Self-Configuring Socio-Technical Systems: Redesign at Runtime

Modern information systems are becoming more and more socio-technical systems, namely systems composed of human (social) agents and software (technical) systems operating together in a common environment. The structure of such systems has to evolve dynamically in response to the changes of the environment. When new requirements are introduced, when an actor leaves the system or when a new actor comes, the socio-technical structure needs to be redesigned and revised. In this paper, an approach to dynamic reconfiguration of a socio-technical system structure in response to internal or external changes is proposed. The approach is based on planning techniques for generating possible alternative configurations, and local strategies for their evaluation. The reconfiguration mechanism is presented, which makes the socio-technical system self-configuring, and the approach is discussed and analyzed on a simple case study

Applying tropos to socio-technical system design and runtime configuration

Recent trends in Software Engineering have introduced the importance of reconsidering the traditional idea of software design as a socio-tecnical problem, where human agents are integral part of the system along with hardware and software components. Design and runtime support for Socio-Technical Systems (STSs) requires appropriate modeling techniques and non-traditional infrastructures. Agent-oriented software methodologies are natural solutions to the development of STSs, both humans and technical components are conceptualized and analyzed as part of the same system. In this paper, we illustrate a number of Tropos features that we believe fundamental to support the development and runtime reconfiguration of STSs. Particularly, we focus on two critical design issues: risk analysis and location variability. We show how they are integrated and used into a planning-based approach to support the designer in evaluating and choosing the best design alternative. Finally, we present a generic framework to develop self-reconfigurable STSs

MAG: A Multilingual, Knowledge-base Agnostic and Deterministic Entity Linking Approach

Entity linking has recently been the subject of a significant body of research. Currently, the best performing approaches rely on trained mono-lingual models. Porting these approaches to other languages is consequently a difficult endeavor as it requires corresponding training data and retraining of the models. We address this drawback by presenting a novel multilingual, knowledge-based agnostic and deterministic approach to entity linking, dubbed MAG. MAG is based on a combination of context-based retrieval on structured knowledge bases and graph algorithms. We evaluate MAG on 23 data sets and in 7 languages. Our results show that the best approach trained on English datasets (PBOH) achieves a micro F-measure that is up to 4 times worse on datasets in other languages. MAG, on the other hand, achieves state-of-the-art performance on English datasets and reaches a micro F-measure that is up to 0.6 higher than that of PBOH on non-English languages.Comment: Accepted in K-CAP 2017: Knowledge Capture Conferenc

Requirements Analysis for Socio-technical Systems: Exploring and Evaluating Alternatives

Early requirements analysis focuses on stakeholders and their goals, and explores alternative ways of fulfilling them through networks of actor delegations. The i* modeling framework is a popular way of modeling and analyzing early requirements. This paper frames the problem of designing actor dependency networks as a multi-agent planning problem and adopts off-the-shelf planners to offer a tool that generate alternative actor dependency networks, and evaluate them in terms of metrics derived from Game Theory literature. The paper presents in detail how planning can generate alternative networks, also describes the tool (P-Tool) that supports the planning process and generates alternatives. As well, we offer preliminary experimental results on the scalability of the approach

An Implemented Prototype of Bluetooth-Based Multi-Agent System

People tend to form social networks within specific geographical areas. This is motivated by the fact that the geographical locality corresponds generally to common interests and opportunities offered by the people active in the area (e.g., students of a university could be interested to buy or sell text books adopted for a specific course, to share notes, or just to meet together to play basketball). Cellular phones and more in general mobile devices are currently widely used and represent a big opportunity to support social communities. We present an application of multi-agent systems accessible via mobile devices (cellular phones and PDAs), where Bluetooth technology has been adopted to reflect users locality. We illustrate an implemented prototype of the proposed architecture and we discuss the opportunities offered by the system

Toothagent: a Multi-Agent System for Virtual Communities Support

People tend to form social networks within geographical areas. This can be explained by the fact that generally geographical localities correspond to common interests (e.g. students located in a university could be interested to buy or sell textbooks adopted for a specific course, to share notes, or just to meet together to play basketball). Cellular phones and more in general mobile devices are currently widely used and represent a big opportunity to support social communities. In this paper, we present a general architecture for multi-agent systems accessible via mobile devices (cellular phones and PDAs), where Bluetooth technology has been adopted to reflect users locality. We illustrate ToothAgent, an implemented prototype of the proposed architecture, and discuss the opportunities offered by the system

Evaluating Procedural Alternatives in an e-Voting Domain: Lesson Learned

The ProVotE project aims at actuating art. 84 of law 2 - 5/3/2003, which promotes the introduction of e-voting in Trentino for the next provincial elections (2008). To provide a smooth transition to the new way of voting ProVotE takes a multi-disciplinary approach that develops along di®erent lines, among which, sociological, normative, organizational, and technological. Carrying out an election is a critical activity that involves several people of di®erent organizations over a period of time that spans months. This paper describes part of the work carried out within the organizational/logistical line of the ProVotE project and describes the approach we are taking in order to provide precise models of the electoral processes of an electronic voting, while, at the same time, providing mechanisms for documenting, reasoning on the possible alternative implementations of the procedures to support the elections of 2008. In particular, the approach is based on defining an alternating sequence of models, written using UML and Tropos, that allow to document the existing electoral processes and, at the same time, that are used to reason, evaluate, and choose possible alternative implementations of the electronic voting processes

2005) Toothagent: a Multi-Agent System for Virtual Communities Support

People tend to form social networks within geographical areas. This can be explained by the fact that generally geographical localities correspond to common interests (e.g. students located in a university could be interested to buy or sell textbooks adopted for a specific course, to share notes, or just to meet together to play basketball). Cellular phones and more in general mobile devices are currently widely used and represent a big opportunity to support social communities. In this paper, we present a general architecture for multi-agent systems accessible via mobile devices (cellular phones and PDAs), where Bluetooth technology has been adopted to reflect users locality. We illustrate ToothAgent, an implemented prototype of the proposed architecture, and discuss the opportunities offered by the system