Creating agent platforms to host agent-mediated services that share resources

After a period where the Internet was exclusively filled with content, the present efforts are moving towards services, which handle the raw information to create value from it. Therefore labors to create a wide collection of agent-based services are being perfomed in several projects, such as Agentcities does. In this work we present an architecture for agent platforms named a-Buildings. The aim of the proposed architecture is to ease the creation, installation, search and management of agent-mediated services and the share of resources among services. To do so the a-Buildings architecture creates a new level of abstraction on top of the standard FIPA agent platform specification. Basically, an a-Building is a service-oriented platform which offers a set of low level services to the agents it hosts. We define low level services as those required services that are neccesary to create more complex high level composed services.Postprint (published version

Multilevel Preconditioning of Discontinuous-Galerkin Spectral Element Methods, Part I: Geometrically Conforming Meshes

This paper is concerned with the design, analysis and implementation of preconditioning concepts for spectral Discontinuous Galerkin discretizations of elliptic boundary value problems. While presently known techniques realize a growth of the condition numbers that is logarithmic in the polynomial degrees when all degrees are equal and quadratic otherwise, our main objective is to realize full robustness with respect to arbitrarily large locally varying polynomial degrees degrees, i.e., under mild grading constraints condition numbers stay uniformly bounded with respect to the mesh size and variable degrees. The conceptual foundation of the envisaged preconditioners is the auxiliary space method. The main conceptual ingredients that will be shown in this framework to yield "optimal" preconditioners in the above sense are Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto grids in connection with certain associated anisotropic nested dyadic grids as well as specially adapted wavelet preconditioners for the resulting low order auxiliary problems. Moreover, the preconditioners have a modular form that facilitates somewhat simplified partial realizations. One of the components can, for instance, be conveniently combined with domain decomposition, at the expense though of a logarithmic growth of condition numbers. Our analysis is complemented by quantitative experimental studies of the main components.Comment: 41 pages, 11 figures; Major revision: rearrangement of the contents for better readability, part on wavelet preconditioner adde

On generalizations of the series of Taylor, Lagrange, Laurent and Teixeira

The classical theorems of Taylor, Lagrange, Laurent and Teixeira, are extended from the representation of a complex function F(z), to its derivative F(ν)(z) of complex order ν, understood as either a Liouville (1832) or a Rieman (1847) differintegration (Campos 1984, 1985); these results are distinct from, and alternative to, other extensions of Taylor's series using differintegrations (Osler 1972, Lavoie & Osler & Tremblay 1976). We consider a complex function F(z), which is analytic (has an isolated singularity) at ζ, and expand its derivative of complex order F(ν)(z), in an ascending (ascending-descending) series of powers of an auxiliary function f(z), yielding the generalized Teixeira (Lagrange) series, which includes, for f(z)=z−ζ, the generalized Taylor (Laurent) series. The generalized series involve non-integral powers and/or coefficients evaluated by fractional derivatives or integrals, except in the case ν=0, when the classical theorems of Taylor (1715), Lagrange (1770), Laurent (1843) and Teixeira (1900) are regained. As an application, these generalized series can be used to generate special functions with complex parameters (Campos 1986), e.g., the Hermite and Bessel types