Cloud Computing with Intelligent Agents to Support Service Oriented System Control and Management

the past few years, Cloud computing has becoming one of the revolutionary technologies in ICT which grows in both popularity and importance, both in industry and in academic domain. More and more private companies, government organizations and institutions are convinced and happy to promote Cloud to improve both connectivity and instant social ability. For IT services and solutions for business, Cloud-based platform promises to offer better business intelligence and productive experience by using unified communications, consistent collaborated data and service management. It is well believed that Cloud Computing will also bring a revolution in the healthcare IT sector along with other ICT business. To exploit Cloud computing productivity potential, this paper focuses on adopting Cloud computing technologies with agent-based solutions to support service oriented system control and management. The on-going research and practice demonstrates an application to the management of community care provision, which shows transforming to Software-as-a-Service (Saas) with the combination of a private healthcare cloud and integrated agents can improve business efficiency by providing flexible services scheduling, smarter health care services control and management

Agreement technologies and their use in cloud computing environments

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13748-012-0031-9[EN] Nowadays, cloud computing is revolutionizing the services provided through the Internet to adapt itself in order to keep the quality of its services. Recent research foresees the advent of a new discipline of agent-based cloud computing systems that can make decisions about adaption in an uncertain environment. This paper discusses the role of argumentation in the next generation of agreement technologies and its use in cloud computing environments.This work is supported by the Spanish government (MICINN), project reference: TIN2012-36586-C03-01.Heras Barberá, SM.; De La Piedra, F.; Julian Inglada, VJ.; Rodríguez, S.; Botti Navarro, VJ.; Bajo, J.; Corchado, JM. (2012). Agreement technologies and their use in cloud computing environments. Progress in Artificial Intelligence. 1(4):277-290. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13748-012-0031-9S27729014European Comission: The Future of Cloud Computing. Technical report (2010)Barham, P., Dragovic, B., Fraser, K., Hand, S., Harris, T., Ho, A., Neugebauer, R., Pratt, I., Warfield, A.: Xen and the art of virtualization. In: SOSP03 Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 164–177. ACM, New York (2003)Wang, L., et. al.: Scientific cloud computing: early definition and experience. In: 10th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC-08), pp. 825–830. IEEE Press (2008)Talia, D.: Clouds meet agents: toward intelligent cloud services. Internet Comput. IEEE 16(2), 78–81 (2012). doi: 10.1109/MIC.2012.28Heras, S.: Case-Based Argumentation Framework for Agent Societies. PhD thesis, Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/12497 (2011)Ashton, K.: That ‘internet of things’ thing. RFID J. (2009). http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/view/4986Klusch, M.: Information agent technology for the Internet: a Survey. Data Knowl. Eng. 36, 337–372 (2001)Schaffer, H.E.: X as a Service. Cloud Computing, and the Need for Good Judgment IT Professional 11(5), 4–5 (2009). doi: 10.1109/MITP.2009.112Richardson, L., Ruby, S.: RESTful Web Services, Web services for the real world O’Reilly, Media, May, p. 454 (2007)GlusterFS Developers. The Gluster web site. http://www.gluster.org (2012)Chodorow, K., Dirolf, M.: The Definitive Guide. O’Reilly Media, MongoDB (2010)Fuentes-Fernandez, R., Hassan, S., Pavon, J., Galan, J.M., Lopez-Paredes, A.: Metamodels for role-driven agent-based modelling. Comput. Math. Organ. Theory 18(1), 91–112 (2012)Jordán, J., et al.: A customer support application using argumentation in multi-agent systems. In: 14th International Conference on, Information Fusion, pp. 772–778 (2011)Heras, S., Jordán, J., Botti, V., Julián, V.: Argue to agree: a case-based argumentation approach. Int. J. Approx. Reasoning (2012, in press)Walton, D., Reed, C., Macagno, F.: Argumentation Schemes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2008)Bench-Capon, T., Sartor, G.: A model of legal reasoning with cases incorporating theories and values. Artif. Intell. 150(1–2), 97–143 (2003)Dignum, F., Weigand, H.: Communication and deontic logic. In: Information Systems Correctness and Reusability, pp. 242–260. World Scientific, Singapore (1995)Wooldridge, M., Jennings, N.R.: Intelligent agents: theory and practice. Knowl. Eng. Rev. 10(2), 115–152 (1995)Lopez-Rodriguez, I., Hernandez-Tejera, M.: Software agents as cloud computing services. In: 9th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multiagent Systems. Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing, vol. 88, pp. 271–276. Springer, Berlin (2011)Sim, K.M.: Towards complex negotiation for cloud economy. In: 5th International Conference on Advances in Grid and Pervasive Computing. LNCS, vol. 6104, pp. 395–406. Springer, Berlin (2010)Aversa, R., et al.: Cloud agency: a mobile agent based cloud system. In: International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems, pp. 132–137. IEEE Computer Society Press, Washington, DC (2010)Cao, B., et al.: A service-oriented qos-assured and multi-agent cloud computing architecture. In: 1st International Conference on Cloud Computing. LNCS, vol. 5931, pp. 644–649. Springer, Berlin (2009)Rahwan, I., Simari, G. (eds.): Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence. Springer, Berlin (2009

Contributions to Service Level Agreement (SLA), Negotiation and Monitoring in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a dynamic field of research, as the latest advances in the cloud computing applications have led to development of a plethora of cloud services in the areas of software, hardware, storage, internet of things connected to the cloud, and 5G supported by the cloud networks. Due to ever increasing developments and the subsequent emergence of a wide range of cloud services, a cloud market was created with cloud providers and customers seeking to buy the cloud services. With the expansion of the cloud market and the presence of a virtual environment in which cloud services are provided and managed, the face to-face meetings between customers and cloud providers is almost impossible, and the negotiation over the cloud services using the state-of-the-art autonomous negotiation agents has been theorized and researched by several researchers in the field of cloud computing, however, the solutions offered by literature are less applicable in the real-time cloud market with the evolving nature of services and customers’ requirements. Therefore, this study aimed to develop the solutions addressing issues in relation to negotiation of cloud services leading to the development of a service-level agreement (SLA), and monitoring of the terms and conditions specified in the SLA. We proposed the autonomous service-level framework supported by the autonomous agents for negotiating over the cloud services on behalf of the cloud providers and customers. The proposed framework contained gathering, filtering, negotiation and SLA monitoring functions, which enhanced its applicability in the real-time cloud market environment. Gathering and filtering stages facilitated the effectiveness of the negotiation phase based on the requirements of customers and cloud services available in the cloud market. The negotiation phase was executed by the selection of autonomous agents, leading to the creation of an SLA with metrics agreed upon between the cloud provider and the customer. Autonomous agents improved the efficiency of negotiation over multiple issues by creating the SLA within a short time and benefiting both parties involved in the negation phase. Rubinstein’s Alternating Offers Protocol was found to be effective in drafting the automated SLA solutions in the challenging environment of the cloud market. We also aimed to apply various autonomous agents to build the new algorithms which can be used to create novel negotiation strategies for addressing the issues in SLAs in cloud computing. The monitoring approach based on the CloudSim tool was found to be an effective strategy for detecting violations against the SLA, which can be an important contribution to building effective monitoring solutions for improving the quality of services in the cloud market

A Semantic-Agent Framework for PaaS Interoperability

Suchismita Hoare, Na Helian, and Nathan Baddoo, 'A Semantic-Agent Framework for PaaS Interoperability', in Proceedings of the The IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing, Toulouse, France, 18-21, July 2016. DOI: 10.1109/UIC-ATC-ScalCom-CBDCom-IoP-SmartWorld.2016.0126 © 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) is poised for a wider adoption by its relevant stakeholders, especially Cloud application developers. Despite this, the service model is still plagued with several adoption inhibitors, one of which is lack of interoperability between proprietary application infrastructure services of public PaaS solutions. Although there is some progress in addressing the general PaaS interoperability issue through various devised solutions focused primarily on API compatibility and platform-agnostic application design models, interoperability specific to differentiated services provided by the existing public PaaS providers and the resultant disparity owing to the offered services’ semantics has not been addressed effectively, yet. The literature indicates that this dimension of PaaS interoperability is awaiting evolution in the state-of-the-art. This paper proposes the initial system design of a PaaS interoperability (IntPaaS) framework to be developed through the integration of semantic and agent technologies to enable transparent interoperability between incompatible PaaS services. This will involve uniform description through semantic annotation of PaaS provider services utilizing the OWL-S ontology, creating a knowledgebase that enables software agents to automatically search for suitable services to support Cloud-based Greenfield application development. The rest of the paper discusses the identified research problem along with the proposed solution to address the issue.Submitted Versio

Real-time agreement and fulfilment of SLAs in Cloud Computing environments

A Cloud Computing system must readjust its resources by taking into account the demand for its services. This raises the need for designing protocols that provide the individual components of the Cloud architecture with the ability to self-adapt and to reach agreements in order to deal with changes in the services demand. Furthermore, if the Cloud provider has signed a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the clients of the services that it offers, the appropriate agreement mechanism has to ensure the provision of the service contracted within a specified time. This paper introduces real-time mechanisms for the agreement and fulfilment of SLAs in Cloud Computing environments. On the one hand, it presents a negotiation protocol inspired by the standard WSAgreement used in web services to manage the interactions between the client and the Cloud provider to agree the terms of the SLA of a service. On the other hand, it proposes the application of a real-time argumentation framework for redistributing resources and ensuring the fulfilment of these SLAs during peaks in the service demand.This work is supported by the Spanish government Grants CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00022, TIN2011-27652-C03-01, TIN2012-36586-C03-01 and TIN2012-36586-C03-03.De La Prieta, F.; Heras Barberá, SM.; Palanca Cámara, J.; Rodríguez, S.; Bajo, J.; Julian Inglada, VJ. (2014). Real-time agreement and fulfilment of SLAs in Cloud Computing environments. 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M., & López-Paredes, A. (2012). Metamodels for role-driven agent-based modelling. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 18(1), 91-112. doi:10.1007/s10588-012-9110-5Heras, S., Botti, V., & Julián, V. (2009). Challenges for a CBR framework for argumentation in open MAS. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 24(4), 327-352. doi:10.1017/s0269888909990178Heras, S., Jordán, J., Botti, V., & Julián, V. (2013). Argue to agree: A case-based argumentation approach. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, 54(1), 82-108. doi:10.1016/j.ijar.2012.06.005[24]M. Jensen, J. Schwenk, N. Gruschka and L. Iacono, On technical security issues in cloud computing, in: IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing, IEEE Press, 2009, pp. 109–116.Kakas, A., Maudet, N., & Moraitis, P. (2005). Modular Representation of Agent Interaction Rules through Argumentation. 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A State-of-the-art Integrated Transportation Simulation Platform

Nowadays, universities and companies have a huge need for simulation and modelling methodologies. In the particular case of traffic and transportation, making physical modifications to the real traffic networks could be highly expensive, dependent on political decisions and could be highly disruptive to the environment. However, while studying a specific domain or problem, analysing a problem through simulation may not be trivial and may need several simulation tools, hence raising interoperability issues. To overcome these problems, we propose an agent-directed transportation simulation platform, through the cloud, by means of services. We intend to use the IEEE standard HLA (High Level Architecture) for simulators interoperability and agents for controlling and coordination. Our motivations are to allow multiresolution analysis of complex domains, to allow experts to collaborate on the analysis of a common problem and to allow co-simulation and synergy of different application domains. This paper will start by presenting some preliminary background concepts to help better understand the scope of this work. After that, the results of a literature review is shown. Finally, the general architecture of a transportation simulation platform is proposed

Densifying the sparse cloud SimSaaS: The need of a synergy among agent-directed simulation, SimSaaS and HLA

Modelling & Simulation (M&S) is broadly used in real scenarios where making physical modifications could be highly expensive. With the so-called Simulation Software-as-a-Service (SimSaaS), researchers could take advantage of the huge amount of resource that cloud computing provides. Even so, studying and analysing a problem through simulation may need several simulation tools, hence raising interoperability issues. Having this in mind, IEEE developed a standard for interoperability among simulators named High Level Architecture (HLA). Moreover, the multi-agent system approach has become recognised as a convenient approach for modelling and simulating complex systems. Despite all the recent works and acceptance of these technologies, there is still a great lack of work regarding synergies among them. This paper shows by means of a literature review this lack of work or, in other words, the sparse Cloud SimSaaS. The literature review and the resulting taxonomy are the main contributions of this paper, as they provide a research agenda illustrating future research opportunities and trends

Simulation Software as a Service and Service-Oriented Simulation Experiment

Simulation software is being increasingly used in various domains for system analysis and/or behavior prediction. Traditionally, researchers and field experts need to have access to the computers that host the simulation software to do simulation experiments. With recent advances in cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS), a new paradigm is emerging where simulation software is used as services that are composed with others and dynamically influence each other for service-oriented simulation experiment on the Internet. The new service-oriented paradigm brings new research challenges in composing multiple simulation services in a meaningful and correct way for simulation experiments. To systematically support simulation software as a service (SimSaaS) and service-oriented simulation experiment, we propose a layered framework that includes five layers: an infrastructure layer, a simulation execution engine layer, a simulation service layer, a simulation experiment layer and finally a graphical user interface layer. Within this layered framework, we provide a specification for both simulation experiment and the involved individual simulation services. Such a formal specification is useful in order to support systematic compositions of simulation services as well as automatic deployment of composed services for carrying out simulation experiments. Built on this specification, we identify the issue of mismatch of time granularity and event granularity in composing simulation services at the pragmatic level, and develop four types of granularity handling agents to be associated with the couplings between services. The ultimate goal is to achieve standard and automated approaches for simulation service composition in the emerging service-oriented computing environment. Finally, to achieve more efficient service-oriented simulation, we develop a profile-based partitioning method that exploits a system’s dynamic behavior and uses it as a profile to guide the spatial partitioning for more efficient parallel simulation. We develop the work in this dissertation within the application context of wildfire spread simulation, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our work based on this application

Observing the clouds : a survey and taxonomy of cloud monitoring

This research was supported by a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) grant. Date of Acceptance: 10/12/2014Monitoring is an important aspect of designing and maintaining large-scale systems. Cloud computing presents a unique set of challenges to monitoring including: on-demand infrastructure, unprecedented scalability, rapid elasticity and performance uncertainty. There are a wide range of monitoring tools originating from cluster and high-performance computing, grid computing and enterprise computing, as well as a series of newer bespoke tools, which have been designed exclusively for cloud monitoring. These tools express a number of common elements and designs, which address the demands of cloud monitoring to various degrees. This paper performs an exhaustive survey of contemporary monitoring tools from which we derive a taxonomy, which examines how effectively existing tools and designs meet the challenges of cloud monitoring. We conclude by examining the socio-technical aspects of monitoring, and investigate the engineering challenges and practices behind implementing monitoring strategies for cloud computing.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe