A System for Modal and Deontic Defeasible Reasoning

Defeasible reasoning is a well-established nonmonotonic reasoning approach that has recently been combined with semantic web technologies. This paper describes modal and deontic extensions of defeasible logic, motivated by potential applications for modelling multi-agent systems and policies. It describes a logic metaprogram that captures the underlying intuitions, and outlines an implemented system

Prosper : developing web applications strongly integrated with Prolog

Separating presentation and application logic, defining presentation in a declarative way and automating recurring tasks are fundamental issues in rapid web application development. Albeit Prolog is widely employed in intelligent systems and knowledge discovery, creating a web interface for Prolog has been a cumbersome task producing poorly maintainable code, which hinders harnessing the power of Prolog in information systems. This paper presents a framework called Prosper that facilitates developing new or extending existing Prolog applications with a presentation front-end. The framework relies on Prolog to the greatest possible extent, supports code re-use, and integrates easily with web servers. As a result, Prosper simplifies the creation of complex, maintainable web applications running either independently or as part of a heterogeneous system without leaving the Prolog domain

Switch or Struggle: Risk Assessment for Late Integration of COTS Components

The domain requirements of software projects often seem so specialized to developers that their original design does not incorporate any commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components. However, if major implementation problems are encountered at a later stage in the project, the integration of a COTS component that promises to solve those problems may become a desirable alternative to struggling on with the original implementation. While a number of methods and criteria have already been proposed for requirements engineering, risk assessment and candidate selection of COTS components, they were developed for application in the initial phases of a project and thus do not take into account the much tighter time and design constraints imposedin a later project stage. To spark discussion on necessary adaptations of the established methods, this position paper uses the example of a concrete project to illustrate the characteristics of “switch or struggle” situations and proposes an initial set of risk factors to be considered at that time

Logic-based Technologies for Multi-agent Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

Precisely when the success of artificial intelligence (AI) sub-symbolic techniques makes them be identified with the whole AI by many non-computerscientists and non-technical media, symbolic approaches are getting more and more attention as those that could make AI amenable to human understanding. Given the recurring cycles in the AI history, we expect that a revamp of technologies often tagged as “classical AI” – in particular, logic-based ones will take place in the next few years. On the other hand, agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) have been at the core of the design of intelligent systems since their very beginning, and their long-term connection with logic-based technologies, which characterised their early days, might open new ways to engineer explainable intelligent systems. This is why understanding the current status of logic-based technologies for MAS is nowadays of paramount importance. Accordingly, this paper aims at providing a comprehensive view of those technologies by making them the subject of a systematic literature review (SLR). The resulting technologies are discussed and evaluated from two different perspectives: the MAS and the logic-based ones

Integrating Diagnostic and Repair to Ensure the Quality of a Composition of Web Services

Service-Oriented Computing is based on dynamic composition of web services to meet the demand of a user. A major challenge in conditioning actual use of web services is to monitor their performance and enable them to react to unexpected malfunctioning. This can be done using the mechanisms of exception handling. But they do react in a predefined manner and local issues have to be planned at the services design time. However, in dynamic environments like the Internet, web services may be subject to unexpected malfunctioning which may not be handled with repair mechanisms defined at design time. In addition, local management ignores errors during the interactions between services, which limit their effectiveness. Such failures may also propagate through the services before being detected, and the key is to find the problem at the source of the malfunction and repair the service. In this context, this work is dedicated to study a distributed but coordinated and dynamic management of repair mechanisms. The difficulty is that repairs are carried out locally, but a global approach must be ensured to take into account interactions between different services. Our objective is to propose a diagnostic-repair architecture and mechanisms for this feature in detail