4,156 research outputs found
Self-organising agent communities for autonomic resource management
The autonomic computing paradigm addresses the operational challenges presented by increasingly complex software systems by proposing that they be composed of many autonomous components, each responsible for the run-time reconfiguration of its own dedicated hardware and software components. Consequently, regulation of the whole software system becomes an emergent property of local adaptation and learning carried out by these autonomous system elements. Designing appropriate local adaptation policies for the components of such systems remains a major challenge. This is particularly true where the system’s scale and dynamism compromise the efficiency of a central executive and/or prevent components from pooling information to achieve a shared, accurate evidence base for their negotiations and decisions.In this paper, we investigate how a self-regulatory system response may arise spontaneously from local interactions between autonomic system elements tasked with adaptively consuming/providing computational resources or services when the demand for such resources is continually changing. We demonstrate that system performance is not maximised when all system components are able to freely share information with one another. Rather, maximum efficiency is achieved when individual components have only limited knowledge of their peers. Under these conditions, the system self-organises into appropriate community structures. By maintaining information flow at the level of communities, the system is able to remain stable enough to efficiently satisfy service demand in resource-limited environments, and thus minimise any unnecessary reconfiguration whilst remaining sufficiently adaptive to be able to reconfigure when service demand changes
A Self-adaptive Agent-based System for Cloud Platforms
Cloud computing is a model for enabling on-demand network access to a shared
pool of computing resources, that can be dynamically allocated and released
with minimal effort. However, this task can be complex in highly dynamic
environments with various resources to allocate for an increasing number of
different users requirements. In this work, we propose a Cloud architecture
based on a multi-agent system exhibiting a self-adaptive behavior to address
the dynamic resource allocation. This self-adaptive system follows a MAPE-K
approach to reason and act, according to QoS, Cloud service information, and
propagated run-time information, to detect QoS degradation and make better
resource allocation decisions. We validate our proposed Cloud architecture by
simulation. Results show that it can properly allocate resources to reduce
energy consumption, while satisfying the users demanded QoS
Social Ethic Behavior Simulation Project
Ethics has usually been considered as the domain of the
intrinsic personal belief. Some even claimed that no
objective knowledge of ethics is possible. We propose
a quite new way of approaching the problem. Although
ethics as a part of the personal belief cannot be examined
scientifically, the claim that it is not possible to study
ethical rules as means of strategy choice is false. The
model we bring forward handles the role of ethical rules
from the perspective of evolutionary fitnes
Adapting Quality Assurance to Adaptive Systems: The Scenario Coevolution Paradigm
From formal and practical analysis, we identify new challenges that
self-adaptive systems pose to the process of quality assurance. When tackling
these, the effort spent on various tasks in the process of software engineering
is naturally re-distributed. We claim that all steps related to testing need to
become self-adaptive to match the capabilities of the self-adaptive
system-under-test. Otherwise, the adaptive system's behavior might elude
traditional variants of quality assurance. We thus propose the paradigm of
scenario coevolution, which describes a pool of test cases and other
constraints on system behavior that evolves in parallel to the (in part
autonomous) development of behavior in the system-under-test. Scenario
coevolution offers a simple structure for the organization of adaptive testing
that allows for both human-controlled and autonomous intervention, supporting
software engineering for adaptive systems on a procedural as well as technical
level.Comment: 17 pages, published at ISOLA 201
Rational bidding using reinforcement learning: an application in automated resource allocation
The application of autonomous agents by the provisioning and usage of computational resources is an attractive research field. Various methods and technologies in the area of artificial intelligence, statistics and economics are playing together to achieve i) autonomic resource provisioning and usage of computational resources, to invent ii) competitive bidding strategies for widely used market mechanisms and to iii) incentivize consumers and providers to use such market-based systems.
The contributions of the paper are threefold. First, we present a framework for supporting consumers and providers in technical and economic preference elicitation and the generation of bids. Secondly, we introduce a consumer-side reinforcement learning bidding strategy which enables rational behavior by the generation and selection of bids. Thirdly, we evaluate and compare this bidding strategy against a truth-telling bidding strategy for two kinds of market mechanisms – one centralized and one decentralized
Local and Global Trust Based on the Concept of Promises
We use the notion of a promise to define local trust between agents
possessing autonomous decision-making. An agent is trustworthy if it is
expected that it will keep a promise. This definition satisfies most
commonplace meanings of trust. Reputation is then an estimation of this
expectation value that is passed on from agent to agent.
Our definition distinguishes types of trust, for different behaviours, and
decouples the concept of agent reliability from the behaviour on which the
judgement is based. We show, however, that trust is fundamentally heuristic, as
it provides insufficient information for agents to make a rational judgement. A
global trustworthiness, or community trust can be defined by a proportional,
self-consistent voting process, as a weighted eigenvector-centrality function
of the promise theoretical graph
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