisations, while in turn trust, asdefined here, legitimates and helps reinforce an organisation's'partnership'. Qualitative evidence drawn from the self-reports of keyparticipants in four partnership organisations provides considerablesupport for the claimed linkages, while also highlighting severalweaknesses, discrepancies and pitfalls inherent in the process ofpursuing trust through partnership. This research is of interest froma public policy perspective, most of all in the United Kingdom, wherepartnership is the favoured organisational model for the New Labourgovernment, most trade unions, and many employers (not to mention theEuropean Union) yet where an agreed definition of the idea has yet toemerge, and where still remarkably little is known about whatpartnership involves inside organisations. This analysis also seeks torestore the curiously neglected idea of trust to a position of centralimportance to the study of employment relations.United Kingdom;case studies;organisational change;trust;social partnership

Monitoring multi-party contracts for E-business

"Monitoring multi-party contracts for E-business" investigates the issues involved in the performance of econtract monitoring of business automations in business to business e-commerce environment. A pro-active monitoring contract model and monitoring mechanism have been designed and developed. A new architecture and framework is proposed for pro-active monitorable contracts. This pro-active monitoring contract model is supported by a prototyp

Monitoring Multi-Party Contracts for E-Business.

"Monitoring Multi-party Contracts for E-business" investigates the issues involved in the performance of econtract monitoring of business automations in business to business e-commerce environment. A pro-active monitoring contract model and monitoring mechanism have been designed and developed. A new architecture and framework is proposed for pro-active monitorable contracts. This pro-active monitoring contract model is supported by a prototype

Electronic institution : an e-contracting platform for virtual organization

Automated tools that assist contract drafting are mostly focused on the representation of contract documents. Multi-agent systems have been ap-plied in the e-business domain, namely for information discovery and contract negotiation. Work on contract monitoring and enforcement is less explored. In this paper we start from these two observations to expose our efforts towards the development of tools that enable the computational representation of con-tracts and furthermore their monitoring and enforcement. We are mostly inter-ested in Virtual Organization settings, where groups of agents representing dif-ferent business entities form consortiums that must be regulated by appropriate norms. We are pursuing the concept of an Electronic Institution as a platform providing a normative environment and a set of e-contracting related services. Within this environment, contracts are represented through norms. We intend to test the applicability of our approach through illustration with case-studies and comparison with other contract representation formalisms

Towards Formal Verification of Web Service Composition

http://www.springerlink.com/Web services composition is an emerging paradigm for enabling application integration within and across organizational boundaries. Current Web services composition proposals, such as BPML, WSBPEL, WSCI, and OWL-S, provide solutions for describing the control and data flows in Web service composition. However, such proposals remain at the descriptive level, without providing any kind of mechanisms or tool support for analysis and verification. Therefore, there is a growing interest for the verification techniques which enable designers to test and repair design errors even before actual running of the service, or allow designers to detect erroneous properties and formally verify whether the service process design does have certain desired properties. In this paper, we propose to verify Web services composition using an event driven approach. We assume Web services that are coordinated by a composition process expressed in WSBPEL and we use Event Calculus to specify the properties and requirements to be monitored

Aligning Monitoring and Compliance Requirements in Evolving Business Networks

Dynamic business networks (BNs) are intrinsically characterised by change. Compliance requirements management, in this context, may become particularly challenging. Partners in the network may join and leave the collaboration dynamically and tasks over which compliance requirements are specified may be consequently delegated to new partners or backsourced by network participants. This paper considers the issue of aligning the compliance requirements in a BN with the monitoring requirements they induce on the BN participants when change (or evolution) occurs. We first provide a conceptual model of BNs and their compliance requirements, introducing the concept of monitoring capabilities induced by compliance requirements. Then, we present a set of mechanisms to ensure consistency between the monitoring and compliance requirements when BNs evolve, e.g. tasks are delegated or backsourced in-house. Eventually, we discuss a prototype implementation of our framework, which also implements a set of metrics to check the status of a BN in respect of compliance monitorability

Web Service Mining and Verification of Properties: An approach based on Event Calculus

http://www.springerlink.com/Web services are becoming more and more complex, involving numerous interacting business objects within complex distributed processes. In order to fully explore Web service business opportunities, while ensuring a correct and reliable execution, analyzing and tracking Web services interactions will enable them to be well understood and controlled. The work described in this paper is a contribution to these issues for Web services based process applications. This article describes a novel way of applying process mining techniques to Web services logs in order to enable ''Web service intelligence''. Our work attempts to apply Web service log-based analysis and process mining techniques in order to provide semantical knowledge about the context of and the reasons for discrepancies between process models and related instances