1,721,155 research outputs found
Developing multiagent systems: the Gaia Methodology
No full textSystems composed of interacting autonomous agents offer a promising software engineering approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, this multiagent system paradigm introduces a number of new abstractions and design/development issues when compared with more traditional approaches to software development. Accordingly, new analysis and design methodologies, as well as new tools, are needed to effectively engineer such systems. Against this background, the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we synthesize and clarify the key abstractions of agent-based computing as they pertain to agent-oriented software engineering. In particular, we argue that a multiagent system can naturally be viewed and architected as a computational organization, and we identify the appropriate organizational abstractions that are central to the analysis and design of such systems. Second, we detail and extend the Gaia methodology for the analysis and design of multiagent systems. Gaia exploits the aforementioned organizational abstractions to provide clear guidelines for the analysis and design of complex and open software systems. Two representative case studies are introduced to exemplify Gaia’s concepts and to show its use and effectiveness in different types of multiagent system
Towards a discipline of IoT-Oriented software engineering
No full textDespite the rapid progresses in IoT research, a general principled software engineering approach for the systematic development of IoT systems and applications is still missing. In this article, by synthesizing form the state of the art in the area, we attempt at framing the key concepts and abstractions that revolve around the design and development of IoT systems and applications, and that could represent the ground on which to start shaping the guidelines of a new IoT-oriented software engineering discipline
Spatial computing and self-organization
No full textHere we discuss the role of "space" in modern distributed computing, and analyze how spatial abstractions promise to be basic necessary ingredients for novel approaches, based on self-organization, to engineer distributed systems
Distributed checkpoint algorithms to avoid roll-back propagation
No full textCheckpointing is a very well known mechanism to achieve fault tolerance. In distributed applications, a local checkpoint is useful for fault tolerance purposes only if can belong to at least one consistent global checkpoint and then, execution can be restarted from it without needing to roll back the execution in the past. The paper introduces a theoretical framework that facilitates the definition and the analysis of distributed checkpoint algorithms to avoid roll backpropagation. On this base, several algorithms are presented and evaluated in a set of testbed applications
Self-Organizing Services for Browsing the World: Challenges and Directions
No full textThe imminent mass deployment of pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags, together with the increasing participation of the Web community in feeding geo-located information within tools such as Google Earth, will soon make available an incredible amount of information about the physical and social worlds and their processes. Overall, both the above trends contribute to the forming of a decentralized infrastructure that, by accumulating and making available in a ubiquitous way detailed digital information about the surrounding world, opens up the possibility of conceiving innovative context-aware services for "browsing the world" around us, as well as of enhancing the quality and effectiveness of current ICT services via context-awareness and dynamic personalization. However, this will also introduce a dramatic complexity increase in data and service management, making impossible for humans to stay in the control loop and directly manage the configuration and functioning of these systems, and compulsory calling for unsupervised self-organizing approaches at both the data and the service level. On the one hand, proper self-organizing approaches must be defined for processing and aggregating large amounts of data into a meaningful and manageable "world model" to be made available to services. On the other hand, proper distributed computing models and infrastructures must be defined to enable services to exploit such information to self-organize their distributed and context-aware activities at the best. In this talk, after having introduced my general vision of future pervasive computing scenarios, I try to identify the key research challenges that should be faced towards the effective provisioning of self-organizing and context-aware services in such scenarios, and will sketch some possibly promising research directions currently being investigated within the "Agents and Pervasive Computing Group" of the Universita di Modena e Reggio Emilia. © 2007 IEEE
Abstractions and Infrastructures for the Design and Development of Mobile Agent Organizations
No full textInternet applications can take advantage of a paradigm based on autonomous and mobile agents. However, suitable abstractions and infrastructures are required for the effective engineering of such applications. In this paper, we argue that a conceptual framework for context-dependent coordination, supported by an infrastructure based on programmable media, can promote a modular and easy to manage approach to the design and development of mobile agent applications in terms of computational organizations. The MARS coordination infrastructure is presented as an implementation of a coordination infrastructure promoting context-dependent coordination. A case study in the area of workflow management is introduced to clarify the concepts presented
Engineering Environment Mediated Natural Coordination for Multiagent Systems in SAPERE
No full textSAPERE is a general multiagent framework to support the development of self-organizing pervasive computing services. One of the key aspects of the SAPERE approach is to have all interactions between agents take place in an indirect way, via a shared spatial environment. In such environment, a set of nature-inspired coordination laws have been defined to rule the coordination activities of the application agents and promote the provisioning of adaptive and self-organizing services
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