Enforcing Security in the AgentScape Middleware.

Multi Agent Systems (MAS) provide a useful paradigm for accessing distributed resources in an autonomic and self-directed manner. Resources, such as web services, are in-creasingly becoming available in large distributed environ-ments. Currently, numerous multi agent systems are avail-able. However, for the multi agent paradigm to become a genuine mainstream success certain key features need to be addressed: the foremost being security. While security has been a focus of the MAS community, configuring and man-aging such multi agent systems typically remains non-trivial. Well defined and easily configurable security policies address this issue. A security architecture that is both flexible and featureful is prerequisite for a MAS. A novel security policy enforcement system for multi agent middleware systems is introduced. The system facilitates a set of good default configurations but also allows extensive scope for users to develop customised policies to suit their individual needs. An agent middleware, AgentScape, is used to illustrate the system

Balancing Organizational Regulation and Agent Autonomy: An MDE-Based Approach

The deployment of agent societies —as complex systems— in dynamic and unpredictable settings brings forth critical issues concerning their design. Organizational models have been advocated to specify open systems in dynamic environments in order to accomplish the need to represent regulating structures explicitly and independently from acting components (or agents). Despite the fact that several frameworks have been proposed for the specification of organizational models, it is still a matter of design choice how to balance between regulative design and component flexibility. We propose a design framework, discussing the advantages of having different degrees of abstraction at organizational level in the development of agent societies. That is, we illustrate how the design properties impact the flexibility of run-time systems to cope with context changes. We adopt the OperA software engineering methodology to deal with the organizational model specification, and the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) mechanisms to map concepts between different design models

Using Agent-based Organisational Models for Crisis Management (extended abstract)

Multi Actor SystemsTechnology, Policy and Managemen