Angelo Ferrando

FRIENDLY & KIND with your Health: Human-Friendly Knowledge-INtensive Dynamic Systems for the e-Health Domain

This paper presents our approach for addressing “Human-friendly Knowledge-INtensive Dynamic Systems” (FRIENDLY & KIND systems) from a methodological point of view, also providing tools and languages for their design, implementation and testing. FRIENDLY & KIND systems are an evolution of multiagent systems and represent a good option for engineering complex and dynamic applications like those in the e-Health domain. We will demonstrate the suitability of our approach by designing and implementing a Remote Monitoring System for oncological patients.

Comparing Trace Expressions and Linear Temporal Logic for Runtime Verification

Trace expressions are a compact and expressive formalism, initially devised for runtime verification of agent interactions in multiagent systems, which has been successfully employed to model real protocols, and to generate monitors for mainstream multiagent system platforms, and generalized to support runtime verification of different kinds of properties and systems. In this paper we formally compare the expressive power of trace expressions with the Linear Temporal Logic LTL, a formalism widely adopted in runtime verification. We show that any LTL formula can be translated into a trace expression which is equivalent from the point of view of runtime verification. Since trace expressions are able to express and verify sets of traces that are not context-free, we can derive that in the context of runtime verification trace expressions are more expressive than LTL.

Runtime verification of fail-uncontrolled and ambient intelligence systems: A uniform approach

We propose an approach for designing, formalizing and implementing, on top of existing MultiAgent Systems and without interfering with them, sentinels that detect errors in fail-uncontrolled multiagent systems, and controllers that identify particular situations in ambient intelligence (AmI) systems. The formalism we use for representing the expected patterns of actions is that of trace expressions extended with features for dealing with exceptions, timeouts, and their handlers. In this paper we provide the syntax and semantics of the extended trace expressions formalism and examples of their use, in the different contexts of fail-uncontrolled and AmI systems.

Monitoring Patients with Hypoglycemia Using Self-adaptive Protocol-Driven Agents: A Case Study

Trace expressions are a compact and expressive formalism for specifying complex patterns of actions. In this paper they have been used to model medical protocols and to generate agents able to execute them, also adapting to the context dynamics. To this aim, we extended our previous work on “self-adaptive agents driven by interaction protocols” by allowing agents to be guided by trace expressions instead of the less concise and less powerful “constrained global types”. This extension required a limited effort, which is an advantage of the previous work as it is relatively straightforward to adapt it to accommodate new requirements arising in sophisticated domains.

Intelligent Agents for Human Behavior Modeling as Support to Operations

Goal of the present paper is providing support to operations planning and management in complex scenarios. The authors are mainly focused on South Asia region, which is subject of experimental analysis by running an Intelligent Agents—driven HLA Federation. Simulation of investments and operations over an asymmetric mission environment with several parties, insurgents, terrorists and dynamic social framework is the aim. The scenario has various degrees of freedom and M&S enables evaluation of human behavior evolution and socio-psychological aspects. The presented models include Computer Generated Forces (CGF) driven by Intelligent Agents (IAs) that represents not only units on the battlefield, but also people and interest groups (i.e. Middle Class, Nomads, Clans). The study is focused on Civil Military Co-operations (CIMIC) and Psychological Operations (PSYOPs). The simulation is based on specific architecture that involves various federates playing different roles. Verification, Validation and Accreditation (VV&A) has been applied along the whole life cycle of the research, in order to determine the correctness and effectiveness of the results. The paper proposes experimental results obtained during the dynamic test of the federations.

Development planning based on interoperable agent driven simulation

Abstract The paper presents the potential of using interoperable agent driven simulation to support development planning; indeed the use of simulation represents a strong benefit to improve planning of infrastructures and plants devoted to disaster relief, civil protection and/or support to country development; the paper describes models used to face these challenges and last updates in population modeling for these applications. The proposed models include population characteristics, need as well as their social networks. In humanitarian support operations and country reconstruction there is a huge potential to use simulators; the paper describes how these models should be designed to support training as well operational planning. The models should be able to consider the impacts of contingencies as well as to guarantee the quick responsiveness requirements for humanitarian crisis management. The authors propose a simulator to be shared and used among Armed Forces and Civil Agencies for addressing Crisis Management, Humanitarian Missions, Country Reconstruction and Development considering joint operations (i.e. Civil Military Cooperation); indeed the paper outlines the importance of training people devoted to guarantee interoperability among civil organization and military units in this sector. The paper describes the models based on interoperable simulation as well as the agents driving the entities during the simulation to create quickly complex scenarios able to consider the impact on population and communities of the different actions by including human behavioral models. The proposed approach guarantees interoperability among different simulators within an HLA (High Level Architecture) federation in order to recreate crisis scenarios combining detailed simulation of multiple factors. The proposed approach is verified and validated by proposing an experimental analysis where it is evaluated a set of construction projects (i.e. digging wells) in a stabilization area and their effectiveness both in terms of direct result (i.e. water availability) as well as of population consensus and disaster relief (i.e. stress mitigation, trustiness respect supporting players).

Managing Bad AIPs with RIVERtools.

We present the RIVERtools integrated development environment for specifying Agent Interaction Protocols (AIPs) modelled as trace expressions, and for statically verifying some of their properties. In particular, this demonstration paper aims at showing why a “good” AIP can become a “bad” one because of unreliability of some communication channels, and how RIVERtools can cope with such bad AIPs, suggesting to the developer possible ways to dynamically verify them in a partially decentralized way.

Coping with Bad Agent Interaction Protocols When Monitoring Partially Observable Multiagent Systems

Interaction Protocols are fundamental elements to provide the entities in a system, be them actors, agents, services, or other communicating pieces of software, a means to agree on a global interaction pattern and to be sure that all the other entities in the system adhere to it as well. These “global interaction patterns” may serve different purposes: if the system does not yet exist, they may specify the allowed interactions in order to drive the system’s implementation and execution. If the system exists before and independently from the protocol, the protocol may still specify the allowed interactions, but it cannot be used to implement them. Its purpose in this case is to monitor that the actual system does respect the rules (runtime verification). Tagging some protocols as good ones and others as bad is common to all the research communities where interaction is crucial, and it is not surprising that some protocol features are recognized as bad ones everywhere. In this paper we analyze the notion of good, bad and ugly protocols in the MAS community and outside, and we discuss the role that bad protocols, despite being bad, may play in a runtime verification scenario where not all the events and interaction channels can be observed.

Simulation Exploration Experience: Providing Effective Surveillance and Defense for a Moon Base Against Threats from Outer Space

In this paper the authors are presenting their work prepared for the Simulation Exploration Experience (SEE) 2014 event. This initiative has been organized by the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) and other leading companies involved in Modeling and Simulation field, and under NASA coordination. SEE, whose previous name was Smackdown, is a project for Federating Interoperable Simulations of Moon Base Operations by using the latest Technologies (i.e. HLA Evolved). The project shown in the following pages is called IPHITOS and simulates a defensive system provided with long range radars and light interceptors to detect, recognize and defeat incoming threats from outer space.

Parametric Trace Expressions for Runtime Verification of Java-Like Programs

Parametric trace expressions are a formalism expressly designed for parametric runtime verification (RV) which has been introduced and successfully employed in the context of runtime monitoring of multiagent systems. Trace expressions are built on the general notion of event type, which allows them to be adopted in different contexts. In this paper we show how trace expressions can be used for conveniently specifying the expected behavior of a Java-like program to be monitored at runtime. Furthermore, we investigate the basic properties of the primitive operators on which trace expressions are coinductively defined in terms of a labeled transition system; this provides a basis for formal reasoning about equivalence of trace expressions and for adopting useful optimization techniques to speed up runtime verification.