CloudAnchor Smart Contracts

The CloudAnchor platform allows the negotiation of IaaS Cloud resources for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME), either as resource providers or consumers. This project entails the research, design, and implementation of a solution based on smart contracts, with the goal of permanently recording and managing the contracts on a blockchain network. The usage of smart contracts enables safe contract code execution and raises the level of trust, integrity, and traceability of the platform contracts by keeping the data stored in a decentralised manner. To do so, a method to coordinate and submit transactions to the blockchain network must be implemented. The tests carried out indicate that the solution has been successfully implemented, with contract registration saved in a decentralised and safe manner. As a result, there was an increase in the platform’s execution time, caused by the new transactions made to the blockchain.A plataforma CloudAnchor permite a negociação e contratualização de recursos Cloud do tipo IaaS a pequenas e médias empresas, sejam elas fornecedoras ou clientes. Este trabalho inclui o estudo, projeto e implementação de uma solução baseada em smart contracts, com o objetivo de administrar e registar de forma permanente os contratos celebrados numa rede blockchain. A utilização de smart contracts permite executar o respetivo código de forma segura e aumentar o nível de confiança, integridade e rastreabilidade dos contratos celebrados na plataforma, guardando-os de forma descentralizada. Para tal, é necessário implementar um mecanismo de coordenação e submissão de transações para a rede blockchain. Os testes realizados permitiram concluir que a implementação da solução foi bem sucedida, passando os contratos a ficar guardados de forma descentralizada e segura. Em consequência, verificou-se um aumento do tempo de execução da plataforma provocado pelas novas transações com a blockchain

Electronic institution : an e-contracting platform for virtual organization

Automated tools that assist contract drafting are mostly focused on the representation of contract documents. Multi-agent systems have been ap-plied in the e-business domain, namely for information discovery and contract negotiation. Work on contract monitoring and enforcement is less explored. In this paper we start from these two observations to expose our efforts towards the development of tools that enable the computational representation of con-tracts and furthermore their monitoring and enforcement. We are mostly inter-ested in Virtual Organization settings, where groups of agents representing dif-ferent business entities form consortiums that must be regulated by appropriate norms. We are pursuing the concept of an Electronic Institution as a platform providing a normative environment and a set of e-contracting related services. Within this environment, contracts are represented through norms. We intend to test the applicability of our approach through illustration with case-studies and comparison with other contract representation formalisms

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Regulated MAS: Social Perspective

This chapter addresses the problem of building normative multi-agent systems in terms of regulatory mechanisms. It describes a static conceptual model through which one can specify normative multi-agent systems along with a dynamic model to capture their operation and evolution. The chapter proposes a typology of applications and presents some open problems. In the last section, the authors express their individual views on these mattersMunindar Singh’s effort was partially supported by the U.S. Army Research Office under grant W911NF-08-1-0105. The content of this paper does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the U.S. Government; no official endorsement should be inferred or implied. Nicoletta Fornara’s effort is supported by the Hasler Foundation project nr. 11115-KG and by the SER project nr. C08.0114 within the COST Action IC0801 Agreement Technologies. Henrique Lopes Cardoso’s effort is supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), under project PTDC/EIA-EIA/104420/2008. Pablo Noriega’s effort has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through the Agreement Technologies CONSOLIDER project under contract CSD2007-0022, and the Generalitat of Catalunya grant 2009-SGR-1434.Peer Reviewe