Multi-Agent Architecture with Support to Quality of Service and Quality of Control

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15381-5_17Multi Agent Systems (MAS) are one of the most suitable frameworks for the implementation of intelligent distributed control system. Agents provide suitable flexibility to give support to implied heterogeneity in cyber-physical systems. Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Control (QoC) parameters are commonly utilized to evaluate the efficiency of the communications and the control loop. Agents can use the quality measures to take a wide range of decisions, like suitable placement on the control node or to change the workload to save energy. This article describes the architecture of a multi agent system that provides support to QoS and QoC parameters to optimize de system. The architecture uses a Publish-Subscriber model, based on Data Distribution Service (DDS) to send the control messages. Due to the nature of the Publish-Subscribe model, the architecture is suitable to implement event-based control (EBC) systems. The architecture has been called FSACtrlThe architecture described in this article is a part of the coordinated project SIDIRELI: Distributed Systems with Limited Resources. Control Kernel and Coordination. Education and Science Department, Spanish Government and FEDER funds.Poza-Lujan, J.; Posadas-Yagüe, J.; Simó Ten, JE. (2010). Multi-Agent Architecture with Support to Quality of Service and Quality of Control. En Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning – IDEAL 2010. Springer Verlag (Germany). 137-144. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-15381-5_17S137144Lee, E.A.: Cyber Physical Systems: Design Challenges. In: 11th IEEE Symposium on Object Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing, pp. 363–369 (2008)Siegel, J.: CORBA 3: Fundamentals and Programming. OMG (2000)FIPA. FIPA-QoS (2002), http://www.fipa.org/specs/fipa00094Object Management Group (OMG): Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems, v1.1. Document formal (2005-12-04)Posadas, J.L., Poza, J.L., Simó, J.E., Benet, G., Blanes, F.: Agent Based Distributed Architecture for Mobile Robot Control. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence 21(6), 805–823 (2008)Aurrecoechea, C., Campbell, A.T., Hauw, L.: A Survey of QoS Architectures. Multimedia Systems Journal, Special Issue on QoS Architecture 6(3), 138–151 (1998)Pardo-Castellote, G.: OMG Data-Distribution Service: architectural overview. In: Proceedings of 23rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops, Providence, USA, vol. 19(22), pp. 200–206 (2003)International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Terms and Definitions Related to Quality of Service and Network Performance Including Dependability. ITU-T Recommendation E.800 (0894) (1994)Sánchez, J., Guarnes, M.Á., Dormido, S.: On the Application of Different Event-Based Sampling Strategies to the Control of a Simple Industrial Process. Sensors 9, 6795–6818 (2009)Dorf, R.C., Bishop, R.H.: Modern Control Systems, 11th edn. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (2008)Poza, J.L., Posadas, J.L., Simó, J.E.: Middleware with QoS Support to Control Intelligent Systems. In: 2th International Conference on Advanced Engineering Computing and Applications in Sciences, ADVCOMP, pp. 211–216 (2008)Poza, J.L., Posadas, J.L., Simó, J.E.: From the Queue to the Quality of Service Policy: A Middleware Implementation. In: Omatu, S., Rocha, M.P., Bravo, J., Fernández, F., Corchado, E., Bustillo, A., Corchado, J.M. (eds.) IWANN 2009. LNCS, vol. 5518, pp. 432–437. Springer, Heidelberg (2009

A survey on quality of service support on middelware-based distributed messaging systems used in multi agent systems

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19934-9_10Messaging systems are widely used in distributed systems to hide the details of the communications mechanism to the multi agents systems. However, the Quality of Service is treated in different way depending on the messaging system used. This article presents a review and further analysis of the quality of service treatment in the mainly messaging systems used in distributed multi agent systems. The review covers the issues related to the purpose of the functions provided and the scope of the quality of service offered by every messaging system. We propose ontology for classifying and decide which parameters are relevant to the user. The results of the analysis and the ontology can be used to select the most suitable messaging system to distributed multi agent architecture and to establish the quality of service requirements in a distributed system.The study described in this article is a part of the coordinated project SIDIRELI: Distributed Systems with Limited Resources. Control Kernel and Coordination. Education and Science Department, Spanish Government and European FEDER found. CICYT: MICINN: DPI2008-06737-C02-01/02.Poza-Lujan, J.; Posadas-Yagüe, J.; Simó Ten, JE. (2011). A survey on quality of service support on middelware-based distributed messaging systems used in multi agent systems. En International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence. Springer. 77-84. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19934-9_10S7784Gaddah, A., Kunz, T.: A survey of middleware paradigms for mobile computing. Technical Report SCE-03-16. Carleton University Systems and Computing Engineering (2003)Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents, http://www.fipa.org/Java Message Service Specification, http://java.sun.com/products/jms/docs.htmlCommon Object Request Broker Architecture, http://www.corba.org/Data Distribution Service, http://portals.omg.org/dds/Java Agent DEvelopment Framework, http://jade.tilab.com/Agent Oriented Software Pty Ltd., JACK Intelligent Agents: User Guide (1999)Nwana, H., Ndumu, D., Lee, L., Collis, J.: ZEUS: A tool-kit for building distributed multi-agent systems. Applied Artifical Intelligence Journal 13(1), 129–186 (1999)Perdikeas, M.K., Chatzipapadopoulos, F.G., Venieris, I.S., Marino, G.: Mobile Agent Standards and Available Platforms. Computer Networks Journal, Special Issue on ’Mobile Agents in Intelligent Networks and Mobile Communication Systems’ 31(10) (1999)Perrone, P.J., Chaganti, K.: J2EE Developer’s Handbook. Sam’s Publishing, Indianapolis (2003)Apache ActiveMQ, http://activemq.apache.org/IBM WebSphere MQSeries, http://mqseries.net/Object Management Group, http://www.omg.org/RTI Data Distribution Service. RTI corp., http://www.rti.com/OpenSplice DDS. PrismTech Ltd., http://www.prismtech.comVogel, A., Kerherve, B., von Bochmann, G., Gecsei, J.: Distributed Multimedia and QoS: A Survey. IEEE Multimedia 2(2), 10–19 (1995)Crawley, E., Nair, R., Rajagopalan, B.: RFC 2386: A Framework for QoS-based Routing in the Internet. IETF Internet Draft, 1–37 (1998)Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. FIPA Quality of Service Ontology Specification. Doc: SC00094A (2002)Sun Microsystems, Inc. Java(TM) Message Service Specification Final Release 1.1 (2002)Object Management Group (OMG). The Common Object Request Broker Architecture and Specification. CORBA 2.4.2 (2001

Design of a shared whiteboard component for multimedia conferencing

This paper reports on the development of a framework for multimedia applications in the domain of tele-education. The paper focuses on the protocol design of a specific component of the framework, namely a shared whiteboard application. The relationship of this component with other components of the framework is also discussed. A salient feature of the framework is that it uses an advanced ATM-based network service. The design of the shared whiteboard component is considered representative for the design as a whole, and is used to illustrate how a flexible protocol architecture utilizing innovative network functions and satisfying demanding user requirements can be developed

SOA services in higher education

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a recent architectural framework for distributed software system development in which software components are packaged as Services. It has become increasingly popular in academia and in industry, but has been principally used in the business domain. However, in higher education, SOA has rarely been applied or investigated. In this paper, we propose the idea of applying SOA technologies in the education domain, to increase both interoperability and flexibility within the e-learning environment. We expect that both students and teachers in higher educational institutions can benefit from this approach. We also describe a number of possible SOA services, along with a high level service roadmap to support a university's learning and teaching activities

A linked data-driven & service-oriented architecture for sharing educational resources

The two fundamental aims of managing educational resources are to enable resources to be reusable and interoperable and to enable Web-scale sharing of resources across learning communities. Currently, a variety of approaches have been proposed to expose and manage educational resources and their metadata on the Web. These are usually based on heterogeneous metadata standards and schemas, such as IEEE LOM or ADL SCORM, and diverse repository interfaces such as OAI-PMH or SQI. Also, there is still a lack of usage of controlled vocabularies and available data sets that could replace the widespread use of unstructured text for describing resources. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has proven that it offers a set of successful principles that have the potential to alleviate the aforementioned issues. In this paper, we introduce an architecture and prototype which is fundamentally based on (a) Linked Data principles and (b) Service-orientation to resolve the integration issues for sharing educational resources

Towards a re-engineering method for web services architectures

Recent developments in Web technologies – in particular through the Web services framework – have greatly enhanced the flexible and interoperable implementation of service-oriented software architectures. Many older Web-based and other distributed software systems will be re-engineered to a Web services-oriented platform. Using an advanced e-learning system as our case study, we investigate central aspects of a re-engineering approach for the Web services platform. Since our aim is to provide components of the legacy system also as services in the new platform, re-engineering to suit the new development paradigm is as important as re-engineering to suit the new architectural requirements

Content-driven design and architecture of E-learning applications

E-learning applications combine content with learning technology systems to support the creation of content and its delivery to the learner. In the future, we can expect the distinction between learning content and its supporting infrastructure to become blurred. Content objects will interact with infrastructure services as independent objects. Our solution to the development of e-learning applications – content-driven design and architecture – is based on content-centric ontological modelling and development of architectures. Knowledge and modelling will play an important role in the development of content and architectures. Our approach integrates content with interaction (in technical and educational terms) and services (the principle organization for a system architecture), based on techniques from different fields, including software engineering, learning design, and knowledge engineering

Satellite-based delivery of educational content to geographically isolated communities: A service based approach

Enabling learning for members of geographically isolated communities presents benefits in terms of promoting regional development and cost savings for governments and companies. However, notwithstanding recent advances in e-Learning, from both technological and pedagogical perspectives, there are very few, if any, recognised methodologies for user-led design of satellite-based e-learning infrastructures. In this paper, we present a methodology for designing a satellite and wireless based network infrastructure and learning services to support distance learning for such isolated communities. This methodology entails (a) the involvement of community members in the development of targeted learning services from an early stage, and (b) a service-oriented approach to learning solution deployment. Results show, that, while the technological premises of distance learning can be accommodated by hybrid satellite/wireless infrastructures,this has to be complemented with (a) high-quality audio–visual educational material, and (b) the opportunity for community members to interact with other community members either as groups (common-room oriented scenarios) or individuals (home-based scenarios), thus providing an impetus for learner engagement in both formal and informal activities