A Spatial Agent-Based Model of N-Person Prisoner's Dilemma Cooperation in a Socio-Geographic Community

The purpose of this paper is to present a spatial agent-based model of N-person prisoner's dilemma that is designed to simulate the collective communication and cooperation within a socio-geographic community. Based on a tight coupling of REPAST and a vector Geographic Information System, the model simulates the emergence of cooperation from the mobility behaviors and interaction strategies of citizen agents. To approximate human behavior, the agents are set as stochastic learning automata with Pavlovian personalities and attitudes. A review of the theory of the standard prisoner's dilemma, the iterated prisoner's dilemma, and the N-person prisoner's dilemma is given as well as an overview of the generic architecture of the agent-based model. The capabilities of the spatial N-person prisoner's dilemma component are demonstrated with several scenario simulation runs for varied initial cooperation percentages and mobility dynamics. Experimental results revealed that agent mobility and context preservation bring qualitatively different effects to the evolution of cooperative behavior in an analyzed spatial environment.Agent Based Modeling, Cooperation, Prisoners Dilemma, Spatial Interaction Model, Spatially Structured Social Dilemma, Geographic Information Systems

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Reasoning of Competitive Non-Functional Requirements in Agent-Based Models

During the decision-making process in real-time competitive environments, there is a need to perform concurrent optimisation of multiple competitive objectives to select an optimal design decision for interdependent stakeholders. To handle such issues, this thesis successfully assimilates the goal-oriented requirements-engineering knowledge with analytical decision-making approaches to facilitate reasoning and analysis by encouraging stakeholders’ involvement. This leads to optimal decisions with domain knowledge improvement in the agent-based i*-goal model by balancing multiple conflicting non-functional requirements reciprocally

Sla Management in a Collaborative Network Of Federated Clouds: The Cloudland

Cloud services have always promised to be available, flexible, and speedy. However, not a single Cloud provider can deliver such promises to their distinctly demanding customers. Cloud providers have a constrained geographical presence, and are willing to invest in infrastructure only when it is profitable to them. Cloud federation is a concept that collectively combines segregated Cloud services to create an extended pool of resources for Clouds to competently deliver their promised level of services. This dissertation is concerned with studying the governing aspects related to the federation of Clouds through collaborative networking. The main objective of this dissertation is to define a framework for a Cloud network that considers balancing the trade-offs among customers’ various quality of service (QoS) requirements, as well as providers\u27 resources utilization. We propose a network of federated Clouds, CloudLend, that creates a platform for Cloud providers to collaborate, and for customers to expand their service selections. We also define and specify a service level agreement (SLA) management model in order to govern and administer the relationships established between different Cloud services in CloudLend. We define a multi-level SLA specification model to annotate and describe QoS terms, in addition to a game theory-based automated SLA negotiation model that supports both customers and providers in negotiating SLA terms, and guiding them towards signing a contract. We also define an adaptive agent-based SLA monitoring model which identifies the root causes of SLA violations, and impartially distributes any updates and changes in established SLAs to all relevant entities. Formal verification proved that our proposed framework assures customers with maximum optimized guarantees to their QoS requirements, in addition to supporting Cloud providers to make informed resource utilization decisions. Additionally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our SLA management model. Our proposed Cloud Lend network and its SLA management model paves the way to resource sharing among different Cloud providers, which allows for the providers’ lock-in constraints to be broken, allowing effortless migration of customers’ applications across different providers whenever is needed

From Digital Twins to Digital Selves and Beyond

This open access book aims at deepening the understanding of the relation between cyber-physical systems (CPSs) as socio-technical systems and their digital representations with intertwined artificial intelligence (AI). The authors describe why it is crucial for digital selves to be able to develop emotional behavior and why a humanity-inspired AI is necessary so that humans and humanoids can coexist. The introductory chapter describes major milestones in computer science which form the basis for the implementation of digital twins and digital selves. The subsequent Part I then lays the foundation to develop a socio-technical understanding of the nature of digital twins as representations and trans-human development objects. Following the conceptual understanding of digital twins and how they could be engineered according to cognitive and organizational structures, Part II forms the groundwork for understanding social behavior and its modeling. It discusses various perception-based socio-emotional approaches before sketching behavior-relevant models and their simulation capabilities. In particular, it is shown how emotions can substantially influence the collective behavior of artificial actors. Part III eventually presents a symbiosis showing under which preconditions digital selves might construct and produce digital twins as integrated design elements in trans-human ecosystems. The chapters in this part are dedicated to opportunities and modes of co-creating reflective socio-trans-human systems based on digital twin models, exploring mutual control and continuous development. The final epilog is congenitally speculative in its nature by presenting thoughts on future developments of artificial life in computational substrates. The book is written for researchers and professionals in areas like cyber-physical systems, robotics, social simulation or systems engineering, interested to take a speculative look into the future of digital twins and autonomous agents. It also touches upon philosophical aspects of digital twins, digital selves and humanoids

Managing Product Line Asset Bases

Product lines are predicated on collecting assets common to the desired product portfolio, commonly known as the asset base. For many product lines, the size of asset base has become large enough to create a variety of difficulties. The techniques for managing large product line asset bases are unaddressed in the literature. This research presents new techniques that take advantage of asset base characteristics, unavailable in more general collections, to both reduce the number of assets and to organize the asset base that go beyond what is possible with other software collections. The result is an asset base that is more efficient to use. Research related to improving the organization of the asset base was performed by taking the component assets of a research SPL and arranging them based on three different organizational criteria - according to the structure of the architecture, important abstractions (Key Domain Abstractions), and product features. The three resulting organizations were then studied using four evaluation criteria - natural division of assets into groups (assets fit into the groups provided by the organization), easy to map assets to organization criteria (mapping between the selection of a particular product variant and the assets needed to produce it), reasonably sized groups, and similarly sized groups. The effectiveness of the different organizations was then compared and recommendations concerning asset base organization provided. The literature indicates that large product lines are likely to contain multiple assets that provide the same functionality, but that differ in the program context that they support. The presence of the duplicative assets creates a number of problems including organization difficulties. In a SPL these differences in program context are the result of requirements expressed at the product`s variation points. The limited differences in program context make it practical to attempt to provide a modular solution which permits the desired variation to be assembled as needed. The research explored a number of different implementation mechanisms to provide these modular variation points. The result is a recommendation on how to implement SPL variation points provided in the form of a pattern language

A Digital Game Maturity Model

Game development is an interdisciplinary concept that embraces artistic, software engineering, management, and business disciplines. Game development is considered as one of the most complex tasks in software engineering. Hence, for successful development of good-quality games, the game developers must consider and explore all related dimensions as well as discussing them with the stakeholders involved. This research facilitates a better understanding of important dimensions of digital game development methodology. The increased popularity of digital games, the challenges faced by game development organizations in developing quality games, and severe competition in the digital game industry demand a game development process maturity assessment. Consequently, this study presents a Digital Game Maturity Model to evaluate the current development methodology in an organization. The objective is first to identify key factors in the game development process, then to classify these factors into target groups, and eventually to use this grouping as a theoretical basis for proposing a maturity model for digital game development. In doing so, the research focuses on three major stakeholders in game development: developers, consumers, and business management. The framework of the proposed model consists of assessment questionnaires made up of key identified factors from three empirical studies, a performance scale, and a rating method. The main goal of the questionnaires is to collect information about current processes and practices. This research contributes towards formulating a comprehensive and unified strategy for game development process maturity assessment. The proposed model was evaluated with two case studies from the digital game industry