Agent Oriented Requirement Engineering for Lake Mathematical Modelling: Preliminary Study

Agent oriented requirement engineering (AORE) is useful in transforming mathematical models to agent oriented modelling and simulation. The transformation process is based on a requirement elicitation study in which various stakeholders will understand users’ requirements through elicitation questions and interviews. The AORE enable the modellers to understand the mathematical model and translate the model into the agent context. With AORE, the computational science students can enjoy the benefits of agent modelling and simulation during their study. This paper presents the work to guide the computational science and mathematical students in agent based simulation. It presents a method to transform the discrete mathematical model into individual based modelling and simulation. Consequently, the method is able to promote the agent technology to a wider audience. We proposed an extended version of AORE that can offer requirements elicitation support in environmental modelling, a computational science (CS) domain of study. The mechanism of AORE within a state of the art agent oriented methodology (AOM) is presented in details through a lake modelling case study in this paper. Also, a demonstration on simulating the case study in agent simulation, NetLogo, and comparison with the origin simulation results of lake model is elaborated to validate the feasibility of AORE

Sustainability modelling of ecommerce for rural community: A case from long lamai Ezommerce initiative

eCommerce is able to improve the visibility and economy of rural community. However, it is a challenge to promote the eCommerce to a wider rural community. One reason is that there is a lack of understanding of the notion of sustainability in the deployment of this technology. Sustainability is always an important property in all kind of technology deployment for rural community. Questions like; How to sustain certain projects once the funding is finished? Who will pay for the project after that? Does the project still exist after certain time? This paper presents an initial sustainability model to support the eCommerce project for Long Lamai community. The model is based on the early management in eCommerce project for Long Lamai. In this paper, we first present the factors that influence the sustainability of eCommerce for the community. This is followed by the modeling of those factors using agentoriented modeling. Finally, we validate the model through the eCommerce project refinement. The model has been shown to be valueable in order to understand the community well and to strategize the eCommerce deployment for the community in a sustainable way. The contributions of this paper is the theoretical framework of the sustainability model as well as its practicality in supporting rural community projects

Agent-Oriented Methodology for Designing 3D Animated Characters

Agent Oriented Methodology (AOM) has been used as an alternative tool to modelling the production of 3D animated characters. Besides allowing strong engagement between production team members, the agent models also drive effective communication among them. This paper explores the adoption of AOM to model the cognitive capability of 3D animated characters. We extend and demonstrate how AOM can be used to model a BDI (Belief/Desire/Intention) cognitive architecture for 3D animated characters in a fire fighting and evacuation scenario. The contribution of this work is that it turns the AOM into a detailed design tool for a 3D production team. Although the AOM can serve as an engagement tool among various stakeholders, we further showcase the use of AOM as a tool for production design and development

Understanding Technology Changes for ICT4D Projects through Modelling

ICT4D involves the study of design and development of ICT technology to the community. Based on our experience, most of the ICT4D projects are happening in one off solution. The projects will deliver with off the shelf products or services and hand over to the community upon the deployment and training. There is neither plan nor development to deal with changes. Hence, it may lead to the failure and unsustainable projects. We believe that dealing with technology changes is essential for sustaining the ICT4D projects. However, how to handle the changes in technology on ICT projects? This paper introduces a preliminary study on technique to handle the changes of technology through modelling. From the modelling, it showcases how the requirements have led to the technology change and how the business models affect the decision in designing the technology or solution for ICT4D projects. We adopt actor network theory to study the technology changes on ICT4D projects. We extend the actor network theory with networked actor modelling to study the actors’ needs and the impact of cost (e.g. business models) to deal with the technology adoption, translation and development for ICT4D projects. The agent oriented modelling is introduced as the modelling process for actor network theory. The agent modelling consists of models based on the integration of agent models and e3Value model. In order to evaluate the work, we demonstrate how the model can understand the technology changes (e.g. adoption and adaptation) for an electronic health record system (EHR)

Interactive mobile game for learning about sustainablity education

Game-based learning is an effective way to engage learners to learn through interactivity afforded by computing technology today. This paper presents an approach to use an interactive mobile game to teach about sustainability issues. The game is created as an interactive mobile application called "LifeTree", and it introduces a new design strategy that uses a bubble analogy throughout the theme in the game. Initial user testing has indicated that the mobile game is found to be interesting and relevant to the learning of environmental issues that challenge the world today

Measuring the Effects of Occlusion on Kernel Based Object Tracking Using Simulated Videos

Occlusion handling is one of the most studied problems for object tracking in computer vision. Many previous works claimed that occlusion can be handled effectively using Kalman filter, Particle filter and Mean Shift tracking methods. However, these methods were only tested on specific task videos. In order to explore the actual potential of these methods, this paper examined the tracking methods with six simulation videos that consider various occlusion scenarios. Tracking performances are evaluated based on Sequence Frame Detection Accuracy (SFDA). The results show that Mean shift tracker would fail completely when full occlusion occurs as claimed by many previous works. In most cases, Kalman filter and Particle filter tracker achieved SFDA score between 0.3 and 0.4. It demonstrates that Particle filter tracker fails to detect object with arbitrary movement in one of the experiments. The effect of occlusion on each tracker is analysed with Frame Detection Accuracy (FDA) graph

Developing fire evacuation simulation through BDIbased modelling and simulation

Fire evacuation simulation is used to simulate the fire evacuation procedures by involving human-like agents. In this paper, the fire evacuation simulation is designed and developed by adopting the BDI agent plug-in. BDI (Belief, Desires, Intentions) is a technique used in modelling the multi-agent system. A tool and BDI methodology are introduced to help in modelling human behaviour and the decision making of an agent. In this paper, the usability of the BDI methodology and BDI agent plug-in tool is studied through a case study of a fire evacuation environment. The case study covers the three main components needed in a fire evacuation simulation: the fire (the spread of the fire and smoke), the building layout (the classroom and physical objects), and the human-like multi-agents. Using the Unity game engine, a fire evacuation simulation system is built based on the requirements, methodology,and design. The usability of the BDI agent plug-in tool can be proven by observing the results of the fire evacuation simulation and the reaction of agents when encountering the fire situation. However, there are also some limitations of this fire evacuation simulation. Therefore, there are works to be done to develop a more realistic fire evacuation simulation and more human-like multi-agents in future

Goal Question Metric as an Interdisciplinary Tool for Assessing Mobile Learning Application

Assessing the mobile learning application among interdisciplinary researchers is a non-trivial task. Mandarin Learning App is a Mandarin 3D game tailor-made for students who choose PBC1033 Mandarin Language Level 1 as an elective course. It is an interdisciplinary project which it involves researchers from software engineering, computational science/mathematics and the Faculty of Language studies. In the project, the software engineer focuses on producing a quality application mostly through usability studies; the language teacher focuses on students’ study performance upon using the Mandarin Learning App and the mathematician focuses on finding the statistical data dependency of collected data through the various statistical packages. Hence, we are facing issues like how to reach a consensus in working on assessing the Mandarin 3D games? How to enable the discussion among the researchers; how to consolidate the results so that we can understand? We introduce Goal Question Metric to tackle these issues. In this paper, we demonstrate how Goal Question Metric is used to form a holistic view of assessing requirements on mobile applications and guide the discussion and reach consensus in analyzing the results of the evaluation. The contribution of this paper is to introduce Goal Question Metric as an interdisciplinary tool while assessing the mobile learning application. With Goal Question Metric, we demonstrate how it can structure the assessment from a different viewpoint in a comprehensive and systematic manner; 1) better structure of the experiments, 2) able to reach consensus among researchers from different disciplines, 3) able to analyze the dependencies among various experiments and 4) able to find hidden results

Analysis and classification of task knowledge patterns

Patterns have recorded the experience of engineering software systems. Various patterns have been introduced and described in several domains. A particular class of patterns, task knowledge patterns that are important for agent oriented software development, is investigated in this paper. It has been reported that descriptions of task knowledge given in the pattern literature is not clearly structured, and some of the useful description is left implicit to the developer. This paper reports our investigation on task knowledge that has been shared across a wider spectrum of articles to showcase such scenario. We present a new way to analyse and classify task knowledge patterns. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the experience of different development groups is described very differently based on the classification result. The investigation shows the need to present task descriptions in a structured manner. The analysis and classification techniques demonstrated are applicable for agent-based simulation