Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. Multi-agent systems have been brought up and used in several application domains

Sustainability of systems interoperability in dynamic business networks

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresCollaborative networked environments emerged with the spread of the internet, contributing to overcome past communication barriers, and identifying interoperability as an essential property to support businesses development. When achieved seamlessly, efficiency is increased in the entire product life cycle support. However, due to the different sources of knowledge, models and semantics, enterprise organisations are experiencing difficulties exchanging critical information, even when they operate in the same business environments. To solve this issue, most of them try to attain interoperability by establishing peer-to-peer mappings with different business partners, or use neutral data and product standards as the core for information sharing, in optimized networks. In current industrial practice, the model mappings that regulate enterprise communications are only defined once, and most of them are hardcoded in the information systems. This solution has been effective and sufficient for static environments, where enterprise and product models are valid for decades. However, more and more enterprise systems are becoming dynamic, adapting and looking forward to meet further requirements; a trend that is causing new interoperability disturbances and efficiency reduction on existing partnerships. Enterprise Interoperability (EI) is a well established area of applied research, studying these problems, and proposing novel approaches and solutions. This PhD work contributes to that research considering enterprises as complex and adaptive systems, swayed to factors that are making interoperability difficult to sustain over time. The analysis of complexity as a neighbouring scientific domain, in which features of interoperability can be identified and evaluated as a benchmark for developing a new foundation of EI, is here proposed. This approach envisages at drawing concepts from complexity science to analyse dynamic enterprise networks and proposes a framework for sustaining systems interoperability, enabling different organisations to evolve at their own pace, answering the upcoming requirements but minimizing the negative impact these changes can have on their business environment

Mobile Robots

The objective of this book is to cover advances of mobile robotics and related technologies applied for multi robot systems' design and development. Design of control system is a complex issue, requiring the application of information technologies to link the robots into a single network. Human robot interface becomes a demanding task, especially when we try to use sophisticated methods for brain signal processing. Generated electrophysiological signals can be used to command different devices, such as cars, wheelchair or even video games. A number of developments in navigation and path planning, including parallel programming, can be observed. Cooperative path planning, formation control of multi robotic agents, communication and distance measurement between agents are shown. Training of the mobile robot operators is very difficult task also because of several factors related to different task execution. The presented improvement is related to environment model generation based on autonomous mobile robot observations

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Proceedings of The Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organisations Federated Workshops (MALLOW 2010)

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-627/allproceedings.pdfInternational audienceMALLOW-2010 is a third edition of a series initiated in 2007 in Durham, and pursued in 2009 in Turin. The objective, as initially stated, is to "provide a venue where: the cost of participation was minimum; participants were able to attend various workshops, so fostering collaboration and cross-fertilization; there was a friendly atmosphere and plenty of time for networking, by maximizing the time participants spent together"

An Integrated Framework for the Methodological Assurance of Security and Privacy in the Development and Operation of MultiCloud Applications

x, 169 p.This Thesis studies research questions about how to design multiCloud applications taking into account security and privacy requirements to protect the system from potential risks and about how to decide which security and privacy protections to include in the system. In addition, solutions are needed to overcome the difficulties in assuring security and privacy properties defined at design time still hold all along the system life-cycle, from development to operation.In this Thesis an innovative DevOps integrated methodology and framework are presented, which help to rationalise and systematise security and privacy analyses in multiCloud to enable an informed decision-process for risk-cost balanced selection of the protections of the system components and the protections to request from Cloud Service Providers used. The focus of the work is on the Development phase of the analysis and creation of multiCloud applications.The main contributions of this Thesis for multiCloud applications are four: i) The integrated DevOps methodology for security and privacy assurance; and its integrating parts: ii) a security and privacy requirements modelling language, iii) a continuous risk assessment methodology and its complementary risk-based optimisation of defences, and iv) a Security and Privacy Service Level AgreementComposition method.The integrated DevOps methodology and its integrating Development methods have been validated in the case study of a real multiCloud application in the eHealth domain. The validation confirmed the feasibility and benefits of the solution with regards to the rationalisation and systematisation of security and privacy assurance in multiCloud systems

On-Demand Composition of Smart Service Systems in Decentralized Environments

The increasing number of smart systems inevitably leads to a huge number of systems that potentially provide independently designed, autonomously operating services. In near-future smart computing systems, such as smart cities, smart grids or smart mobility, independently developed and heterogeneous services need to be dynamically interconnected in order to develop their full potential in a rather complex collaboration with others. Since the services are developed independently, it is challenging to integrate them on-the-fly at run time. Due to the increasing degree of distribution, such systems operate in a decentralized and volatile environment, where central management is infeasible. Conversely, the increasing computational power of such systems also supersedes the need for central management. The four identified key problems of adaptable, collaborative Smart Service Systems are on-demand composition of complex service structures in decentralized environments, the absence of a comprehensive, serendipity-aware specification, a discontinuity from design-time specification to run-time execution, and the lack of a development methodology that separates the development of a service from that of its role essential to a collaboration. This approach utilizes role-based models, which have a collaborative nature, for automated, on-demand service composition. A rigorous two-phase development methodology is proposed in order to demarcate the development of the services from that of their role essential to a collaboration. Therein, a collaboration designer specifies the collaboration including its abstract functionality using the proposed role-based collaboration specification for Smart Service Systems. Thereof, a partial implementation is derived, which is complemented by services developed in the second phase. The proposed middleware architecture provides run-time support and bridges the gap between design and run time. It implements a protocol for coordinated, role-based composition and adaptation of Smart Service Systems. The approach is quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated by means of a case study and a performance evaluation in order to identify limitations of complex service structures and the trade-off of employing the concept of roles for composition and adaptation of Smart Service Systems.:1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation 1.2 Terminology 1.3 Problem Statement 1.4 Requirements Analysis 1.5 Research Questions and Hypothesis 1.6 Focus and Limitations 1.7 Outline 2 The Role Concept in Computer Science 2.1 What is a Role in Computer Science? 2.2 Roles in RoleDiSCo 3 State of the Art & Related Work 3.1 Role-based Modeling Abstractions for Software Systems 3.1.1 Classification 3.1.2 Approaches 3.1.3 Summary 3.2 Role-based Run-Time Systems 3.2.1 Classification 3.2.2 Approaches 3.2.3 Summary 3.3 Spontaneously Collaborating Run-Time Systems 3.3.1 Classification 3.3.2 Approaches 3.3.3 Summary 3.4 Summary 4 On-Demand Composition and Adaptation of Smart Service Systems 4.1 RoleDiSCo Development Methodology 4.1.1 Role-based Collaboration Specification for Smart Service Systems 4.1.2 Derived Partial Implementation 4.1.3 Player & Context Provision 4.2 RoleDiSCo Middleware Architecture for Smart Service Systems 4.2.1 Infrastructure Abstraction Layer 4.2.2 Context Management 4.2.3 Local Repositories & Knowledge 4.2.4 Discovery 4.2.5 Dispatcher 4.3 Coordinated Composition and Subsequent Adaptation 4.3.1 Initialization and Planning 4.3.2 Composition: Coordinating Subsystem 4.3.3 Composition: Non-Coordinating Subsystem 4.3.4 Competing Collaborations & Negotiation 4.3.5 Subsequent Adaptation 4.3.6 Terminating a Pervasive Collaboration 4.4 Summary 5 Implementing RoleDiSCo 5.1 RoleDiSCo Development Support 5.2 RoleDiSCo Middleware 5.2.1 Infrastructure Abstraction Layer 5.2.2 Knowledge Repositories and Local Class Discovery 5.2.3 Planner 6 Evaluation 6.1 Case Study: Distributed Slideshow 6.1.1 Scenario 6.1.2 Phase 1: Collaboration Design 6.1.3 Phase 2: Player Complementation 6.1.4 Coordinated Composition and Adaptation at Run Time 6.2 Runtime Evaluation 6.2.1 General Testbed Setup and Scenarios 6.2.2 Discovery Time 6.2.3 Composition Time 6.2.4 Discussion 6.3 The ›Role‹ of Roles 6.4 Summary 7 Conclusion 7.1 Summary 7.2 Research Results 7.3 Future Wor

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate