The evolution of tropos: Contexts, commitments and adaptivity

Software evolution is the main research focus of the Tropos group at University of Trento (UniTN): how do we build systems that are aware of their requirements, and are able to dynamically reconfigure themselves in response to changes in context (the environment within which they operate) and requirements. The purpose of this report is to offer an overview of ongoing work at UniTN. In particular, the report presents ideas and results of four lines of research: contextual requirements modeling and reasoning, commitments and goal models, developing self-reconfigurable systems, and requirements awareness

Analyzing the Effects of Role Configuration in Logistics Processes using Multiagent-Based Simulation: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Current trends like the digital transformation and Industry 4.0 are challenging logistics management: flexible process development and optimization has been a primary concern in research in the last two decades. However, flexibility is limited by its underlying distribution of action and task knowledge. Thus, our objective is to develop an approach to optimize performance of logistics processes by dynamic (re-) configuration of knowledge in teams. One of the key assumptions for that approach is, that the distribution of knowledge has impact on team‘s performance. Consequently, we propose a formal specification for representing active resources (humans or smart machines) and distribution of action knowledge in multiagent-based simulation. In the second part of this paper, we analyze process quality in a psychologically validated laboratory case study. Our simulation results support our assumption, i.e., the results show that there is significant influence of knowledge distribution on process quality

Real “Smart Cities”: Insights from Civitas PROSPERITY

A city does not need to be smart, but to allow people be, behave, live and work smart(er). Furthermore, smart should not be necessarily equalled to high technology, but to the sound management, communication and use of available resources, be they tangible or intangible. Anyway our evolution cannot be limited to technology, even if the latter has become unavoidable. If not accompanied by a comprehensive perspective and coherent management, technology may rather block than facilitate resilience and sustainable urban development. Not always the most technically advanced and expensive solutions are the best (most effective) ones or frequently they cannot work alone, needing to be complemented by soft / lower-cost measures. Moreover,even if the actual “smart city” paradigm would be accepted, there do not seem to be enough resources (especially primary ones) to provide high-tech for everybody (WWF, 2018). In this case high-tech might be replaced by smart-tech staying for innovative solutions of best coping with given situations no matter the level of scientific, cultural, economic and behavioural advancement. These are some of the conclusions of a recent ongoing project funded through Horizon 2020, pleading for a global integrated perspective and providing the appropriate tools to sustainably shape and enhance it. Being built in response to the challenge “Real Smart Cities. Best practices and concepts for the future”, the present contribution informs on how Civitas PROSPERITY (applied research project) integrated these principles and produced innovation in the field of Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP). The focus is on bright solutions that can be equally extended and applied in other fields of urban management beyond mobility, such as energy, land-use, cultural heritage etc

Smart Residential Buildings as Learning Agent Organizations in the Internet of Things

Background: Smart buildings are one of the major application areas of technologies bound to embedded systems and the Internet of things. Such systems have to be adaptable and flexible in order to provide better services to its residents. Modelling such systems is an open research question. Herein, the question is approached using an organizational modelling methodology bound to the principles of the learning organization. Objectives: Providing a higher level of abstraction for understanding, developing and maintaining smart residential buildings in a more human understandable form. Methods/Approach: Organization theory provides us with the necessary concepts and methodology to approach complex organizational systems. Results: A set of principles for building learning agent organizations, a formalization of learning processes for agents, a framework for modelling knowledge transfer between agents and the environment, and a tailored organizational structure for smart residential buildings based on Nonaka’s hypertext organizational form. Conclusions: Organization theory is a promising field of research when dealing with complex engineering systems

Formalization of the partnering structure for networked businesses

Rapidly changing market demands and increasing competitive pressure cause many businesses implement changes to the way they conduct business. One of these changes is the decision to collaborate with other businesses, forming what we call a 'networked business'. Networked businesses are formed by different organizations working together to reach a common goal. For the participating organizations in a networked business to be able to promptly react to their customers' needs, they must set up as cornerstone a well-defined collaborative partnering structure. In this report we discuss the partnering structure of networked businesses and present a framework for its formalization. Using a case study, we illustrate that existing approaches for value modeling, roles specification, and responsibilities definition can be used successfully if employed in a unifying way to address this structure concept

Artificial institutions: a model of institutional reality for open multiagent systems

Software agents' ability to interact within different open systems, designed by different groups, presupposes an agreement on an unambiguous definition of a set of concepts, used to describe the context of the interaction and the communication language the agents can use. Agents' interactions ought to allow for reliable expectations on the possible evolution of the system; however, in open systems interacting agents may not conform to predefined specifications. A possible solution is to define interaction environments including a normative component, with suitable rules to regulate the behaviour of agents. To tackle this problem we propose an application-independent metamodel of artificial institutions that can be used to define open multiagent systems. In our view an artificial institution is made up by an ontology that models the social context of the interaction, a set of authorizations to act on the institutional context, a set of linguistic conventions for the performance of institutional actions and a system of norms that are necessary to constrain the agents' action

OperA/ALIVE/OperettA

Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Towards a Conceptualization of Sociomaterial Entanglement

In knowledge representation, socio-technical systems can be modeled as multiagent systems in which the local knowledge of each individual agent can be seen as a context. In this paper we propose formal ontologies as a means to describe the assumptions driving the construction of contexts as local theories and to enable interoperability among them. In particular, we present two alternative conceptualizations of the notion of sociomateriality (and entanglement), which is central in the recent debates on socio-technical systems in the social sciences, namely critical and agential realism. We thus start by providing a model of entanglement according to the critical realist view, representing it as a property of objects that are essentially dependent on different modules of an already given ontology. We refine then our treatment by proposing a taxonomy of sociomaterial entanglements that distinguishes between ontological and epistemological entanglement. In the final section, we discuss the second perspective, which is more challenging form the point of view of knowledge representation, and we show that the very distinction of information into modules can be at least in principle built out of the assumption of an entangled reality