Multi-agent systems for power engineering applications - part 2 : Technologies, standards and tools for building multi-agent systems

This is the second part of a 2-part paper that has arisen from the work of the IEEE Power Engineering Society's Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) Working Group. Part 1 of the paper examined the potential value of MAS technology to the power industry, described fundamental concepts and approaches within the field of multi-agent systems that are appropriate to power engineering applications, and presented a comprehensive review of the power engineering applications for which MAS are being investigated. It also defined the technical issues which must be addressed in order to accelerate and facilitate the uptake of the technology within the power and energy sector. Part 2 of the paper explores the decisions inherent in engineering multi-agent systems for applications in the power and energy sector and offers guidance and recommendations on how MAS can be designed and implemented. Given the significant and growing interest in this field, it is imperative that the power engineering community considers the standards, tools, supporting technologies and design methodologies available to those wishing to implement a MAS solution for a power engineering problem. The paper describes the various options available and makes recommendations on best practice. It also describes the problem of interoperability between different multi-agent systems and proposes how this may be tackled

Data analysis for agent based mobile services

One of the high interesting areas in the distributed systems is the problem of building and running pervasive computing services for mobile users. The central point for building such a services is to appropriately model the physical and data environment. In this paper we concentrate on the data part of such an environment that would enable creating a general scheme for a category of flexible services for mobile users. We define the basic profile of the users and methods, how the services should deal with the profiles. For modeling the presence of the user in the data environment (even if he/she is off-line) the agent-based solution was chosen, so the distributed system is build as a multi-agent system

Méthodes orientées agent et multi-agent

http://www.emse.fr/~picard/publications/bernon09industrie.pdfNational audienceLes systèmes multi-agents (SMA) ont montré leur pertinence pour la conception d'applications distribuées (logiquement ou physiquement), complexes et robustes. Le concept d'agent est aujourd'hui plus qu'une technologie efficace, il représente un nouveau paradigme pour le développement de logiciels dans lesquels l'agent est un logiciel autonome qui a un objectif, évolue dans un environnement et interagit avec d'autres agents au moyen de langages et de protocoles (voir le chapitre 1 " Introduction aux systèmes multi-agents "). Souvent, l'agent est considéré comme un objet " intelligent " ou comme un niveau d'abstraction au-dessus des objets et des composants (voir le chapitre 5 " Composants logiciels et systèmes multi-agents "). Les méthodes de développement orientées objet - au vu des différences entre les objets et les agents - ne sont pas directement applicables au développement de SMA. Il est alors devenu nécessaire d'étendre ou de développer de nouveaux modèles, de nouvelles méthodologies et de nouveaux outils adaptés au concept d'agent

CRiBAC: Community-centric role interaction based access control model

As one of the most efficient solutions to complex and large-scale problems, multi-agent cooperation has been in the limelight for the past few decades. Recently, many research projects have focused on context-aware cooperation to dynamically provide complex services. As cooperation in the multi-agent systems (MASs) becomes more common, guaranteeing the security of such cooperation takes on even greater importance. However, existing security models do not reflect the agents' unique features, including cooperation and context-awareness. In this paper, we propose a Community-based Role interaction-based Access Control model (CRiBAC) to allow secure cooperation in MASs. To do this, we refine and extend our preliminary RiBAC model, which was proposed earlier to support secure interactions among agents, by introducing a new concept of interaction permission, and then extend it to CRiBAC to support community-based cooperation among agents. We analyze potential problems related to interaction permissions and propose two approaches to address them. We also propose an administration model to facilitate administration of CRiBAC policies. Finally, we present the implementation of a prototype system based on a sample scenario to assess the proposed work and show its feasibility. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Self-Configuring Socio-Technical Systems: Redesign at Runtime

Modern information systems are becoming more and more socio-technical systems, namely systems composed of human (social) agents and software (technical) systems operating together in a common environment. The structure of such systems has to evolve dynamically in response to the changes of the environment. When new requirements are introduced, when an actor leaves the system or when a new actor comes, the socio-technical structure needs to be redesigned and revised. In this paper, an approach to dynamic reconfiguration of a socio-technical system structure in response to internal or external changes is proposed. The approach is based on planning techniques for generating possible alternative configurations, and local strategies for their evaluation. The reconfiguration mechanism is presented, which makes the socio-technical system self-configuring, and the approach is discussed and analyzed on a simple case study