OntologyBeanGenerator 5.0: Extending ontology concepts with methods and exceptions

When modeling and implementing complex systems based on agents and artifacts, achieving semantic interoperability is not only useful, but often necessary. A commonly adopted solution to manage complex and real MASs is adopting a Model Driven methodology, which uses an ontology as the formal representation of the domain, and then exploiting some existing tool to automatically generate code for agents in the MAS, to let them interact according to the model. While this approach is satisfactorily supported when the target MAS environment is Jason, less support is provided to Jade MASs, despite Jade's large adoption for real MASs development. So, considering the great support given by the automatic code generation starting from a formal model, and the large community working on Jade MASs, in this work we present an extension of the OntologyBeanGenerator plugin for Prot\ue9g\ue9, used to generate a Java representation of an OWL ontology for Jade. We improved the OntologyBeanGenerator tool to support the modeling of exceptions, formalized at the ontology level, and of methods associated with ontology elements, to set the interface of concrete objects (artifacts) at design stage. This extension allows us to integrate in a Model Driven approach a support for the formal definition of artifacts and provide an automatic generation of Jade code/interfaces to interact with them respecting the model

Automatically Generating Test Cases for Safety-Critical Software via Symbolic Execution

Automated test generation based on symbolic execution can be beneficial for systematically testing safety-critical software, to facilitate test engineers to pursue the strict testing requirements mandated by the certification standards, while controlling at the same time the costs of the testing process. At the same time, the development of safety-critical software is often constrained with programming languages or coding conventions that ban linguistic features which are believed to downgrade the safety of the programs, e.g., they do not allow dynamic memory allocation and variable-length arrays, limit the way in which loops are used, forbid recursion, and bound the complexity of control conditions. As a matter of facts, these linguistic features are also the main efficiency-blockers for the test generation approaches based on symbolic execution at the state of the art. This paper contributes new evidence of the effectiveness of generating test cases with symbolic execution for a significant class of industrial safety critical-systems. We specifically focus on Scade, a largely adopted model-based development language for safety-critical embedded software, and we report on a case study in which we exploited symbolic execution to automatically generate test cases for a set of safety-critical programs developed in Scade. To this end, we introduce a novel test generator that we developed in a recent industrial project on testing safety-critical railway software written in Scade, and we report on our experience of using this test generator for testing a set of Scade programs that belong to the development of an on-board signaling unit for high-speed rail. The results provide empirically evidence that symbolic execution is indeed a viable approach for generating high-quality test suites for the safety-critical programs considered in our case study

Agents and Robots for Reliable Engineered Autonomy:A Perspective from the Organisers of AREA 2020

From MDPI via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: accepted 2021-05-13, pub-electronic 2021-05-14Publication status: PublishedFunder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; Grant(s): EP/R026092, EP/R026173, EP/R026084, 694277Multi-agent systems, robotics and software engineering are large and active research areas with many applications in academia and industry. The First Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA), organised the first time in 2020, aims at encouraging cross-disciplinary collaborations and exchange of ideas among researchers working in these research areas. This paper presents a perspective of the organisers that aims at highlighting the latest research trends, future directions, challenges, and open problems. It also includes feedback from the discussions held during the AREA workshop. The goal of this perspective is to provide a high-level view of current research trends for researchers that aim at working in the intersection of these research areas

Special Issue: Agents and Robots for Reliable Engineered Autonomy

From MDPI via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: accepted 2021-07-06, pub-electronic 2021-07-13Publication status: PublishedThe study of autonomous agents is a well-established area that has been researched for decades, both from a design and implementation viewpoint [...

Exploiting Prolog for Projecting Agent Interaction Protocols

Abstract. Constrained global types are a powerful means to represent agent interaction protocols. In our recent research we demonstrated that they can be used to represent complex protocols in a very compact way, and we exploited them to dynamically verify correct implementation of a protocol in a real MAS framework, Jason. The main drawback of our previous approach is the full centralization of the monitoring activity which is delegated to a unique monitor agent. This approach works well for MASs with few agents, but could become unsuitable in communicationintensive and highly-distributed MASs where hundreds of agents should be monitored. In this paper we define an algorithm for projecting a constrained global type onto a set of agents Ags, by restricting it to the interactions involving agents in Ags, so that the outcome of the algorithm is another constrained global type that can be safely used for verifying the compliance of the sub-system Ags to the protocol specified by the original constrained global type. The projection mechanism is implemented in SWI Prolog and is the first step towards distributing the monitoring activity, making it safer and more efficient: the compliance of a MAS to a protocol could be dynamically verified by suitably partitioning the agents of the MAS into small sets of agents, and by assigning to each partition Ags a local monitor agent which checks all interactions involving Ags against the projected constrained global type. We leave for further investigation the problem of finding suitable partitions of agents in a MAS, to guarantee that verification through projected types and distributed agents is equivalent to verification performed by a single centralized monitor with a unique global type

Genetic investigations on 8 patients affected by ring 20 chromosome syndrome

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Mosaic Chromosome 20 ring [r(20)] is a chromosomal disorder associated with a rare syndrome characterized by a typical seizure phenotype, a particular electroclinical pattern, cognitive impairment, behavioural problems and absence of a consistent pattern of dysmorphology. The pathogenic mechanism underlying seizures disorders in r(20) syndrome is still unknown. We performed a detailed clinical and genetic study on 8 patients with r(20) chromosome, aimed at detecting the genetic mechanism underlying r(20) syndrome.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We submitted 8 subjects with a previous diagnosis of ring 20 chromosome mosaicism to a clinical re-evaluation, followed by cytogenetic, FISH, array-CGH and molecular analyses. The genetic study was also extended to their available parents.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>FISH and array-CGH experiments indicate that cryptic deletions on chromosome 20 are not the cause of the r(20) chromosome associated disease. Moreover, no evidence of chromosome 20 uniparental disomy was found. Analysis of FISH signals given by variant in size alphoid tandem repeats probes on the normal chromosome 20 and the r(20) chromosome in the mosaic carriers suggests that the r(20) chromosome is the same chromosome not circularized in the "normal" cell line.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Higher percentages of r(20) chromosome cells were observed to be related with precocious age at seizure onset and with resistance to antiepileptic drug treatment. Behavioural problems also seem to be associated with higher percentages of r(20) chromosome cells. Our results suggest that an epigenetic mechanism perturbing the expression of genes close to the telomeric regions, rather than deletion of genes located at the distal 20p and/or 20q regions, may underlie the manifestation of r(20) syndrome.</p

Fantastic MASs and Where to Find Them: First Results and Lesson Learned

Nowadays, the Multiagent Systems research community is facing new challenges related to engineering the overall process of software development, tailoring it to the specific needs of the community, and integrating SE techniques into many studies in the MAS area. More and more frequently, researchers need already developed MASs for validating their new proposals. Often, they spend time in looking for the code of existing tools to compare with the state of the art. Unfortunately, accessing this kind of resources, which are the starting point for many SE activities, is not always easy. In this paper, we present the first outcome of the initiative 'Fantastic MAS and where to find them', launched in June 2022, where we asked the agent community to contribute in the creation of a repository to facilitate the sharing of the already existing tools (agent development frameworks, libraries, add ons of already existing platforms) and MASs with their code. The 'Fantastic MAS' goals are to i) improve the sharing and reusing of research results ii) support the SE activities in our research community, iii) help making a step towards the Open Science movement, which has been already widely adopted in other research communities. Besides providing an overview of the submissions we got, we discuss the open problems that emerged in these eight months of the initiative, so that to stimulate the discussion in the community

Multi Agent Resource Allocation: a Comparison of Five Negotiation Protocols

Abstract—This paper describes five systems that exploit negotiation strategies to solve multiagent resource allocation problems. A deep comparison is drawn among them according to different criteria that involve general features of the systems; adherence to widely accepted agent definitions; domain, purpose, and approach; analysis, design and implementation of the negotiation protocol. Considerations on how extending one of the analyzed systems in order to move a concrete step towards the realization of an integrated platform for developing negotiation protocols are also provided in the conclusions. I