Dominic Greenwood

The IEEE FIPA approach to integrating software agents and web services

In many settings Web services are now perceived as the first choice technology to provide neatly encapsulated functionality for Web-based computation. To date, many standards have been produced and adoption is accelerating across numerous application domains. This uptake has long been recognized by members of software agent community with several approaches reported that explore various means of extending the utility of Web services with the autonomous control offered by agents. This paper reports on the recent work of several members of this community to consolidate their approaches into a common specification describing how to seamlessly interconnect FIPA compliant agent systems with W3C compliant Web services. This work has been conducted within the context of the IEEE FIPA Agent and Web Service Integration working group and will be shortly published as a new FIPA specification.

AML: agent modeling language toward industry-grade agent-based modeling

The Agent Modeling Language(AML) is a semi-formal visual modeling language, specified as an extension to UML 2.0. It is a consistent set of modeling constructs designed to capture the aspects of multi-agent systems. The ultimate objective for AML is to provide a means for software engineers to incorporate aspects of multi-agent system engineering into their analysis and design processes. This paper presents an introductory overview of AML, discussing the motivations driving the development of the language, the scope and approach taken, the specific language structure and optional extensibility. The core AML modeling constructs are explained and demonstrated by example where possible. Extensions to OCL and CASE tool support are also discussed.

Autonomic Goal-Oriented Business Process Management

This paper outlines an autonomic approach to business process management using goal-oriented principles and autonomous agent technology employing the well-known BDI method. We discuss how the structure of common business processes can be mapped onto goal-oriented models where achievement points are represented by goals and the task structures used to reach them are represented by plans. The flexibility afforded by this approach implies that autonomic feedback loops are created between the business process incarnation and its autonomous controller, which may be extended to the multiple process case where several controllers interact to form extended feedback relationships. We introduce a set of technologies designed to deliver these features in real-world applications and support the position with a case study in the domain of Engineering Change Management.

Service Level Agreement Management with Adaptive Coordination

Service level agreement management in the telecommunications domain consists of a set of mechanisms for establishing, provisioning and monitoring services according to specified requirements given by either a customer or provider. This paper presents an approach to adaptive coordination between customers requesting service via an SLA, and the provider who owns and provisions network resources. We deploy a set of software agents capable of automating negotiation between these parties, while simultaneously applying provider policy and controlling admission of service requests onto the underlying network infrastructure. An architecture supporting this approach is described, as is a prototype of the full system deployed on a network simulator

Web Service Discovery and Composition using the Web Service Integration Gateway

In recent years Web services and their associated standards have received an enormous amount of attention. Web services hold the promise of creating a distributed global repository of network addressable units of computation. This repository will undoubtedly generate a disruptive force that will fundamentally change not only the methodologies and techniques used for software construction, but will even challenge our perception of what constitutes a software application. In the future software applications will be increasingly amorphous, dynamically adapting their composition at run-time in response to changes in environmental context and conditions.

LS/ATN: Reporting on a Successful Agent-Based Solution for Transport Logistics Optimization

A considerable volume of research exists concerning the domain of automatic planning and scheduling, hut many real-world scheduling problems, and especially that of transportation logistics, remain difficult to solve. In particular, this domain demands schedule-solving for every vehicle in a transportation fleet where pick-up and delivery of customer orders is distributed across multiple geographic locations, while satisfying time-window constraints on pickup and delivery per location. This paper presents a successful commercial-grade solution to this problem called living systems adaptive transportation networks (LS/ATN), which has been proven through real-world deployment to reduce transportation costs through the optimization of route solving for both small and large fleets. LS/ATN is a novel agent-based resource management and decision system designed to address this highly dynamic and complex domain in commercial settings. We show how LS/ATN employs agent cooperation algorithms to derive truck schedules that optimize the use of available resources leading to significant cost savings. The solution is designed to support, rather than replace, the day-to-day activities of human dispatchers

The Living Systems Technology Suite: An Autonomous Middleware for Autonomic Computing

This paper presents the Living Systemsreg Technology Suite, LS/TS, a middleware based on autonomous software agents and autonomic computing principles. Specifically, the paper describes the autonomic principles built into LS/TS, and the features that follow from them. These features are described within the context of a general taxonomy of autonomic systems, elaborating on the relationship between middleware and application levels. Lastly, the paper addresses the problem of system self-representation, leveraging LS/TS support for ontology and semantic agent communication

A Multiagent Web Service Composition Engine, Revisited

This paper provides an update on our Multiagent Web Service Composition Engine which was entered in the first Web Service Composition Challenge at the EEE-05 conference. This paper explores the rational behind the selection of a multiagent architecture for service composition problems and demonstrates the relevance of interaction based computation. Rather than describing the composition algorithm from an AI reasoning perspective, a description of the service composition agents from an interaction perspective is provided.

The AML Approach to Modeling Autonomic Systems

Autonomic systems are typically distributed, complex and concurrent systems, comprised of multiple interacting autonomic elements that often exhibit emergent behavior design and development of such systems is a non-trivial task that by definition requires specific software engineering approaches, including the use of specialized modeling techniques. This paper takes the well-known Prospecting Asteroids Mission from NASA, an autonomous and autonomic system for future exploration of asteroid fields, which can be considered as a axiomatic example of how autonomic principles can be applied in real terms. Introducing the agent modeling language (AML), we demonstrate using a series of didactic examples how AML can be applied to efficiently, accurately and comprehensively model the PAM system. A selection of AML models specifying the PAM domain, goals, architecture, and behaviors are presented which help demonstrate the utility of AML when modeling autonomous and autonomic systems

Applying a UML-based agent modeling language to the autonomic computing domain

As agent technology practitioners, some time ago we determined to develop an extension to UML 2.0 that addressed our specific needs, such as modeling autonomicity, proactivity and role-based behavior. We called this extension the Agent Modeling Language (AML) and have recently published the metamodel and specification for public use. In a recent project, we realized that AML could also be applied to the domain of autonomic computing and so decided to publish some of our findings in this paper. AML can be directly used by designers of autonomous and autonomic computing systems to visually model their architectures and behaviors. Herein we provide an overview of the scope, approach taken, the specific language structure and optional extensibility. The core modeling constructs of AML are explained using a series of didactic examples describing the IBM Unity architecture, an well-grounded exemplar of an autonomic system. We thus focus on the features of AML that differentiate it from UML 2.0 with a specific focus on those aspects that support the autonomic principles of self-healing and survivability.