Internet collaboration and service composition as a loose form of teamwork

This paper describes Web service composition as a form of teamwork, where the Web services are team members in a loose collaboration. We argue that newer hierarchical teamwork models are more appropriate for Web service composition than the traditional models involving joint beliefs and joint intentions. We describe our system for developing and executing Web service compositions as team plans in JACK Teams,((TM) 1) and discuss the relationships between this approach and service orchestration languages such as Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS). We discuss briefly how the use of Al planning can also be incorporated into this model, and identify some of the research issues involved. Incorporating Web service compositions into a mature Belief Desire Intention (BDI) agent team framework allows for integration of Web services seamlessly into a powerful application execution paradigm that supports sophisticated reasoning

An architecture for autonomic web service process planning

Web service composition is a technology that has received considerable attention in the last number of years. Languages and tools to aid in the process of creating composite web services have been received specific attention. Web service composition is the process of linking single web services together in order to accomplish more complex tasks. One area of web service composition that has not received as much attention is the area of dynamic error handling and re-planning, enabling autonomic composition. Given a repository of service descriptions and a task to complete, it is possible for AI planners to automatically create a plan that will achieve this goal. If however a service in the plan is unavailable or erroneous the plan will fail. Motivated by this problem, this paper suggests autonomous re-planning as a means to overcome dynamic problems. Our solution involves automatically recovering from faults and creating a context-dependent alternate plan

Information sharing platform to support collaborative teamwork in construction

Construction industry is one of the most challenging industries. It has many problems associated to its performance and the ability to satisfy the users’ requirements. One of the most critical issues that need to be addressed by construction is related to the lack of information sharing among the project stakeholders. Therefore this research has been undertaken to address this issue within the context of Collaborative Teamwork Environment (CTW) in construction. The aim and the objective of the research are to identify the important elements of project reporting towards establishment of communication framework to support collaborative teamwork information sharing in Malaysian construction industry. This research also developed the Matrix Measurement Guidelines (MMG-CTW) as a useful tool to gauge the level of collaborative teamwork achievement that was created by the communication platform. The different methodologies were employed to generate qualitative and quantitative data at different stages of the research. These methodologies were: literature review; single stage postal questionnaire survey; interview; and project case study analysis. The data collected using the triangulation approach with the stated methodologies from the expert industry player’s nationwide. The important elements and the current approach of project communication and the elements of the collaborative teamwork are the main variables that have been identified from the data collection and been used as the basis to develop the project communication platform. The research was divided into three main phases. The initial stage involved the evaluation of the current approach of the project communication and the collaborative teamwork environment in Malaysian construction industry. The second stage was the development of the MMG-CTW and the third stage was the establishment of the framework for the communication platform. This communication and information need have been integrated within the MS-SharePoint software and was tested its application on two selected case study projects and feedbacks generated from the users were used for improvement. As a result, the application of this groupware system is suitable for a medium size project because of its simplicity and user friendly. This research concludes that the implementation of CTW concept is still in the early stage in Malaysian construction industry. The practice of project reporting is still using simple tools such as email, telephone and traditional way of exchanging documents. The progress report, design concept, drawing and specification were identified as the top priority project reporting elements in project communication and information. There is an urgent need to improve the current communication system among project stakeholders. The groupware system developed in this research was validated by the expert panel can be a suitable tool for communication framework to support collaborative teamwork information sharing in Malaysian construction industry

Internet collaboration and service composition as a loose form of teamwork

This paper describes Web Service composition as a form of team work, where the Web services are team members in a loose collaboration. We argue that newer hierarchical team work models are more appropriate for Web service composition than the traditional models involving joint beliefs and joint intentions. We describe our system for developing and executing Web ser-T M1 vice compositions as team plans in JACK Teams, and discuss the relationships between this approach and service orchestration languages such as Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS). We discuss briefly how the use of AI planning can also be incorporated into this model, and identify some of the research issues involved. Incorporating Web service compositions into a mature Belief Desire Intention (BDI) agent team framework allows for integration of Web services seamlessly into a powerful application execution paradigm that supports sophisticated reasoning. 1

A platform-independent domain-specific modeling language for multiagent systems

Associated with the increasing acceptance of agent-based computing as a novel software engineering paradigm, recently a lot of research addresses the development of suitable techniques to support the agent-oriented software development. The state-of-the-art in agent-based software development is to (i) design the agent systems basing on an agent-based methodology and (ii) take the resulting design artifact as a base to manually implement the agent system using existing agent-oriented programming languages or general purpose languages like Java. Apart from failures made when manually transform an abstract specification into a concrete implementation, the gap between design and implementation may also result in the divergence of design and implementation. The framework discussed in this dissertation presents a platform-independent domain-specific modeling language for MASs called Dsml4MAS that allows modeling agent systems in a platform-independent and graphical manner. Apart from the abstract design, Dsml4MAS also allows to automatically (i) check the generated design artifacts against a formal semantic specification to guarantee the well-formedness of the design and (ii) translate the abstract specification into a concrete implementation. Taking both together, Dsml4MAS ensures that for any well-formed design, an associated implementation will be generated closing the gap between design and code.Aufgrund wachsender Akzeptanz von Agentensystemen zur Behandlung komplexer Problemstellungen wird der Schwerpunkt auf dem Gebiet der agentenorientierten Softwareentwicklung vor allem auf die Erforschung von geeignetem Entwicklungswerkzeugen gesetzt. Stand der Forschung ist es dabei das Agentendesign mittels einer Agentenmethodologie zu spezifizieren und die resultierenden Artefakte als Grundlage zur manuellen Programmierung zu verwenden. Fehler, die bei dieser manuellen Überführung entstehen, machen insbesondere das abstrakte Design weniger nützlich in Hinsicht auf die Nachhaltigkeit der entwickelten Softwareapplikation. Das in dieser Dissertation diskutierte Rahmenwerk erörtert eine plattformunabhängige domänenspezifische Modellierungssprache für Multiagentensysteme namens Dsml4MAS. Dsml4MAS erlaubt es Agentensysteme auf eine plattformunabhängige und graphische Art und Weise darzustellen. Die Modellierungssprache umfasst (i) eine abstrakte Syntax, die das Vokabular der Sprache definiert, (ii) eine konkrete Syntax, die die graphische Darstellung spezifiziert sowie (iii) eine formale Semantik, die dem Vokabular eine präzise Bedeutung gibt. Dsml4MAS ist Bestandteil einer (semi-automatischen) Methodologie, die es (i) erlaubt die abstrakte Spezifikation schrittweise bis hin zur konkreten Implementierung zu konkretisieren und (ii) die Interoperabilität zu alternativen Softwareparadigmen wie z.B. Dienstorientierte Architekturen zu gewährleisten