Practical applications of multi-agent systems in electric power systems

The transformation of energy networks from passive to active systems requires the embedding of intelligence within the network. One suitable approach to integrating distributed intelligent systems is multi-agent systems technology, where components of functionality run as autonomous agents capable of interaction through messaging. This provides loose coupling between components that can benefit the complex systems envisioned for the smart grid. This paper reviews the key milestones of demonstrated agent systems in the power industry and considers which aspects of agent design must still be addressed for widespread application of agent technology to occur

Towards a Tool-based Development Methodology for Pervasive Computing Applications

Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This challenge involves coping with heterogeneous devices, overcoming the intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture for the application, encoding it in a program, writing specific code to test the application, and finally deploying it. This paper presents a design language and a tool suite covering the development life-cycle of a pervasive computing application. The design language allows to define a taxonomy of area-specific building-blocks, abstracting over their heterogeneity. This language also includes a layer to define the architecture of an application, following an architectural pattern commonly used in the pervasive computing domain. Our underlying methodology assigns roles to the stakeholders, providing separation of concerns. Our tool suite includes a compiler that takes design artifacts written in our language as input and generates a programming framework that supports the subsequent development stages, namely implementation, testing, and deployment. Our methodology has been applied on a wide spectrum of areas. Based on these experiments, we assess our approach through three criteria: expressiveness, usability, and productivity

Investigation into Mobile Learning Framework in Cloud Computing Platform

Abstract—Cloud computing infrastructure is increasingly used for distributed applications. Mobile learning applications deployed in the cloud are a new research direction. The applications require specific development approaches for effective and reliable communication. This paper proposes an interdisciplinary approach for design and development of mobile applications in the cloud. The approach includes front service toolkit and backend service toolkit. The front service toolkit packages data and sends it to a backend deployed in a cloud computing platform. The backend service toolkit manages rules and workflow, and then transmits required results to the front service toolkit. To further show feasibility of the approach, the paper introduces a case study and shows its performance

A Formal Approach to Exploiting Multi-Stage Attacks based on File-System Vulnerabilities of Web Applications (Extended Version)

Web applications require access to the file-system for many different tasks. When analyzing the security of a web application, secu- rity analysts should thus consider the impact that file-system operations have on the security of the whole application. Moreover, the analysis should take into consideration how file-system vulnerabilities might in- teract with other vulnerabilities leading an attacker to breach into the web application. In this paper, we first propose a classification of file- system vulnerabilities, and then, based on this classification, we present a formal approach that allows one to exploit file-system vulnerabilities. We give a formal representation of web applications, databases and file- systems, and show how to reason about file-system vulnerabilities. We also show how to combine file-system vulnerabilities and SQL-Injection vulnerabilities for the identification of complex, multi-stage attacks. We have developed an automatic tool that implements our approach and we show its efficiency by discussing several real-world case studies, which are witness to the fact that our tool can generate, and exploit, complex attacks that, to the best of our knowledge, no other state-of-the-art-tool for the security of web applications can find

Integrated Dynamic Facade Control with an Agent-based Architecture for Commercial Buildings

Dynamic façades have significant technical potential to minimize heating, cooling, and lighting energy use and peak electric demand in the perimeter zone of commercial buildings, but the performance of these systems is reliant on being able to balance complex trade-offs between solar control, daylight admission, comfort, and view over the life of the installation. As the context for controllable energy-efficiency technologies grows more complex with the increased use of intermittent renewable energy resources on the grid, it has become increasingly important to look ahead towards more advanced approaches to integrated systems control in order to achieve optimum life-cycle performance at a lower cost. This study examines the feasibility of a model predictive control system for low-cost autonomous dynamic façades. A system architecture designed around lightweight, simple agents is proposed. The architecture accommodates whole building and grid level demands through its modular, hierarchical approach. Automatically-generated models for computing window heat gains, daylight illuminance, and discomfort glare are described. The open source Modelica and JModelica software tools were used to determine the optimum state of control given inputs of window heat gains and lighting loads for a 24-hour optimization horizon. Penalty functions for glare and view/ daylight quality were implemented as constraints. The control system was tested on a low-power controller (1.4 GHz single core with 2 GB of RAM) to evaluate feasibility. The target platform is a low-cost ($35/unit) embedded controller with 1.2 GHz dual-core cpu and 1 GB of RAM. Configuration and commissioning of the curtainwall unit was designed to be largely plug and play with minimal inputs required by the manufacturer through a web-based user interface. An example application was used to demonstrate optimal control of a three-zone electrochromic window for a south-facing zone. The overall approach was deemed to be promising. Further engineering is required to enable scalable, turnkey solutions

Microservices Validation: Methodology and Implementation

Due to the wide spread of cloud computing, arises actual question about architecture, design and implementation of cloud applications. The microservice model describes the design and development of loosely coupled cloud applications when computing resources are provided on the basis of automated IaaS and PaaS cloud platforms. Such applications consist of hundreds and thousands of service instances, so automated validation and testing of cloud applications developed on the basis of microservice model is a pressing issue. There are constantly developing new methods of testing both individual microservices and cloud applications at a whole. This article presents our vision of a framework for the validation of the microservice cloud applications, providing an integrated approach for the implementation of various testing methods of such applications, from basic unit tests to continuous stability testing

Search based software engineering: Trends, techniques and applications

© ACM, 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version is available from the link below.In the past five years there has been a dramatic increase in work on Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE), an approach to Software Engineering (SE) in which Search-Based Optimization (SBO) algorithms are used to address problems in SE. SBSE has been applied to problems throughout the SE lifecycle, from requirements and project planning to maintenance and reengineering. The approach is attractive because it offers a suite of adaptive automated and semiautomated solutions in situations typified by large complex problem spaces with multiple competing and conflicting objectives. This article provides a review and classification of literature on SBSE. The work identifies research trends and relationships between the techniques applied and the applications to which they have been applied and highlights gaps in the literature and avenues for further research.EPSRC and E