Maple-Swarm: programming collective behavior for ensembles by extending HTN-planning

Programming goal-oriented behavior in collective adaptive systems is complex, requires high effort, and is failure-prone. If the system's user wants to deploy it in a real-world environment, hurdles get even higher: Programs urgently require to be situation-aware. With our framework Maple, we previously presented an approach for easing the act of programming such systems on the level of particular robot capabilities. In this paper, we extend our approach for ensemble programming with the possibility to address virtual swarm capabilities encapsulating collective behavior to whole groups of agents. By using the respective concepts in an extended version of hierarchical task networks and by adapting our self-organization mechanisms for executing plans resulting thereof, we can achieve that all agents, any agent, any other set of agents, or a swarm of agents execute (swarm) capabilities. Moreover, we extend the possibilities of expressing situation awareness during planning by introducing planning variables that can get modified at design-time or run-time as needed. We illustrate the possibilities with examples each. Further, we provide a graphical front-end offering the possibility to generate mission-specific problem domain descriptions for ensembles including a lightweight simulation for validating plans

Organizations of Agents in Information Fusion Environments

Information fusion in a context-aware system is understood as a process that assembles assessments of the environment based on its goals. Advantages of intelligent approaches such as Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and the use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) within the information fusion process are emerging, especially in context-aware scenarios. However, it has become critical to propose improved and efficient ways to handle the enormous quantity of data provided by these approaches. Agents are a suitable option because they can represent autonomous entities by modeling their capabilities, expertise and intentions. In this sense, virtual organizations of agents are an interesting option/possibility because they can provide the necessary capacity to handle open and heterogeneous systems such as those normally found in the information fusion process. This paper presents a new framework that defines a method for creating a virtual organization of software and hardware agents. This approach facilitates the inclusion of context-aware capabilities when developing intelligent and adaptable systems, where functionalities can communicate in a distributed and collaborative way. Several tests have been performed to evaluate this framework and preliminary results and conclusions are presented

Virtual Organizations in Information Fusion

Advantages of intelligent approaches such as Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and the use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) within the information fusion process are emerging, especially on context-aware scenarios.However, it is necessary to go further and propose better ways to deal with the avalanche of data that these scenarios provide. In this sense, virtual organizations of agents are an interesting alternative because they provide the necessary capacity to handle open and heterogeneous systems. This paper presents a framework that defines a method for creating virtual organization of software and hardware agents

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

Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview

In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level (micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level (macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models, and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page

A Generic Agent Organisation Framework For Autonomic Systems

Autonomic computing is being advocated as a tool for managing large, complex computing systems. Specifically, self-organisation provides a suitable approach for developing such autonomic systems by incorporating self-management and adaptation properties into large-scale distributed systems. To aid in this development, this paper details a generic problem-solving agent organisation framework that can act as a modelling and simulation platform for autonomic systems. Our framework describes a set of service-providing agents accomplishing tasks through social interactions in dynamically changing organisations. We particularly focus on the organisational structure as it can be used as the basis for the design, development and evaluation of generic algorithms for self-organisation and other approaches towards autonomic systems

Facilitating the take-up of new HCI practices: a ‘diffusion of innovations’ perspective

The workshop Made for Sharing: HCI Stories of Transfer, Triumph & Tragedy focuses on collecting cases in which practitioners have used their HCI methods in new contexts. For analyzing the collected body of cases we propose to apply a framework inspired by the Diffusion of Innovations approach which focuses on what facilitates the adoption, re-invention and implementation of new practices in social systems

Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields

This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways