Incorporating temporal-bounded CBR techniques in real-time agents

Nowadays, MAS paradigm tries to move Computation to a new level of abstraction: Computation as interaction, where large complex systems are seen in terms of the services they offer, and consequently in terms of the entities or agents providing or consuming services. However, MAS technology is found to be lacking in some critical environments as real-time environments. An interaction-based vision of a real-time system involves the purchase of a responsibility by any entity or agent for the accomplishment of a required service under possibly hard or soft temporal conditions. This vision notably increases the complexity of these kinds of systems. The main problem in the architecture development of agents in real-time environments is with the deliberation process where it is difficult to integrate complex bounded deliberative processes for decision-making in a simple and efficient way. According to this, this work presents a temporal-bounded deliberative case-based behaviour as an anytime solution. More specifically, the work proposes a new temporal-bounded CBR algorithm which facilitates deliberative processes for agents in real-time environments, which need both real-time and deliberative capabilities. The paper presents too an application example for the automated management simulation of internal and external mail in a department plant. This example has allowed to evaluate the proposal investigating the performance of the system and the temporal-bounded deliberative case-based behaviour. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This work is supported by TIN2006-14630-C03-01 projects of the Spanish government, GVPRE/2008/070 project, FEDER funds and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 under Grant CSD2007-00022.Navarro Llácer, M.; Heras Barberá, SM.; Julian Inglada, VJ.; Botti Navarro, VJ. (2011). Incorporating temporal-bounded CBR techniques in real-time agents. Expert Systems with Applications. 38(3):2783-2796. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2010.08.070S2783279638

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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Future Generation Computer Systems, 28(5), 755-768. doi:10.1016/j.future.2011.04.017[8]A. Beloglazov and R. Buyya, Energy efficient allocation of virtual machines in cloud data centers, in: 10th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing, IEEE Computer Society, 2010, pp. 577–578.[9]A. Beloglazov and R. Buyya, Energy efficient resource management in virtualized cloud data centers, in: 10th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing, IEEE Computer Society, 2010, pp. 826–831.Bench-Capon, T., & Sartor, G. (2003). A model of legal reasoning with cases incorporating theories and values. 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Agent Recommendation for Agent-Based Urban-Transportation Systems. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 26(6), 77-81. doi:10.1109/mis.2011.94[15]Y.Y. Cheng, M. Low, S. Zhou, W. Cai and C.S. Choo, Evolving agent-based simulations in the clouds, in: 3rd International Workshop on Advanced Computational Intelligence (IWACI), 2010, pp. 244–249.[16]F. Dignum and H. Weigand, Communication and Deontic Logic, in: Information Systems – Correctness and Reusability. Selected Papers from the IS-CORE Workshop, R. Wieringa and R. Feenstra, eds, World Scientific Publishing Co., 1995, pp. 242–260.Erdogmus, H. (2009). Cloud Computing: Does Nirvana Hide behind the Nebula? IEEE Software, 26(2), 4-6. doi:10.1109/ms.2009.31[19]J.O. Fitó, I. Goiri and J. Guitart, SLA-driven elastic cloud hosting provider, in: 18th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP), IEEE Computer Society, 2010, pp. 111–118.Fuentes-Fernández, R., Hassan, S., Pavón, J., Galán, J. 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. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 11(2), 189-206. doi:10.1007/s10458-005-2176-4[26]M.J. Kim, H.G. Yoon and H.K. Lee, MAV: An intelligent Multi-agent model based on Cloud computing for resource virtualization, in: Computers, Networks, Systems, and Industrial Engineering, Studies in Computational Intelligence, Vol. 365, Springer, 2011, pp. 99–111.Kraus, S., Sycara, K., & Evenchik, A. (1998). Reaching agreements through argumentation: a logical model and implementation. Artificial Intelligence, 104(1-2), 1-69. doi:10.1016/s0004-3702(98)00078-2[28]W.-Y. Lin, G.-Y. Lin and H.-Y. Wei, Dynamic auction mechanism for cloud resource allocation, in: 10th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing, CCGRID’10, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 2010, pp. 591–592.[29]S. Liu, G. Quan and S. Ren, On-line scheduling of real-time services for cloud computing, in: 6th World Congress on Services, SERVICES’10, IEEE Computer Society, 2010, pp. 459–464.Navarro, M., Heras, S., Botti, V., & Julián, V. (2013). Towards real-time agreements. Expert Systems with Applications, 40(10), 3906-3917. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2012.12.087Ontañón, S., & Plaza, E. (2011). An argumentation framework for learning, information exchange, and joint-deliberation in multi-agent systems1. Multiagent and Grid Systems, 7(2-3), 95-108. doi:10.3233/mgs-2011-0169Palanca, J., Navarro, M., García-Fornes, A., & Julian, V. (2013). Deadline prediction scheduling based on benefits. Future Generation Computer Systems, 29(1), 61-73. doi:10.1016/j.future.2012.05.007[33]C. Pautasso, O. Zimmermann and F. Leymann, Restful web services vs. “big”’ web services: making the right architectural decision, in: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW’08, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2008, pp. 805–814.[34]J. Peng, X. Zhang, Z. Lei, B. Zhang, W. Zhang and Q. Li, Comparison of several cloud computing platforms, in: 2nd International Symposium on Information Science and Engineering, ISISE’09, IEEE Computer Society, 2009, pp. 23–27.Prakken, H., & Sartor, G. (1998). Artificial Intelligence and Law, 6(2/4), 231-287. doi:10.1023/a:1008278309945[36]I. Rahwan and G. Simari, eds, Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence, Springer, 2009.Ross, J. W., & Westerman, G. (2004). Preparing for utility computing: The role of IT architecture and relationship management. IBM Systems Journal, 43(1), 5-19. doi:10.1147/sj.431.0005Schaffer, H. E. (2009). X as a Service, Cloud Computing, and the Need for Good Judgment. IT Professional, 11(5), 4-5. doi:10.1109/mitp.2009.112[39]K.M. Sim, Agent-based cloud commerce, in: IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, IEEE Press, 2009, pp. 717–721.Soh, L.-K., & Tsatsoulis, C. (2005). A Real-Time Negotiation Model and A Multi-Agent Sensor Network Implementation. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 11(3), 215-271. doi:10.1007/s10458-005-0539-5Talia, D. (2012). Clouds Meet Agents: Toward Intelligent Cloud Services. IEEE Internet Computing, 16(2), 78-81. doi:10.1109/mic.2012.28Tolchinsky, P., Modgil, S., Atkinson, K., McBurney, P., & Cortés, U. (2011). Deliberation dialogues for reasoning about safety critical actions. 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Organization based multiagent architecture for distributed environments

[EN]Distributed environments represent a complex field in which applied solutions should be flexible and include significant adaptation capabilities. These environments are related to problems where multiple users and devices may interact, and where simple and local solutions could possibly generate good results, but may not be effective with regards to use and interaction. There are many techniques that can be employed to face this kind of problems, from CORBA to multi-agent systems, passing by web-services and SOA, among others. All those methodologies have their advantages and disadvantages that are properly analyzed in this documents, to finally explain the new architecture presented as a solution for distributed environment problems. The new architecture for solving complex solutions in distributed environments presented here is called OBaMADE: Organization Based Multiagent Architecture for Distributed Environments. It is a multiagent architecture based on the organizations of agents paradigm, where the agents in the architecture are structured into organizations to improve their organizational capabilities. The reasoning power of the architecture is based on the Case-Based Reasoning methology, being implemented in a internal organization that uses agents to create services to solve the external request made by the users. The OBaMADE architecture has been successfully applied to two different case studies where its prediction capabilities have been properly checked. Those case studies have showed optimistic results and, being complex systems, have demonstrated the abstraction and generalizations capabilities of the architecture. Nevertheless OBaMADE is intended to be able to solve much other kind of problems in distributed environments scenarios. It should be applied to other varieties of situations and to other knowledge fields to fully develop its potencial.[ES]Los entornos distribuidos representan un campo de conocimiento complejo en el que las soluciones a aplicar deben ser flexibles y deben contar con gran capacidad de adaptación. Este tipo de entornos está normalmente relacionado con problemas donde varios usuarios y dispositivos entran en juego. Para solucionar dichos problemas, pueden utilizarse sistemas locales que, aunque ofrezcan buenos resultados en términos de calidad de los mismos, no son tan efectivos en cuanto a la interacción y posibilidades de uso. Existen múltiples técnicas que pueden ser empleadas para resolver este tipo de problemas, desde CORBA a sistemas multiagente, pasando por servicios web y SOA, entre otros. Todas estas mitologías tienen sus ventajas e inconvenientes, que se analizan en este documento, para explicar, finalmente, la nueva arquitectura presentada como una solución para los problemas generados en entornos distribuidos. La nueva arquitectura aquí se llama OBaMADE, que es el acrónimo del inglés Organization Based Multiagent Architecture for Distributed Environments (Arquitectura Multiagente Basada en Organizaciones para Entornos Distribuidos). Se trata de una arquitectura multiagente basasa en el paradigma de las organizaciones de agente, donde los agentes que forman parte de la arquitectura se estructuran en organizaciones para mejorar sus capacidades organizativas. La capacidad de razonamiento de la arquitectura está basada en la metodología de razonamiento basado en casos, que se ha implementado en una de las organizaciones internas de la arquitectura por medio de agentes que crean servicios que responden a las solicitudes externas de los usuarios. La arquitectura OBaMADE se ha aplicado de forma exitosa a dos casos de estudio diferentes, en los que se han demostrado sus capacidades predictivas. Aplicando OBaMADE a estos casos de estudio se han obtenido resultados esperanzadores y, al ser sistemas complejos, se han demostrado las capacidades tanto de abstracción como de generalización de la arquitectura presentada. Sin embargo, esta arquitectura está diseñada para poder ser aplicada a más tipo de problemas de entornos distribuidos. Debe ser aplicada a más variadas situaciones y a otros campos de conocimiento para desarrollar completamente el potencial de esta arquitectura

Designing new network adaptation and ATM adaptation layers for interactive multimedia applications

Multimedia services, audiovisual applications composed of a combination of discrete and continuous data streams, will be a major part of the traffic flowing in the next generation of high speed networks. The cornerstones for multimedia are Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) foreseen as the technology for the future Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN) and audio and video compression algorithms such as MPEG-2 that reduce applications bandwidth requirements. Powerful desktop computers available today can integrate seamlessly the network access and the applications and thus bring the new multimedia services to home and business users. Among these services, those based on multipoint capabilities are expected to play a major role.    Interactive multimedia applications unlike traditional data transfer applications have stringent simultaneous requirements in terms of loss and delay jitter due to the nature of audiovisual information. In addition, such stream-based applications deliver data at a variable rate, in particular if a constant quality is required.    ATM, is able to integrate traffic of different nature within a single network creating interactions of different types that translate into delay jitter and loss. Traditional protocol layers do not have the appropriate mechanisms to provide the required network quality of service (QoS) for such interactive variable bit rate (VBR) multimedia multipoint applications. This lack of functionalities calls for the design of protocol layers with the appropriate functions to handle the stringent requirements of multimedia.    This thesis contributes to the solution of this problem by proposing new Network Adaptation and ATM Adaptation Layers for interactive VBR multimedia multipoint services.    The foundations to build these new multimedia protocol layers are twofold; the requirements of real-time multimedia applications and the nature of compressed audiovisual data.    On this basis, we present a set of design principles we consider as mandatory for a generic Multimedia AAL capable of handling interactive VBR multimedia applications in point-to-point as well as multicast environments. These design principles are then used as a foundation to derive a first set of functions for the MAAL, namely; cell loss detection via sequence numbering, packet delineation, dummy cell insertion and cell loss correction via RSE FEC techniques.    The proposed functions, partly based on some theoretical studies, are implemented and evaluated in a simulated environment. Performances are evaluated from the network point of view using classic metrics such as cell and packet loss. We also study the behavior of the cell loss process in order to evaluate the efficiency to be expected from the proposed cell loss correction method. We also discuss the difficulties to map network QoS parameters to user QoS parameters for multimedia applications and especially for video information. In order to present a complete performance evaluation that is also meaningful to the end-user, we make use of the MPQM metric to map the obtained network performance results to a user level. We evaluate the impact that cell loss has onto video and also the improvements achieved with the MAAL.    All performance results are compared to an equivalent implementation based on AAL5, as specified by the current ITU-T and ATM Forum standards.    An AAL has to be by definition generic. But to fully exploit the functionalities of the AAL layer, it is necessary to have a protocol layer that will efficiently interface the network and the applications. This role is devoted to the Network Adaptation Layer.    The network adaptation layer (NAL) we propose, aims at efficiently interface the applications to the underlying network to achieve a reliable but low overhead transmission of video streams. Since this requires an a priori knowledge of the information structure to be transmitted, we propose the NAL to be codec specific.    The NAL targets interactive multimedia applications. These applications share a set of common requirements independent of the encoding scheme used. This calls for the definition of a set of design principles that should be shared by any NAL even if the implementation of the functions themselves is codec specific. On the basis of the design principles, we derive the common functions that NALs have to perform which are mainly two; the segmentation and reassembly of data packets and the selective data protection.    On this basis, we develop an MPEG-2 specific NAL. It provides a perceptual syntactic information protection, the PSIP, which results in an intelligent and minimum overhead protection of video information. The PSIP takes advantage of the hierarchical organization of the compressed video data, common to the majority of the compression algorithms, to perform a selective data protection based on the perceptual relevance of the syntactic information.    The transmission over the combined NAL-MAAL layers shows significant improvement in terms of CLR and perceptual quality compared to equivalent transmissions over AAL5 with the same overhead.    The usage of the MPQM as a performance metric, which is one of the main contributions of this thesis, leads to a very interesting observation. The experimental results show that for unexpectedly high CLRs, the average perceptual quality remains close to the original value. The economical potential of such an observation is very important. Given that the data flows are VBR, it is possible to improve network utilization by means of statistical multiplexing. It is therefore possible to reduce the cost per communication by increasing the number of connections with a minimal loss in quality.    This conclusion could not have been derived without the combined usage of perceptual and network QoS metrics, which have been able to unveil the economic potential of perceptually protected streams.    The proposed concepts are finally tested in a real environment where a proof-of-concept implementation of the MAAL has shown a behavior close to the simulated results therefore validating the proposed multimedia protocol layers

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Model for WCET prediction, scheduling and task allocation for emergent agent-behaviours in real-time scenarios

[ES]Hasta el momento no se conocen modelos de tiempo real específicamente desarrollados para su uso en sistemas abiertos, como las Organizaciones Virtuales de Agentes (OVs). Convencionalmente, los modelos de tiempo real se aplican a sistemas cerrados donde todas las variables se conocen a priori. Esta tesis presenta nuevas contribuciones y la novedosa integración de agentes en tiempo real dentro de OVs. Hasta donde alcanza nuestro conocimiento, éste es el primer modelo específicamente diseñado para su aplicación en OVs con restricciones temporales estrictas. Esta tesis proporciona una nueva perspectiva que combina la apertura y dinamicidad necesarias en una OV con las restricciones de tiempo real. Ésto es una aspecto complicado ya que el primer paradigma no es estricto, como el propio término de sistema abierto indica, sin embargo, el segundo paradigma debe cumplir estrictas restricciones. En resumen, el modelo que se presenta permite definir las acciones que una OV debe llevar a cabo con un plazo concreto, considerando los cambios que pueden ocurrir durante la ejecución de un plan particular. Es una planificación de tiempo real en una OV. Otra de las principales contribuciones de esta tesis es un modelo para el cálculo del tiempo de ejecución en el peor caso (WCET). La propuesta es un modelo efectivo para calcular el peor escenario cuando un agente desea formar parte de una OV y para ello, debe incluir sus tareas o comportamientos dentro del sistema de tiempo real, es decir, se calcula el WCET de comportamientos emergentes en tiempo de ejecución. También se incluye una planificación local para cada nodo de ejecución basada en el algoritmo FPS y una distribución de tareas entre los nodos disponibles en el sistema. Para ambos modelos se usan modelos matemáticos y estadísticos avanzados para crear un mecanismo adaptable, robusto y eficiente para agentes inteligentes en OVs. El desconocimiento, pese al estudio realizado, de una plataforma para sistemas abiertos que soporte agentes con restricciones de tiempo real y los mecanismos necesarios para el control y la gestión de OVs, es la principal motivación para el desarrollo de la plataforma de agentes PANGEA+RT. PANGEA+RT es una innovadora plataforma multi-agente que proporciona soporte para la ejecución de agentes en ambientes de tiempo real. Finalmente, se presenta un caso de estudio donde robots heterogéneos colaboran para realizar tareas de vigilancia. El caso de estudio se ha desarrollado con la plataforma PANGEA+RT donde el modelo propuesto está integrado. Por tanto al final de la tesis, con este caso de estudio se obtienen los resultados y conclusiones que validan el modelo

Working Notes from the 1992 AAAI Spring Symposium on Practical Approaches to Scheduling and Planning

The symposium presented issues involved in the development of scheduling systems that can deal with resource and time limitations. To qualify, a system must be implemented and tested to some degree on non-trivial problems (ideally, on real-world problems). However, a system need not be fully deployed to qualify. Systems that schedule actions in terms of metric time constraints typically represent and reason about an external numeric clock or calendar and can be contrasted with those systems that represent time purely symbolically. The following topics are discussed: integrating planning and scheduling; integrating symbolic goals and numerical utilities; managing uncertainty; incremental rescheduling; managing limited computation time; anytime scheduling and planning algorithms, systems; dependency analysis and schedule reuse; management of schedule and plan execution; and incorporation of discrete event techniques

Efficient Decision Support Systems

This series is directed to diverse managerial professionals who are leading the transformation of individual domains by using expert information and domain knowledge to drive decision support systems (DSSs). The series offers a broad range of subjects addressed in specific areas such as health care, business management, banking, agriculture, environmental improvement, natural resource and spatial management, aviation administration, and hybrid applications of information technology aimed to interdisciplinary issues. This book series is composed of three volumes: Volume 1 consists of general concepts and methodology of DSSs; Volume 2 consists of applications of DSSs in the biomedical domain; Volume 3 consists of hybrid applications of DSSs in multidisciplinary domains. The book is shaped upon decision support strategies in the new infrastructure that assists the readers in full use of the creative technology to manipulate input data and to transform information into useful decisions for decision makers

Final report on the evaluation of RRM/CRRM algorithms

Deliverable public del projecte EVERESTThis deliverable provides a definition and a complete evaluation of the RRM/CRRM algorithms selected in D11 and D15, and evolved and refined on an iterative process. The evaluation will be carried out by means of simulations using the simulators provided at D07, and D14.Preprin