Adapting Quality Assurance to Adaptive Systems: The Scenario Coevolution Paradigm

From formal and practical analysis, we identify new challenges that self-adaptive systems pose to the process of quality assurance. When tackling these, the effort spent on various tasks in the process of software engineering is naturally re-distributed. We claim that all steps related to testing need to become self-adaptive to match the capabilities of the self-adaptive system-under-test. Otherwise, the adaptive system's behavior might elude traditional variants of quality assurance. We thus propose the paradigm of scenario coevolution, which describes a pool of test cases and other constraints on system behavior that evolves in parallel to the (in part autonomous) development of behavior in the system-under-test. Scenario coevolution offers a simple structure for the organization of adaptive testing that allows for both human-controlled and autonomous intervention, supporting software engineering for adaptive systems on a procedural as well as technical level.Comment: 17 pages, published at ISOLA 201

To boldly go:an occam-π mission to engineer emergence

Future systems will be too complex to design and implement explicitly. Instead, we will have to learn to engineer complex behaviours indirectly: through the discovery and application of local rules of behaviour, applied to simple process components, from which desired behaviours predictably emerge through dynamic interactions between massive numbers of instances. This paper describes a process-oriented architecture for fine-grained concurrent systems that enables experiments with such indirect engineering. Examples are presented showing the differing complex behaviours that can arise from minor (non-linear) adjustments to low-level parameters, the difficulties in suppressing the emergence of unwanted (bad) behaviour, the unexpected relationships between apparently unrelated physical phenomena (shown up by their separate emergence from the same primordial process swamp) and the ability to explore and engineer completely new physics (such as force fields) by their emergence from low-level process interactions whose mechanisms can only be imagined, but not built, at the current time

Production Networks Linkages, Innovation Processes and Social Management Technologies. A Methodological Approach Applied to the Volkswagen case in Argentina

The purpose of this paper -as a part of a wider research project - is to analyze the concept of production network from a methodological and theoretical viewpoint based on a three-plane perspective. These dimensions are the linkages among agents, the innovation activities, and the social management technology, including work process organization and the social agreement generation model in force. It is an experimentally methodological approach that tries to go from a theoretical conceptualization of the phenomenon to its empirical evaluation. The questions guiding this research are as follows: What are the variables and dimensions to be observed in the analysis of a group of interconnected firms in order to define a production network? Is it a unique definition or, on the contrary, does it involve a range of alternatives? What are the externalities generated by the agents who belong to one network? What is the relationship between the network’s firms’ technological behavior and their organizational counterpart? How are learning processes in the business firms linked to their own training systems? Has the social management technology some differential role in the learning process and in the development of skills? How do knowledge transmission processes manifest themselves within the “network”? What indicators are useful for the empirical identification of the different means of manifestation of the network according to the theoretical viewpoint adopted? How can those indicators be articulated in order to elaborate typologies intended for the identification of “hybrid” models? How can a complex indicator be built in order to show the different levels of circulation of intangible assets, development of learning processes and work process organization? In the first section, the conceptualization of the production “network” used in this paper is discussed. In the second section, most relevant variables and indicators are presented in order to feature the business firms and the network in terms of: a) type, quantity and quality of tangible and intangible exchanges among the agents; b) innovative capacity and learning; c) social management technology. Then we elaborate a typology of networks based on the consideration of the previous parameters. Lastly, in the fourth section, we discuss how the three dimensions interact in the case of Volkswagen and his forty main local suppliers.Innovation, production process, case study

Coordinating complex problem-solving among distributed intelligent agents

A process-oriented control model is described for distributed problem solving. The model coordinates the transfer and manipulation of information across independent networked applications, both intelligent and conventional. The model was implemented using SOCIAL, a set of object-oriented tools for distributing computing. Complex sequences of distributed tasks are specified in terms of high level scripts. Scripts are executed by SOCIAL objects called Manager Agents, which realize an intelligent coordination model that routes individual tasks to suitable server applications across the network. These tools are illustrated in a prototype distributed system for decision support of ground operations for NASA's Space Shuttle fleet

Engineering Multiagent Systems - Reflections

This report documents the programme and outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12342 ``Engineering multiagent Systems\u27\u27. The seminar brought together researchers from both academia and industry to identify the potential for and facilitate convergence towards standards for agent technology. As such it was particularly relevant to industrial research. A key objective of the seminar, moreover, has been to establish a road map for engineering multiagent systems. Various research areas have been identified as important topics for a research agenda with a focus on the development of multiagent systems. Among others, these include the integration of agent technology and legacy systems, component-based agent design, standards for tooling, establishing benchmarks for agent technology, and the development of frameworks for coordination and organisation of multiagent systems. This report presents a more detailed discussion of these and other research challenges that were identified. The unique atmosphere of Dagstuhl provided the perfect environment for leading researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds to discuss future directions in programming languages, tools and platforms for multiagent systems, and the road map produced by the seminar will have a timely and decisive impact on the future of this whole area of research