An Agent-Based Collaborative Platform for the Optimized Trading of Renewable Energy within a Community, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2014, nr 4

Cities are increasingly recognized for their ability to play a catalytic role in addressing climate and energy challenges using technologically innovative approaches. Since energy used in urban areas accounts for about 40% of total EU energy consumption, a change of direction towards renewable energy is necessary in order to alleviate the usage of carbonized electricity and also to save money. A combination of IT and telecommunication technologies is necessary to enable the energy and resources saving. ICT based solutions can be used to enable energy and money saving not only for a single building, but for the whole community of a neighborhood. In this paper a model for the energy cost minimization of a neighborhood together with an agent-based interaction model that reproduces the proposed formal representation is presented. Furthermore the authors present a prototype implementation of this model and first experimental tests

Science of Complex Systems and Citizenship Skills: A Pilot Study with Adult Citizens

The issue of scientific citizenship in the context of STEM education has been under debate for over two decades. We present a preliminary study which aims to investigate if, how and why the development of hard scientific skills grounded in the discipline of complex systems (suitably simplified and adapted) may foster the development of citizenship skills that can impact on people's approaches to facing problems and making decisions. We carried out a pilot study with a group of 34 volunteer adult citizens. The data analysis showed that: i) in the beginning, only a few participants were comfortable dealing with scientific and epistemological concepts related to complex systems, favouring instead a "common sense" approach towards decision-making; ii) in some successful cases, there was an alignment between scientific competences and decision-making strategies, suggesting that it is possible to design activities based on authentic scientific concepts in order to develop citizenship skills

Design of an agent based monitoring framework for federated clouds

Abstract—In the last years, the Cloud services market experienced an extremely rapid growth, which may lead to severe scalability problems. Therefore, in order to cope with the resource capacity limits of a single Cloud provider, as well as to address the vendor lock-in problem associated to the choice of a single proprietary Cloud solution, the concept of federating multiple heterogeneous organizations is receiving an increasing attention by the key players in the Cloud services market; this model enables the implementation of environmental diversity for Cloud applications and overcomes the provisioning and scalability limits of a single Cloud. One of the main issues within a Cloud federation is related to the monitoring of the application deployed on resources coming from different vendors belonging to the federation. In this work we present an agent based approach to monitor the user’s Cloud environment provided by the federation: a multi-layer architecture is proposed where each part aims at monitoring different aspects of the multi-Cloud infrastructure, starting from the detection of critical conditions on low level parameters for the computational units and composing different monitoring levels in order to check the federated SLA

Monitoring and management of a cloud application within a federation of cloud providers

Cloud federation is an emerging computing model where multiple resources from independent cloud providers are leveraged to create large-scale distributed virtual computing clusters, operating as within a single cloud organisation. This concept of service aggregation is characterised by interoperability features, which can address different problems about inter-cloud collaboration. One of the main issues within a cloud federation is related to the monitoring of the application deployed on resources coming from different vendors belonging to the federation. We present an agent-based architecture that aims at monitoring the user’s cloud environment provided by the federation: the elasticity of the proposed architecture allows the configuration and customisation of the monitoring infrastructure to adapt it to the specific cloud application. Agents will be strengthened by algorithms and rules used to monitor QoS parameters that are critical for the specific application. The prototypal implementation of the proposed framework will be applied on a testbed application to validate the monitoring architecture

Intrusion detection in federated clouds

Abstract: In order to overcome the provisioning and scalability limits of a single cloud, cloud federation appears as the computing model in which multiple resources from independent cloud providers can be shared to create large-scale distributed virtual clusters. On the other hand, these complex architectures become an attractive target for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Although, federated cloud environments have large amount of resources and profound dynamic allocation capability, which can be used to face DDoS attacks, they are however vulnerable to attacks that aim at compromising the service level agreements. In this paper, we investigate the key research topics for supporting distributed intrusion detection in a federated cloud environment. We propose a scalable intrusion detection solution, which can be used by cloud providers to protect the federated cloud infrastructure, as well as offered to the cloud service providers to monitor the hosted applications. We present a multi-layer architecture, which exploits a publish/subscribe middleware to collect and share security information in the federated cloud infrastructure. Moreover, we present an open-source framework, which provides features and interfaces to develop and deploy security components, as well as to define customised event correlation rules used to detect possible inter-cloud attacks

An Agent-Based Platform for Cloud Applications Performance Monitoring

The monitoring of the resources is one among the major challenges that the virtualization brings with it within the Cloud environments. In order to ensure scalability and dependability, the user’s applications are often distributed on several computational resources, such as Virtual Machines, storages and so on. For this reason, the customer is able to retrieve information about the Cloud infrastructure only by acquiring monitoring services provided by the same vendor that is offering the Cloud resources, thus being forced to trust the Cloud provider about the detected performance indexes. In this work we present a complete architecture that covers all the monitoring activities that take place within a Cloud application lifecycle: we also propose an agent-based implementation of a particular module of the designed architecture that ensures high customization of the monitoring facility and more tolerance to network and resource failures

An autonomic monitoring framework for IaaS cloud applications

Within the Cloud application life cycle, Cloud monitoring takes an important role since the fulfilment of the requirements has to be continuously controlled in order to avoid saturation or under-utilisation of Cloud resources and to check the compliance of the signed SLAs with the real performance of the infrastructure. In fact, to ensure scalability and dependability, the user's applications are often distributed on several computational resources, such as virtual machines, storages and so on, and the customer often is able to retrieve information about the Cloud infrastructure only by acquiring monitoring services provided by the same vendor that is offering the Cloud resources. In this work we present a complete framework that covers all the monitoring activities that take place within a Cloud application life cycle, introducing autonomic monitoring facilities that, exploiting the agent technology capabilities, allows the monitoring infrastructure to automatically adapt itself to the execution environment. These facilities provide both robustness and performance control to the framework, reducing the invasiveness of the monitoring and allowing, only if necessary, a deeper analysis of the measured data

Intrusion detection in Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing represents both a technology for using computing infrastructures in a more efficient way, and a business model for selling computing resources and services. On the other hand, such complex and distributed architectures become an attractive target for intruders. Cyber-attacks represent a serious danger, which can compromise the quality of service delivered to the customers. In this paper, we investigate the key research topics for supporting distributed intrusion detection in Cloud environments. Moreover, we present a distributed architecture for providing intrusion detection in Cloud Computing, which enables Cloud providers to offer security solutions as a service. It is a hierarchical and multi-layer architecture designed to collect information in the Cloud environment, using multiple distributed security components, which can be used to perform complex event correlation analysis