Special issue: Development of service-based and agent-based computing systems

This special issue presents the best papers from theworkshops onService-OrientedComputing: Agents, Semantics and Engineering (SOCASE 2010) held in May 2010 in Toronto, Canada and the IEEE 2010 First International Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing and Multi-Agent Systems (SOCMAS 2010) held in July 2010 in Miami, Florida, USA. The goal of the workshops was to present the recent significant developments at the intersections of multi-agent systems, semantic technology, and service-oriented computing, and to promote crossfertilization of techniques. In particular, the workshops attempted to identify techniques from research on multi-agent systems and semantic technology that will have the greatest impact on automating serviceoriented application construction and management, focusing on critical challenges such as service quality assurance, reliability, and adaptability. The areas of service-oriented computing and Semantic Web services offer much of real interest to the multi-agent system community, including similarities in system architectures and provision processes, powerful tools, and the focus on many related issues including quality of service, security, and reliability. In addition, service-oriented computing and Semantic Web services offer various diverse application fields for both the concepts and methodologies of intelligent agent and multi-agent systems. Similarly, techniques developed in the multi-agent systems research community promise to have a strong impact on this fast growing technology. In particular, they enable services to be discovered and enacted across enterprise boundaries. If an organisation bases its success on services provided by others, then it must be able to trust that the services will perform as promised, whenever needed. Researchers in multi-agent systems have investigated such trust mechanisms

Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields

This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways

Applying tropos to socio-technical system design and runtime configuration

Recent trends in Software Engineering have introduced the importance of reconsidering the traditional idea of software design as a socio-tecnical problem, where human agents are integral part of the system along with hardware and software components. Design and runtime support for Socio-Technical Systems (STSs) requires appropriate modeling techniques and non-traditional infrastructures. Agent-oriented software methodologies are natural solutions to the development of STSs, both humans and technical components are conceptualized and analyzed as part of the same system. In this paper, we illustrate a number of Tropos features that we believe fundamental to support the development and runtime reconfiguration of STSs. Particularly, we focus on two critical design issues: risk analysis and location variability. We show how they are integrated and used into a planning-based approach to support the designer in evaluating and choosing the best design alternative. Finally, we present a generic framework to develop self-reconfigurable STSs

Advances in infrastructures and tools for multiagent systems

In the last few years, information system technologies have focused on solving challenges in order to develop distributed applications. Distributed systems can be viewed as collections of service-provider and ser vice-consumer components interlinked by dynamically defined workflows (Luck and McBurney 2008).Alberola Oltra, JM.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Such Aparicio, JM. (2014). Advances in infrastructures and tools for multiagent systems. Information Systems Frontiers. 16:163-167. doi:10.1007/s10796-014-9493-6S16316716Alberola, J. M., Búrdalo, L., Julián, V., Terrasa, A., & García-Fornes, A. (2014). An adaptive framework for monitoring agent organizations. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9478-x .Alfonso, B., Botti, V., Garrido, A., & Giret, A. (2014). A MAS-based infrastructure for negotiation and its application to a water-right market. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9443-8 .Andrighetto, G., Castelfranchi, C., Mayor, E., McBreen, J., López-Sánchez, M., & Parsons, S. (2013). (Social) norm dynamics. In G. Andrighetto, G. Governatori, P. Noriega, & L. W. van der Torre (Eds.), Normative multi-agent systems (pp. 135–170). Dagstuhl: Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik.Baarslag, T., Fujita, K., Gerding, E. H., Hindriks, K., Ito, T., Jennings, N. R., et al. (2013). Evaluating practical negotiating agents: results and analysis of the 2011 international competition. Artificial Intelligence, 198, 73–103.Boissier, O., Bordini, R. H., Hübner, J. F., Ricci, A., & Santi, A. (2013). Multi-agent oriented programming with JaCaMo. Science of Computer Programming, 78(6), 747–761.Campos, J., Esteva, M., López-Sánchez, M., Morales, J., & Salamó, M. (2011). Organisational adaptation of multi-agent systems in a peer-to-peer scenario. Computing, 91(2), 169–215.Carrera, A., Iglesias, C. A., & Garijo, M. (2014). Beast methodology: an agile testing methodology for multi-agent systems based on behaviour driven development. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9438-5 .Criado, N., Such, J. M., & Botti, V. (2014). Norm reasoning services. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9444-7 .Del Val, E., Rebollo, M., & Botti, V. (2014). Enhancing decentralized service discovery in open service-oriented multi-agent systems. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 28(1), 1–30.Denti, E., Omicini, A., & Ricci, A. (2002). Coordination tools for MAS development and deployment. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 16(9–10), 721–752.Dignum, V., & Dignum, F. (2012). A logic of agent organizations. Logic Journal of IGPL, 20(1), 283–316.Ferber, J., & Gutknecht, O. (1998). A meta-model for the analysis and design of organizations in multi-agent systems. In Multi agent systems. Proceedings. International Conference on (pp. 128–135). IEEE.Fogués, R. L., Such, J. M., Espinosa, A., & Garcia-Fornes, A. (2014). BFF: a tool for eliciting tie strength and user communities in social networking services. Information Systems Frontiers, 16(2). doi: 10.1007/s10796-013-9453-6 .Garcia, E., Giret, A., & Botti, V. (2011). Evaluating software engineering techniques for developing complex systems with multiagent approaches. Information and Software Technology, 53(5), 494–506.Garcia-Fornes, A., Hübner, J., Omicini, A., Rodriguez-Aguilar, J., & Botti, V. (2011). Infrastructures and tools for multiagent systems for the new generation of distributed systems. Engineering Applications of Articial Intelligence, 24(7), 1095–1097.Jennings, N., Faratin, P., Lomuscio, A., Parsons, S., Sierra, C., & Wooldridge, M. (2001). Automated negotiation: prospects, methods and challenges. International Journal of Group Decision and Negotiation, 10(2), 199–215.Jung, Y., Kim, M., Masoumzadeh, A., & Joshi, J. B. (2012). A survey of security issue in multi-agent systems. Artificial Intelligence Review, 37(3), 239–260.Kota, R., Gibbins, N., & Jennings, N. R. (2012). Decentralized approaches for self-adaptation in agent organizations. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS), 7(1), 1.Kraus, S. (1997). Negotiation and cooperation in multi-agent environments. Artificial Intelligence, 94(1), 79–97.Lin, Y. I., Chou, Y. W., Shiau, J. Y., & Chu, C. H. (2013). Multi-agent negotiation based on price schedules algorithm for distributed collaborative design. Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 24(3), 545–557.Luck, M., & McBurney, P. (2008). Computing as interaction: agent and agreement technologies.Luck, M., McBurney, P., Shehory, O., & Willmott, S. (2005). Agent technology: Computing as interaction (A roadmap for agent based computing). AgentLink.Ossowski, S., & Menezes, R. (2006). On coordination and its significance to distributed and multiagent systems. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 18(4), 359–370.Ossowski, S., Sierra, C., & Botti. (2013). Agreement technologies: A computing perspective. In Agreement Technologies (pp. 3–16). Springer Netherlands.Pinyol, I., & Sabater-Mir, J. (2013). Computational trust and reputation models for open multi-agent systems: a review. Artificial Intelligence Review, 40(1), 1–25.Ricci, A., Piunti, M., & Viroli, M. (2011). Environment programming in multi-agent systems: an artifact-based perspective. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 23(2), 158–192.Sierra, C., & Debenham, J. (2006). Trust and honour in information-based agency. In Proceedings of the 5th international conference on autonomous agents and multi agent systems, (p. 1225–1232). New York: ACM.Sierra, C., Botti, V., & Ossowski, S. (2011). Agreement computing. KI-Knstliche Intelligenz, 25(1), 57–61.Vasconcelos, W., García-Camino, A., Gaertner, D., Rodríguez-Aguilar, J. A., & Noriega, P. (2012). Distributed norm management for multi-agent systems. Expert Systems with Applications, 39(5), 5990–5999.Wooldridge, M. (2002). An introduction to multiagent systems. New York: Wiley.Wooldridge, M., & Jennings, N. R. (1995). Intelligent agents: theory and practice. Knowledge Engineering Review, 10(2), 115–152

The i* framework for goal-oriented modeling

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39417-6i* is a widespread framework in the software engineering field that supports goal-oriented modeling of socio-technical systems and organizations. At its heart lies a language offering concepts such as actor, dependency, goal and decomposition. i* models resemble a network of interconnected, autonomous, collaborative and dependable strategic actors. Around this language, several analysis techniques have emerged, e.g. goal satisfaction analysis and metrics computation. In this work, we present a consolidated version of the i* language based on the most adopted versions of the language. We define the main constructs of the language and we articulate them in the form of a metamodel. Then, we implement this version and a concrete technique, goal satisfaction analys is based on goal propagation, using ADOxx. Throughout the chapter, we used an example based on open source software adoption to illustrate the concepts and test the implementation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

On the emergent Semantic Web and overlooked issues

The emergent Semantic Web, despite being in its infancy, has already received a lotof attention from academia and industry. This resulted in an abundance of prototype systems and discussion most of which are centred around the underlying infrastructure. However, when we critically review the work done to date we realise that there is little discussion with respect to the vision of the Semantic Web. In particular, there is an observed dearth of discussion on how to deliver knowledge sharing in an environment such as the Semantic Web in effective and efficient manners. There are a lot of overlooked issues, associated with agents and trust to hidden assumptions made with respect to knowledge representation and robust reasoning in a distributed environment. These issues could potentially hinder further development if not considered at the early stages of designing Semantic Web systems. In this perspectives paper, we aim to help engineers and practitioners of the Semantic Web by raising awareness of these issues