Utility-Based Mechanism for Structural Self-Organization in Service-Oriented MAS

Structural relations established among agents influence the performance of decentralized service discovery process in multiagent systems. Moreover, distributed systems should be able to adapt their structural relations to changes in environmental conditions. In this article, we present a service-oriented multiagent systems, where agents initially self-organize their structural relations based on the similarity of their services. During the service discovery process, agents integrate a mechanism that facilitates the self-organization of their structural relations to adapt the structure of the system to the service demand. This mechanism facilitates the task of decentralized service discovery and improves its performance. Each agent has local knowledge about its direct neighbors and the queries received during discovery processes. With this information, an agent is able to analyze its structural relations and decide when it is more appropriate to modify its direct neighbors and select the most suitable acquaintances to replace them. The experimental evaluation shows how this self-organization mechanism improves the overall performance of the service discovery process in the system when the service demand changesThis work is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through grants CSD2007-0022 (CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010), TIN2012-36586-C03-01, TIN2012-36586-C03-01, TIN2012-36586-C03-02, PROMETEOII/2013/019, and FPU grant AP-2008-00601 awarded to E. Del Val.Del Val Noguera, E.; Rebollo Pedruelo, M.; Vasirani, M.; Fernández, A. (2014). Utility-Based Mechanism for Structural Self-Organization in Service-Oriented MAS. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems. 9(3):1-24. https://doi.org/10.1145/2651423S12493Sherief Abdallah and Victor Lesser. 2007. 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Digital technology and governance in transition: The case of the British Library

Comment on the organizational consequences of the new information and communications technologies (ICTs) is pervaded by a powerful imagery of disaggregation and a tendency for ?virtual? forms of production to be seen as synonymous with the ?end? of bureaucracy. This paper questions the underlying assumptions of the ?virtual organization?, highlighting the historically enduring, diversified character of the bureaucratic form. The paper then presents case study findings on the web-based access to information resources now being provided by the British Library (BL). The case study evidence produces two main findings. First, radically decentralised virtual forms of service delivery are heavily dependent on new forms of capacity-building and information aggregation. Second, digital technology is embedded in an inherently contested and contradictory context of institutional change. Current developments in the management and control of digital rights are consistent with the commodification of the public sphere. However, the evidence also suggests that scholarly access to information resources is being significantly influenced by the ?information society? objectives of the BL and other institutional players within the network of UK research libraries

Self-organization in service discovery in presence of noncooperative agents

[EN] Self-organization and cooperation of agents in open societies play an important role in the success of the service discovery process. Self-organization allows agents to deal with dynamic requirements in service demand. Moreover, in distributed environments where service discovery is carried out by agents that only have a partial view of the system, cooperation with neighbors is a key issue in order to locate the required services. However, cooperation is not always present in open agent societies. With this motivation, we present a set of mechanisms that consider self-organization actions and incentives to adapt the structure of the society to the service demand and to promote a cooperative behavior among agents in open societies.This work is supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2011-27652-C03-01 and TIN2012-36586-C03-01 projects and PROMETEOII/2013/019, the Program Valorización y Recursos Conjuntos de IþDþi VLC/CAMPUS and the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte as part of the Campus of International Excellence Program SP2014800.Del Val Noguera, E.; Rebollo Pedruelo, M.; Botti Navarro, VJ. (2016). Self-organization in service discovery in presence of noncooperative agents. Neurocomputing. 176:81-90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2014.11.085S819017

Combination of self-organization mechanisms to enhance service discovery in open systems

Decentralized systems have emerged as an alternative to centralized approaches for dealing with dynamic requirements in new business models. These systems should provide mechanisms that contribute to flexibility and facilitate adaptation to changes in the environment. In this paper, we present two self-organization mechanisms for a decentralized service discovery system in order to improve its performance. These mechanisms are based on local actions of agents that only consider local information about queries they forward during the discovery process. The self-organization actions are chosen by each agent individually when the agent considers them to be appropriate. The actions are: remaining in the system, leaving the system, cloning, and changing structural relations with other agents. We have evaluated each self-organization mechanism separately but also the combination of the two as the environmental conditions in the service demand change. The results show that the proposed self-organization mechanisms considerably improve the performance of the service discovery systemDel Val Noguera, E.; Rebollo Pedruelo, M.; Botti Navarro, VJ. (2014). Combination of self-organization mechanisms to enhance service discovery in open systems. Information Sciences. 279:138-162. doi:10.1016/j.ins.2014.03.109S13816227

Beyond clusters: Fostering innovation through a differentiated and combined network approach

Over the past decades, economic and innovation policy across Europe moved in the direction of creating regional clusters of related firms and institutions. Creating clusters through public policy is risky, complex and costly, however. Moreover, it is not necessary to rely on clusters to stimulate innovation. A differentiated and combined network approach to enhancing innovation and stimulating economic growth may be more efficient and effective, especially though not exclusively in regions lacking clusters. The challenge of such a policy is to mitigate the bottlenecks associated with ‘global pipeline’, ‘local buzz’ and ‘stand alone’ strategies used by innovative firms (cf. Bathelt et al. 2004; Atzema & Visser 2005b), and to combine these strategies with a view to their complementarity in terms of knowledge effects. Private and semi-public brokers will be key in the evolving policy, as timely organizational change is crucial for continued innovation, while brokers also need to mitigate governance problems. This requires region-specific knowledge in terms of sectors, life cycles, institutional and socio-cultural factors, and yields spatially differentiated and differentiating adjustment strategies. The role of public policy is to assist in recruiting, provide start-up funding and monitor brokers. With this, policy moves towards a decentralized, process-based, region-specific, spatially diverging and multi-level system of innovation that is geared towards the evolving innovation strategies of firms.innovation policy, clusters, networks, governance, regionalization

Process Moves in The Intra-organizational Diffusion of Knowledge Management: Preliminary Findings from A Study on CKO Effectiveness

The existing literature on Chief Knowledge Officers (CKOs) focuses on individual characteristics and organizational context but fails to convincingly address the issue of process dynamics in terms of effective and ineffective CKO moves and strategies. In order to address this gap we review propositions from the management fashion, diffusion of innovations and issue selling literatures, and identify sets of effective and ineffective CKO process moves based on an empirical study of CKOs in large industrial and financial service companies in Germany and Switzerland. The paper proposes an agenda for future CKO research, and concludes with a set of guidelines for organizational practice.Knowledge management; implementation; innovation diffusion; management fashion, issue selling

Orchestration of the Marketing Strategy under Competitive Dynamics

Constructing suitable marketing strategy and implementing it effectively is an art and science both like orchestration of a symphony. The discussion in this paper blends this analogy with the science of marketing demonstrating the levels of strategy development in a competitive marketplace. The paper presents the marketing-mix in contemporary context and argues that performance of a marketing firm can be maximized, when a firm develops a creative marketing strategy and achieves marketing strategy implementation effectiveness. The discussion in the paper reveals that marketing managers of different levels simultaneously operate within the firm and perceive the need for strategy development with varied preferences. A consequence of this is development of robust strategies and their effective implementation which, in turn, leads to increased market performance. Thus, it is important for researchers to investigate various strategy integration perspectives and this paper provides guidance by reviewing the existing literature.Marketing strategy, strategy integration, marketing-mix, customer value,strategy implementation, market competition, risk factors, brand building, customer centric strategy, routes to market

The essence of P2P: A reference architecture for overlay networks

The success of the P2P idea has created a huge diversity of approaches, among which overlay networks, for example, Gnutella, Kazaa, Chord, Pastry, Tapestry, P-Grid, or DKS, have received specific attention from both developers and researchers. A wide variety of algorithms, data structures, and architectures have been proposed. The terminologies and abstractions used, however, have become quite inconsistent since the P2P paradigm has attracted people from many different communities, e.g., networking, databases, distributed systems, graph theory, complexity theory, biology, etc. In this paper we propose a reference model for overlay networks which is capable of modeling different approaches in this domain in a generic manner. It is intended to allow researchers and users to assess the properties of concrete systems, to establish a common vocabulary for scientific discussion, to facilitate the qualitative comparison of the systems, and to serve as the basis for defining a standardized API to make overlay networks interoperable