On the Identification of Agents in the Design of Production Control Systems

This paper describes a methodology that is being developed for designing and building agent-based systems for the domain of production control. In particular, this paper deals with the steps that are involved in identifying the agents and in specifying their responsibilities. The methodology aims to be usable by engineers who have a background in production control but who have no prior experience in agent technology. For this reason, the methodology needs to be very prescriptive with respect to the agent-related aspects of design

Dynamic Model-based Management of Service-Oriented Infrastructure.

Models are an effective tool for systems and software design. They allow software architects to abstract from the non-relevant details. Those qualities are also useful for the technical management of networks, systems and software, such as those that compose service oriented architectures. Models can provide a set of well-defined abstractions over the distributed heterogeneous service infrastructure that enable its automated management. We propose to use the managed system as a source of dynamically generated runtime models, and decompose management processes into a composition of model transformations. We have created an autonomic service deployment and configuration architecture that obtains, analyzes, and transforms system models to apply the required actions, while being oblivious to the low-level details. An instrumentation layer automatically builds these models and interprets the planned management actions to the system. We illustrate these concepts with a distributed service update operation

Towards intelligent web services: the web service modeling ontology (WSMO)

The Semantic Web and the Semantic Web Services build a natural application area for Intelligent Agents, namely querying and reasoning about structured knowledge and semantic descriptions of services and their interfaces on the Web. This paper provides an overview of the Web Service Modeling Ontology, a conceptual framework for the semantical description of Web services

Commercial software tools for intelligent autonomous systems

This article identifies some of the commercial software tools that can potentially be examined, or relied upon for their techniques, within new EPSRC projects entitled "Reconfigurable Autonomy" and "Distributed Sensing and Control.." awarded and to be undertaken between Liverpool, Southampton and Surrey Universities in the next 4 years. Although such projects strive to produce new techniques of various kinds, the software reviewed here could also influence, shape and help to integrate the algorithmic outcome of all 16 projects awarded within the EPSRC Autonomous and Intelligent Systems programme early 2012. To avoid mis-representation of technololgies provided by the software producer companies listed, most of this review is based on using quotes from original product descriptions