3,176 research outputs found
A Review of Platforms for the Development of Agent Systems
Agent-based computing is an active field of research with the goal of
building autonomous software of hardware entities. This task is often
facilitated by the use of dedicated, specialized frameworks. For almost thirty
years, many such agent platforms have been developed. Meanwhile, some of them
have been abandoned, others continue their development and new platforms are
released. This paper presents a up-to-date review of the existing agent
platforms and also a historical perspective of this domain. It aims to serve as
a reference point for people interested in developing agent systems. This work
details the main characteristics of the included agent platforms, together with
links to specific projects where they have been used. It distinguishes between
the active platforms and those no longer under development or with unclear
status. It also classifies the agent platforms as general purpose ones, free or
commercial, and specialized ones, which can be used for particular types of
applications.Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures, 9 tables, 83 reference
Chaordic learning systems: reconceptualising pedagogy for the digital age
This article focuses on an explorative and experimental project seeking to implement Chaordic Learning Systems (CLS) as a pedagogic approach in Higher Education. We outline a project that embraced technologies of Web 2.0 to show how both physical and virtual spaces can be used to support and develop a strong and dynamic learning community in which staff and students work alongside each other to co-produce learning resources. Drawing on theories of Communities of Practice and Situated Learning a new teaching framework was introduced to a Level 5 undergraduate module (7.5 ECTS credits) that had not, until this project, used both face-to-face and online learning tools to engage students in the critical and discursive debates pertaining to sport and physical culture. We undertook this project with the belief that Higher Education should be concerned with answering the calls of an increasingly digital society for whom learning is not restricted by the physical boundaries of the university or the political landscape within which learning finds itself
Intelligent business processes composition based on mas, semantic and cloud integration (IPCASCI)
[EN]Component reuse is one of the techniques that most clearly contributes to the
evolution of the software industry by providing efficient mechanisms to create quality
software. Reuse increases both software reliability, due to the fact that it uses
previously tested software components, and development productivity, and leads to a
clear reduction in cost.
Web services have become are an standard for application development on cloud
computing environments and are essential in business process development. These
services facilitate a software construction that is relatively fast and efficient, two
aspects which can be improved by defining suitable models of reuse. This research
work is intended to define a model which contains the construction requirements of
new services from service composition. To this end, the composition is based on
tested Web services and artificial intelligent tools at our disposal.
It is believed that a multi-agent architecture based on virtual organizations is a
suitable tool to facilitate the construction of cloud computing environments for
business processes from other existing environments, and with help from ontological
models as well as tools providing the standard BPEL (Business Process Execution
Language). In the context of this proposal, we must generate a new business process
from the available services in the platform, starting with the requirement
specifications that the process should meet. These specifications will be composed of a
semi-free description of requirements to describe the new service.
The virtual organizations based on a multi-agent system will manage the tasks
requiring intelligent behaviour. This system will analyse the input (textual description
of the proposal) in order to deconstruct it into computable functionalities, which will
be subsequently treated. Web services (or business processes) stored to be reused
have been created from the perspective of SOA architectures and associated with an
ontological component, which allows the multi-agent system (based on virtual
organizations) to identify the services to complete the reuse process.
The proposed model develops a service composition by applying a standard BPEL
once the services that will compose the solution business process have been
identified. This standard allows us to compose Web services in an easy way and
provides the advantage of a direct mapping from Business Process Management
Notation diagrams
Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological
ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital
Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems
to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital
Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems,
where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of
agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating
continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on
evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at
finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital
Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures
originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological
ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from
the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity).
Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating
Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a
metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa
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