Arianna Tocchio

The DALI Logic Programming Agent-Oriented Language

DALI [3], [2] is an Active Logic Programming Language designed in the line of [6] for executable specification of logical agents. A DALI agent is a logic program that contains a particular kind of rules, reactive rules, aimed at interacting with an external environment. The reactive and proactive behavior of a DALI agent is triggered by several kinds of events: external, internal, present and past events. All the events and actions are timestamped, so as to record when they occurred. The new syntactic entities, i.e., predicates related to events and proactivity, are indicated with special postfixes (which are coped with by a pre-processor) so as to be immediately recognized while looking at a program.

DALICA: Agent-Based Ambient Intelligence for Cultural-Heritage Scenarios

Villa Adriana is an enormous archaeological area where ancient artifacts and modern technology have found an unexpected equilibrium. The old artifacts are huge stone monuments; the modern technology includes PDAs and signals from the Galileo satellite combined with intelligent software agents. As part of the European CUSPIS project (Cultural Heritage Space Identification System, www. cuspis-project.info), we exploited intelligent agents for two ambient-intelligence scenarios applicable to Villa Adriana. One scenario involves cultural assets fruition-the possibility of accessing and enjoying cultural assets. This scenario concerns the dissemination of information about cultural assets; for example, users can visit a museum or archaeological site and receive on their mobile devices appropriate, personalized information about that place. The other scenario involves cultural assets monitoring, which concerns securely transporting cultural assets from the owner organization to a renter organization and back.

About declarative semantics of logic-based agent languages

In this paper we cope with providing an approach to declarative semantics of logic-based agent-oriented languages, taking then as a case-study the language DALI which has been previously defined by the authors. This “evolutionary semantics” does not resort to a concept of state: rather, it models reception of events as program transformation steps, that produce a “program evolution” and a corresponding “semantic evolution”. Communication among agents and multi-agent systems is also taken into account. The aim is that of modeling agents evolution according to either external (environmental) or internal changes in a logical way, thus allowing in principle the adoption of formal verification methods. We also intend to create a common ground for relating and comparing different approaches/languages.

A Multi-layered General Agent Model

We propose a layered representation of general agent models with a base layer, composed of basic agent features including control, and a higher layer, consisting of a meta-control with the task of tuning, supervising and modifying the base layer. This provides higher flexibility in how an agent is built and may evolve.

A Logic-Based Infrastructure for Reconfiguring Applications

This paper proposes the DALI Multiagent System, which is a logic programming environment for developing agent-based applications, as a tool for component-based software management based on coordination. In particular, we show the usefulness of the integration between DALI and the agent-based Lira system, which is a Light-weight Infrastructure for Reconfiguring Applications. We argue that using intelligent agents for managing component-based software systems makes it possible to: (i) perform monitoring and supervision upon complex properties of a system, such as for instance performance; (ii) perform global reconfigurations dynamically, through the cooperation of intelligent agents.

A Geo Time Authentication System

In this paper we present Geo Time Authentication (GTA), a prototype system that provides authenticity and integrity of cultural assets information. It has been conceived in the context of the CUSPIS project and afterwards it has been generalized to the context of assets and goods where problems of counterfeiting and thefts are prevalent. To prevent these crimes GTA adds to the usual asset information an additional tag that contains Galileo geo time information and it extends digital certificates with the notion of geographical areas for protecting the origin and the authenticity of the assets. Moreover, GTA makes available several services to protect the assets transport.

A Multi-Agent System for Industrial Fault Detection and Repair

A Multi Agent System is described, capable of monitoring a telecommunication industrial test & measurement setup, designed as an application of the DALI agent language. The autonomy of the MAS is necessary to supervise the measurement apparatus during off-work time without human intervention, increasing the quality and efficacy of the overall test procedure. The MAS can decide whether to recover or repair the set of software process needed to achieve a correct test sequence without user intervention.

Demonstrator of a Multi-Agent System for Industrial Fault Detection and Repair

A demonstrator of a Multi Agent System is described capable of monitoring a telecommunication industrial test & measurement setup, designed as an application of the DALI agent language. The autonomy of the MAS is necessary to supervise the measurement apparatus during off-work time without human intervention, increasing the quality and efficacy of the overall test procedure. The MAS can decide whether to recover or repair the set of software process needed to achieve a correct test sequence without user intervention.

Contracts Violation: Justification via Argumentation

An important field of application of intelligent logical agents, where rationality plays a main role, is that of automated negotiation. Our work is related to the use of argumentation in the field of negotiation. In particular, we are interested in contract violations, and in the construction of justifications to motivate the violation itself and recover if possible the contract on modified conditions. We propose a temporal modal logic language able to support and depict the arguments/justification used in dialectical disputes and we consider suitable algorithms and mechanisms to introduce and manage justifications.

Planning experiments in the DALI logic programming language

We discuss some features of the new logic programming language DALI for agents and multi-agent systems, also in connection to the issues raised in [12]. We focus in particular on the treatment of proactivity, which is based on the novel mechanism of the internal events and goals. As a case-study, we discuss the design and implementation of an agent capable to perform simple forms of planning. We demonstrate how it is possible in DALI to perform STRIPS-like planning without implementing a meta-interpreter. In fact a DALI agent, which is capable of complex proactive behavior, can build step-by-step her plan by proactively checking for goals and possible actions.