Emilia Garcia

An engineering framework for Service-Oriented Intelligent Manufacturing Systems

HighlightsA complete software development method is presented for Service Oriented Intelligent Manufacturing Systems.The software development method provides a CASE tool that automatically generates executable code for the system execution.A specific and complete set of service guidelines for the development of Service Oriented Intelligent Manufacturing Systems is provided.The completeness of the approach is evaluated under two views: an empirical by means of case studies; and a qualitative analysis. Nowadays fully integrated enterprises are being replaced by business networks in which each participant provides others with specialized services. As a result, the Service Oriented Manufacturing Systems emerges. These systems are complex and hard to engineer. The main source of complexity is the number of different technologies, standards, functions, protocols, and execution environments that must be integrated in order to realize them. This paper proposes a framework and associated engineering approach for assisting the system developers of Service Oriented Manufacturing Systems. The approach combines multi-agent system with Service Oriented Architectures for the development of intelligent automation control and execution of manufacturing systems.

A Modeling Tool for Service-Oriented Open Multiagent Systems

Service-oriented Open technology is becoming more and more the enabler tool for today open enterprise ISs. In this field, it seems interesting to work with the Multi-Agent System research focusing on open distributed, complex and dynamic systems, in which information and resources are distributed among several agents, which interact by means of services. In this paper, an engineering tool for Service-oriented Open Multi-Agent Systems is presented. This tool is based on a platform independent unified meta-model. In this way, a Model Driven Architecture mechanism is applied, thus defining a Service-Oriented Multi-agent System meta-model based on Virtual Organizations and employing the Eclipse technology to develop the IDE tool.

Software Engineering for Service-Oriented MAS

Nowadays, service-oriented architectures (SOA) and multiagent systems (MAS) are two increasingly important technologies. Despite the differences in technology, SOA and MAS have some similar objectives and their integration produces systems with more flexibility, functionality and interoperability. Their integration creates new requirements and special methods and tools are necessary to develop systems that integrate both technologies. This paper analyzes the most important issues for developing Service-oriented MAS. Furthermore, some methods and tools to develop this kind of systems are analyzed to show how current approaches solve the problem of the integration between agents and services.

Developing Adaptive Agents Situated in Intelligent Virtual Environments

This paper presents a framework specially designed for the execution and adaptation of Intelligent Virtual Environments. This framework, called JACALIVE, facilitates the development of this kind of environments managing in an efficient and realistic way the evolution of parameters for the adaptation of the physical world. The framework includes a design method and a physical simulator which is in charge of giving the Intelligent Virtual Environment the look of the real or physical world, allowing to simulate physical phenomena such as gravity or collision detection. The paper also includes a case study which illustrates the use of the proposed framework.

Evaluating software engineering techniques for developing complex systems with multiagent approaches

ContextMultiagent systems (MAS) allow complex systems to be developed in which autonomous and heterogeneous entities interact. Currently, there are a great number of methods and frameworks for developing MAS. The selection of one or another development environment is a crucial part of the development process. Therefore, the evaluation and comparison of MAS software engineering techniques is necessary in order to make the selection of the development environment easier. ObjectiveThe main goal of this paper is to define an evaluation framework that will help in facilitating, standardizing, and simplifying the evaluation, analysis, and comparison of MAS development environments. Moreover, the final objective of the proposed tool is to provide a repository of the most commonly used MAS software engineering methods and tools. MethodThe proposed framework analyzes methods and tools through a set of criteria that are related to both system engineering dimensions and MAS features. Also, the support for developing organizational and service-oriented MAS is studied. This framework is implemented as an online application to improve its accessibility. ResultsIn this paper, we present Masev, which is an evaluation framework for MAS software engineering. It allows MAS methods, techniques and environments to be analyzed and compared. A case study of the analysis of four methodologies is presented. ConclusionIt is concluded that Masev simplifies the evaluation and comparison task and summarizes the most important issues for developing MAS, organizational MAS, and service-oriented MAS. Therefore, it could help developers to select the most appropriate MAS method and tools for developing a specific system, and it could be used for MAS software engineering developers to detect and deficiencies in their methods and tools. Also, developers of new tools can understand this application as a way to publish their tools and demonstrate what their contributions are to the state of the art.

Regulated Open Multi-Agent Systems Based on Contracts

Regulated Open multi-agent systems are composed by heterogeneous and autonomous agents which may need to coexist in a complex social and legal frame work that can evolve to address the different and often conflicting objectives of the many stakeholders involved. Of the ways in which agent behaviour can be regulated in a multi-agent system, contracts seem to be the most appropriate for industrial environments. This paper analyzes the open challenges in the development of these kind of systems. It also proposes an architecture and a designing method which face up to these challenges by means of the integration of open multi-agent systems, service-oriented architectures, e-contracting and regulation enforcement mechanisms.

A Model-Driven CASE tool for developing and verifying regulated open MAS

This paper describes a CASE tool for developing complex systems in which heterogeneous and autonomous agents may need to coexist in a complex social and legal framework. Model-Driven Technologies are used to integrate the design of systems of this kind with the verification of the models and with the generation of executable code from these models. The verification module is based on model-checking techniques to check the coherence of a modeled legal context at design time is presented and it is exemplified with a case study.

Analysing the Suitability of Multiagent Methodologies for e-Health Systems

Online e-health systems are being proposed and developed at an ever increasing rate. However, the progress relies on the interoperability of local healthcare software, and is often hampered by ad hoc methods leading to closed systems with a multitude of protocols, terminologies, and design approaches. Agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) seems intuitively a good approach for developing more open systems. While agent-based e-health systems have been developed, the general hypothesis of the suitability of AOSE has not been evaluated. In this paper, we test that hypothesis, including a case study of applying a normative agent methodology to a particular real-world e-health system, and present an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of AOSE for e-health.

On the evaluation of MAS development tools

Recently a great number of methods and frameworks to develop multiagent systems have appeared. Nowadays there is no established framework to evaluate environments to develop multiagent systems (MAS) and choosing between one framework or another is a difficult task. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) a brief analysis of the state of the art in the evaluation of MAS engineering; (2) a complete list of criteria that helps in the evaluation of multiagent system development environments; (3) a quantitative evaluation technique; (4) an evaluation of the Ingenias methodology and its development environment using this evaluation framework.

Developing Intelligent Virtual Environments Using MAM5 Meta-Model

An IVE (Intelligent Virtual Environment) is a virtual environment simulating a physical (or real) world, inhabited by autonomous intelligent entities[2]. Today, this kind of applications are between the most demanded ones, not only as being the key for multi-user games such as World Of Warcraft (with more than 7 million of users in 2013) but also for inmersive social networks such as Second Life (with 36 million accounts created in its 10 years of history). It is in the development of these huge IVEs where the need of a quick and easy-to-use modelling toolkit arises.