Integrating driving forces into the development of Adaptive Virtual Organizations

Organizations have become the backbone of the society. Humans live around all kinds of organizations, such as neighborhood communities, businesses, schools, unions, political, sports, and religious organizations, etc. These organizations have a set of members, each playing a specific role, which determines their duties and functionalities within the organization. One of these functionalities is to offer a range of services to members of the organization and external people. These members must follow a set of norms to ensure the proper functioning of the organization and should pursue the global goals of the organization. A feature that is repeated in organizations is that they are not static but dynamic, resulting in changes in both its structure and the way in which they behave. In an organization, any of its elements is prone to change due to situations that occur in the organization itself or its environment. Researchers in the field of social sciences and organizations have studied such situations, the reasons why they appear and solutions and actions to be taken to ensure that this situation does not damage the organization or to take advantage of the situation. These situations are known as ‘Forces that drive organizational change’. Human organizations are the main source of inspiration for the Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) based on organizations. These systems are computational abstractions that are populated by agents instead of people, but take into account organizational elements such as roles, services, goals, norms, etc. However, the proposals that have been presented up to now to define this type of MAS are focused mostly on static systems, without changes in its structure. Moreover, in the few proposals that take into account organizational changes, they just state that changes occur, but without specifying the reason for change. Thus, the concept of ‘forces that drive organizational change’ (and their features) is not considered. Therefore, the objective of this PhD thesis is to translate the knowledge of the forces that drive organizational change available in human organizations to MASbased organizations. These forces will be formally expressed with the factors that help to detect them. The solutions to be taken when a force is detected will also be presented. To correctly perform this task, a formalization for virtual organizations is designed, named Virtual Organization Formalization (VOF). Moreover, the Artifacts for Organizational Mechanisms are proposed, which are a tool to help in the representation of organizational knowledge and in the modeling of the environment of the organization. This tool is based on the Agents & Artifacts (A&A) framework.Esparcia García, S. (2015). Integrating driving forces into the development of Adaptive Virtual Organizations [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/48538TESI

Un Intergiciel de Gestion du Contexte basé Multi-Agent pour les Applications d'Intelligence Ambiante

The complexity and magnitude of Ambient Intelligence scenarios imply that attributes such as modeling expressiveness, flexibility of representation and deployment, as well as ease of configuration and development become central features for context management systems.However, existing works in the literature seem to explore these development-oriented attributes at a low degree.Our goal is to create a flexible and well configurable context management middleware, able to respond to different scenarios. To this end, our solution is built on the basis of principles and techniques of the Semantic Web and Multi-Agent Systems.We use the Semantic Web to provide a new context meta-model, allowing for an expressive and extensible modeling of content, meta-properties (e.g. temporal validity, quality parameters) and dependencies (e.g. integrity constraints).In addition, we develop a middleware architecture that relies on Multi-Agent Systems and a service component based design. Each agent of the system encapsulates a functional aspect of the context provisioning processes (acquisition, coordination, distribution, use).We introduce a new way to structure the deployment of agents depending on the multi-dimensionality aspects of the application's context model. Furthermore, we develop declarative policies governing the adaptation behavior of the agents managing the provisioning of context information.Simulations of an intelligent university scenario show that appropriate tooling built around our middleware can provide significant advantages in the engineering of context-aware applications.La complexité et l'ampleur des scénarios de l'Intelligence Ambiante impliquent que des attributs tels que l'expressivité de modelisation, la flexibilité de representation et de deploiement et la facilité de configuration et de developpement deviennent des caracteristiques centrales pour les systèmes de gestion de contexte. Cependant, les ouvrages existants semblent explorer ces attributs orientés-developpement a un faible degré.Notre objectif est de créer un intergiciel de gestion de contexte flexible et bien configurable, capable de répondre aux différents scenarios. A cette fin, notre solution est construite a base de techniques et principes du Web Semantique (WS) et des systèmes multi-agents (SMA).Nous utilisons le WS pour proposer un noveau meta-modèle de contexte, permettant une modelisation expressive et extensible du contenu, des meta-proprietés (e.g. validité temporelle, parametres de qualité) et des dépendances (e.g. les contraintes d'integrité) du contexte.De plus, une architecture a base de SMA et des composants logiciels, ou chaque agent encapsule un aspect fonctionnel du processus de gestion de contexte (acquisition, coordination, diffusion, utilisation) est developpée.Nous introduisons un nouveau moyen de structurer le deploiement d'agents selon les dimensions du modèle de contexte de l'application et nous elaborons des politiques déclaratives gouvernant le comportement d'adaptation du provisionnement contextuel des agents. Des simulations d'un scenario d'université intelligente montrent que un bon outillage construit autour de notre intergiciel peut apporter des avantages significatifs dans la génie des applications sensibles au contexte

Exploiting the JaCaMo framework for realising an adaptive room governance application

International audienceAmbient Intelligent (AmI) applications are often meant to be used in complex and highly dynamic environments and are characterized by features such as context-awareness, personalisation, adaptivity and anticipation of user's desires. In this demo we focus on how the use of the high level of abstraction provided by multi agent-oriented technologies and related programming languages - and in particular of the ones rooted on a strong notion of agency - can ease the conceiving and realisation of AmI applications exhibiting such features. For doing this we present here an adaptive governance application, realised using the JaCaMo framework, for the dynamic management and allocation of rooms in the context of a smart co-working space

A negotiation approach for energy-aware room allocation systems

[Otros] This paper addresses energy-aware room allocation management where the system aims to satisfy individuals¿ needs as much as possible while concerning total energy consumption in a building. In the problem, there are a several rooms having varied settings resulting in different energy consumption. The main objective of the system is not only finding the right allocations for user¿s need, but also minimizing energy consumption. However, the users of the system may have conflicting preferences over the rooms to be allocated for them. This paper pursues how the system can increase user satisfaction while achieving its goals. For that purpose, an adaptation of the mediated single text negotiation model is introduced. The proposal seeks to guarantee an upper bound on energy consumption by pruning the negotiation space via a genetic algorithm, and to take advantage of the negotiation for increasing user satisfaction. Experiments suggest that the adaptations improve the performanceThis work is supported by TIN2012-36586-C03-01, TIN2011-27652-C03-01, and TIN2009-13839-C03-01 projects of the Spanish government, the FPU grant AP2008-00600 awarded to V¿¿ctor S¿anchez-Anguix, and the New Governance Models for Next Generation Infrastructures project with NGI grant number 04.17. We would also like to thank anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.Esparcia García, S.; Sanchez-Anguix, V.; Aydogan, R. (2013). A Negotiation Approach for Energy-Aware Room Allocation Systems. Springer. 280-291. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38061-7_27S280291Perez-Lombard, L., Ortiz, J., Pout, C.: A review on buildings energy consumption information. Energy and Buildings 40(3), 394–398 (2008)Plan de ahorro de eficiencia energética de los edificios públicos de la generalitat. Diari oficial de la Comunitat Valenciana (6800), 18038–18044 (June 2012)Sorici, A., Boissier, O., Picard, G., Santi, A.: Exploiting the jacamo framework for realising an adaptive room governance application. In: Proc. DSM 2011, TMC 2011, AGERE! 2011, AOOPES 2011, NEAT 2011, & VMIL 2011, pp. 239–242. ACM (2011)Klein, M., Faratin, P., Sayama, H., Bar-Yam, Y.: Negotiating complex contracts. Group Decision and Negotiation 12, 111–125 (2003)Sareni, B., Krahenbuhl, L.: Fitness sharing and niching methods revisited. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation 2(3), 97–106 (1998)Mengshoel, O.J., Goldberg, D.E.: The crowding approach to niching in genetic algorithms. Evolutionary Computation 16(3), 315–354 (2008)Sanchez-Anguix, V., Valero, S., Julian, V., Botti, V., Garcia-Fornes, A.: Evolutionary-aided negotiation model for bilateral bargaining in ambient intelligence domains with complex utility functions. Information Sciences 222, 25–46 (2013)Kuo, P., Schroeder, R., Mahaffey, S., Bollinger, R.: Optimization of operating room allocation using linear programming techniques. J. Am. Coll. Surg. 197(6), 889–895 (2003)Schumann, A., Wilson, N., Burillo, M.: Learning user preferences to maximise occupant comfort in office buildings. In: García-Pedrajas, N., Herrera, F., Fyfe, C., Benítez, J.M., Ali, M. (eds.) IEA/AIE 2010, Part I. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 6096, pp. 681–690. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Abras, S., Pesty, S., Ploix, S., Jacomino, M.: An anticipation mechanism for power management in a smart home using multi-agent systems. In: Information and Communication Technologies: From Theory to Applications, pp. 1–6. IEEE (2008