Designing normative open virtual enterprises

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Enterprise Information Systems on 23/03/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17517575.2015.1036927.[EN] There is an increasing interest on developing virtual enterprises in order to deal with the globalisation of the economy, the rapid growth of information technologies and the increase of competitiveness. In this paper we deal with the development of normative open virtual enterprises (NOVEs). They are systems with a global objective that are composed of a set of heterogeneous entities and enterprises that exchange services following a specific normative context. In order to analyse and design systems of this kind the multi-agent paradigm seems suitable because it offers a specific solution for supporting the social and contractual relationships between enterprises and for formalising their business processes. This paper presents how the Regulated Open Multiagent systems (ROMAS) methodology, an agent-oriented software methodology, can be used to analyse and design NOVEs. ROMAS offers a complete development process that allows identifying and formalising of the structure of NOVEs, their normative context and the interactions among their members. The use of ROMAS is exemplified by means of a case study that represents an automotive supply chain.This work was partially supported by the projects [PROMETEOII/2013/019], [TIN2012-36586-C03-01], [FP7-29493], [TIN2011-27652-C03-00] and [CSD2007-00022], and the CASES project within the 7th European Community Framework Programme [grant agreement number 294931].Garcia Marques, ME.; Giret Boggino, AS.; Botti Navarro, VJ. (2016). Designing normative open virtual enterprises. Enterprise Information Systems. 10(3):303-324. https://doi.org/10.1080/17517575.2015.1036927S303324103Cardoso, H. L., Urbano, J., Brandão, P., Rocha, A. P., & Oliveira, E. (2012). 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Evaluating how agent methodologies support the specification of the normative environment through the development process

[EN] Due to the increase in collaborative work and the decentralization of processes in many domains, there is an expanding demand for large-scale, flexible and adaptive software systems to support the interactions of people and institutions distributed in heterogeneous environments. Commonly, these software applications should follow specific regulations meaning the actors using them are bound by rights, duties and restrictions. Since this normative environment determines the final design of the software system, it should be considered as an important issue during the design of the system. Some agent-oriented software engineering methodologies deal with the development of normative systems (systems that have a normative environment) by integrating the analysis of the normative environment of a system in the development process. This paper analyses to what extent these methodologies support the analysis and formalisation of the normative environment and highlights some open issues of the topic.This work is partially supported by the PROMETEOII/2013/019, TIN2012-36586-C03-01, FP7-29493, TIN2011-27652-C03-00, CSD2007-00022 projects, and the CASES project within the 7th European Community Framework Program under the grant agreement No 294931.Garcia Marques, ME.; Miles, S.; Luck, M.; Giret Boggino, AS. (2014). Evaluating how agent methodologies support the specification of the normative environment through the development process. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-014-9275-zS120Cossentino, M., Hilaire, V., Molesini, A., & Seidita, V. (Eds.). (2014). Handbook on agent-oriented design processes (Vol. VIII, 569 p. 508 illus.). Berlin: Springer.Akbari, O. (2010). A survey of agent-oriented software engineering paradigm: Towards its industrial acceptance. 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Engineering regulated open multiagent systems

In this thesis, w e focus on the d e velopment o f normati v e open multiagent systems. The y are systems in which heterogeneous and autonomous agents may need to coexist in a complex social and legal framework that can evolve to address the different and often conflicting objecti ves of the man y stak eholders inv olved. This thesis presents ROMAS, a set o f methods and tools for analyzing and designing systems o f this kind. R OMAS inte grates the analysis, design and v erification o f these systems by means o f a metamodel, a methodology that includes specific de v elopment guidelines and a model-dri ven CASE tool.The author wish to thank R. Bejar and F. Manya for supervising this PhD thesis. Supported by MINECO projects TIN2009-14704-C03-01 and TIN2010-20967-C04-01/03.Garcia Marques, ME. (2014). Engineering regulated open multiagent systems. AI Communications. 27:417-419. https://doi.org/10.3233/AIC-1406104174192

Secure Tropos: An Agent Oriented Software Engineering Methodology for the Development of Health and Social Care Information Systems

A huge amount of health and social care related information needs to be stored and analysed; with the aid of computer systems this can be done faster and more efficiently. As a result, computerised health and social care information systems are gaining popularity. The development of such systems, mostly so far, follows an ad-hoc pattern. However, in order to effectively deal with the characteristics of such systems such as size, security, unpredictability, and openness; appropriate software engineering methodologies and paradigms should be employed for their development. This paper defines a set of requirements that a methodology should demonstrate and it argues for the appropriateness of the Secure Tropos agent oriented methodology for the development of health and social care information systems. The applicability of the methodology is demonstrated with the aid of a real-life case study, the electronic Single Assessment Process system, an information system to support integrated assessment of the health and social care needs of older people. The application of the proposed methodology on the case study indicated that the methodology satisfies the identified requirements

A security oriented approach in the development of multiagent systems : applied to the management of the health and social care needs of older people in England.

Security can play an important role in the development of some multi agent systems. However, a careful analysis of software development processes indicates that the definition of security requirements is, usually, considered after the design of the system. This approach, usually, leads to problems, such as conflicts between security and functional requirements, which can translate into security vulnerabilities. As a result, the integration of security issues in agent oriented software engineering methodologies has been identified as an important issue. Nevertheless, developers of agent oriented software engineering methodologies have mainly neglected security engineering and in fact very little evidence has been reported on work that integrates security issues into the development stages of agent oriented software engineering methodologies. This thesis advances the current state of the art In agent oriented software engineering in many ways. It identifies problems associated with the integration of security and software engineering and proposes a set of minimum requirements that a security oriented process should demonstrate. It extends the concepts and the development process of the Tropos methodology with respect to security to allow developers, even those with minimum security knowledge, to identify desired security requirements for their multi agent systems, reason about them, and as a result develop a system that satisfies its security requirements. In doing so, this research has developed (1) an analysis technique to enable developers to select amongst alternative architectural styles using as criteria the security requirements of the system, (2) a pattern language consisting of security patterns for multi agent systems, and (3) a scenario-based technique that allows developers to test the reaction of the system to potential attacks. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated by employing it in the development of the electronic single assessment process (eSAP) system, a real-life case study that provided the initial motivation for this research

Inclusion of service robots in the daily lives of frail older users: a step-by-step definition procedure on users' requirements

The implications for the inclusion of robots in the daily lives of frail older adults, especially in relation to these population needs, have not been extensively studied. The “Multi-Role Shadow Robotic System for Independent Living” (SRS) project has developed a remotelycontrolled, semi-autonomous robotic system to be used in domestic environments. The objective of this paper is to document the iterative procedure used to identify, select and prioritize user requirements. Seventy-four requirements were identified by means of focus groups, individual interviews and scenario-based interviews. The list of user requirements, ordered according to impact, number and transnational criteria, revealed a high number of requirements related to basic and instrumental activities of daily living, cognitive and social support and monitorization, and also involving privacy, safety and adaptation issues. Analysing and understanding older users’ perceptions and needs when interacting with technological devices adds value to assistive technology and ensures that the systems address currently unmet needs

Intentional dialogues in multi-agent systems based on ontologies and argumentation

Some areas of application, for example, healthcare, are known to resist the replacement of human operators by fully autonomous systems. It is typically not transparent to users how artificial intelligence systems make decisions or obtain information, making it difficult for users to trust them. To address this issue, we investigate how argumentation theory and ontology techniques can be used together with reasoning about intentions to build complex natural language dialogues to support human decision-making. Based on such an investigation, we propose MAIDS, a framework for developing multi-agent intentional dialogue systems, which can be used in different domains. Our framework is modular so that it can be used in its entirety or just the modules that fulfil the requirements of each system to be developed. Our work also includes the formalisation of a novel dialogue-subdialogue structure with which we can address ontological or theory-of-mind issues and later return to the main subject. As a case study, we have developed a multi-agent system using the MAIDS framework to support healthcare professionals in making decisions on hospital bed allocations. Furthermore, we evaluated this multi-agent system with domain experts using real data from a hospital. The specialists who evaluated our system strongly agree or agree that the dialogues in which they participated fulfil Cohen’s desiderata for task-oriented dialogue systems. Our agents have the ability to explain to the user how they arrived at certain conclusions. Moreover, they have semantic representations as well as representations of the mental state of the dialogue participants, allowing the formulation of coherent justifications expressed in natural language, therefore, easy for human participants to understand. This indicates the potential of the framework introduced in this thesis for the practical development of explainable intelligent systems as well as systems supporting hybrid intelligence

Control Patterns in a Health Care Network

In this paper we present control patterns for the analysis and design of administrative control mechanisms in a network organization. A control pattern is a description of a generic and reusable control mechanism that solves a specific control problem, to be selected on the basis of the context. To represent the context and solution, we analyze a network organization as a set of actors who transfer objects of economic value. The usefulness and adequacy of the control patterns is demonstrated by a case study of the governance and control mechanisms of the Dutch public health insurance network for exceptional medical expenses (AWBZ)