Alberto Fernandez

A role-based support mechanism for service description and discovery

The ever-growing number of services on the WWW provides enormous business opportunities. Services can be automatically discovered and invoked, or even be dynamically composed from more simples ones. In this paper we concentrate on the problem of service discovery. Most current approaches base their search on inputs and outputs of the service. Some of them also take into account preconditions and effects, and other parameters that describe the service. We present a new approach that complements existing ones by considering the types of interactions that services can be used in. We present our proposal for a concrete application based on a real-world scenario for emergency assistance in the healthcare domain

Agent coordination for bus fleet management

This paper presents an abstract multiagent architecture useful for Decision Support Systems (DSS), and shows how this architecture can be instantiated to a particular real-world domain, Bus Fleet Management (BFM). After discussing the benefits of adopting a multiagent approach for DSS, the paper introduces the real world case study and analyzes it. Next, an abstract MAS architecture for DSS in general, and specialized then for BFM case study is presented. The architecture includes a set of different agents which are in charge of different social roles, and what is needed for their coordination, the Coordination Facilitator and the coordination protocols. The paper is concentrated in this point showing a concrete example in the BFM domain.

Towards a Generic Multiagent Model for Decision Support: Two Case Studies *

This paper describes how agent and knowledge technology can be used to build advanced software systems that support operational decision-making in complex domains. In particular, we present an abstract architecture and design guidelines for agent-based decision support systems, illustrate its application to two real-world domains – road traffic and bus fleet management – and discuss the lessons learnt from this enterprise.