Fabio Bellifemine

Developing multi-agent systems with a FIPA-compliant agent framework

To ease large‐scale realization of agent applications there is an urgent need for frameworks, methodologies and toolkits that support the effective development of agent systems. Moreover, since one of the main tasks for which agent systems were invented is the integration between heterogeneous software, independently developed agents should be able to interact successfully.

JADE: a FIPA2000 compliant agent development environment

JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) is a software environment to build agent systems for the management of networked information resources in compliance with the FIPA2000 specifications for interoperable intelligent multi- agent systems. The goal of JADE is to simplify development while ensuring standard compliance through a comprehensive set of system services and agents. JADE offers an agent runtime system on which implement efficient FIPA 2000 compliant multi- agent systems and supports their development through the availability of a predefined programmable agent model and of a set of management and testing tools. This paper describes the main features of the JADE system and introduces some of the most important projects based on JADE software.

JADE: A software framework for developing multi-agent applications. Lessons learned

Since a number of years agent technology is considered one of the most innovative technologies for the development of distributed software systems. While not yet a mainstream approach in software engineering at large, a lot of work on agent technology has been done, many research results and applications have been presented, and some software products exists which have moved from the research community to the industrial community. One of these is JADE, a software framework that facilitates development of interoperable intelligent multi-agent systems and that is distributed under an Open Source License. JADE is a very mature product, used by a heterogeneous community of users both in research activities and in industrial applications. This paper presents JADE and its technological components together with a discussion of the possible reasons for its success and lessons learned from the somewhat detached perspective possible nine years after its inception.

Jade — A Java Agent Development Framework

JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) is a software environment to build agent systems for the management of networked information resources in compliance with the FIPA specifications for interoperable multi-agent systems. JADE provides a middleware for the development and execution of agent-based applications which can seamless work and interoperate both in wired and wireless environment. Moreover, JADE supports the development of multi-agent systems through the predefined programmable and extensible agent model and a set of management and testing tools. Currently, JADE is one of the most used and promising agent development framework; in fact, it has a large user group, involving more than two thousands active members, it has been used to realize real systems in different application sectors, and its future development is guided by a governing board involving some important industrial companies.

User Modeling and Recommendation Techniques for Personalized Electronic Program Guides

This chapter presents the recommendation techniques applied in Personal Program Guide (PPG). This is a system generating personalized Electronic Program Guides for Digital TV. The PPG manages a user model that stores the estimates of the individual user’s preferences for TV program categories. This model results from the integration of different preference acquisition modules that handle explicit user preferences, stereotypical information about TV viewers, and information about the user’s viewing behavior. The observation of the individual viewing behavior is particularly easy because the PPG runs on the set-top box and is deeply integrated with the TV playing and the video recording services offered by that type of device.

SPINE: a domain-specific framework for rapid prototyping of WBSN applications

Wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) enable a broad range of applications for continuous and real‐time health monitoring and medical assistance. Programming WBSN applications is a complex task especially due to the limitation of resources of typical hardware platforms and to the lack of suitable software abstractions. In this paper, SPINE (signal processing in‐node environment), a domain‐specific framework for rapid prototyping of WBSN applications, which is lightweight and flexible enough to be easily customized to fit particular application‐specific needs, is presented. The architecture of SPINE has two main components: one implemented on the node coordinating the WBSN and one on the nodes with sensors. The former is based on a Java application, which allows to configure and manage the network and implements the classification functions that are too heavy to be implemented on the sensor nodes. The latter supports sensing, computing and data transmission operations through a set of libraries, protocols and utility functions that are currently implemented for TinyOS platforms. SPINE allows evaluating different architectural choices and deciding how to distribute signal processing and classification functions over the nodes of the network. Finally, this paper describes an activity monitoring application and presents the benefits of using the SPINE framework. Copyright

An agent-based signal processing in-node environment for real-time human activity monitoring based on wireless body sensor networks

Nowadays wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) have great potential to enable a broad variety of assisted living applications such as human biophysical/biochemical control and activity monitoring for health care, e-fitness, emergency detection, emotional recognition for social networking, security, and highly interactive games. It is therefore important to define design methodologies and programming frameworks which enable rapid prototyping of WBSN applications. Several effective application development frameworks have been already proposed for WBSNs designed for TinyOS-based sensor platforms, e.g. CodeBlue, SPINE, and Titan. In this paper we present an application of MAPS, an agent framework for wireless sensor networks based on the Java-programmable Sun SPOT sensor platform, for the development of a real-time WBSN-based system for human activity monitoring. The agent-oriented programming abstractions provided by MAPS allow effective and rapid prototyping of the sensor-side software. In particular, the architecture of the developed system is a typical star-based WBSN composed of a coordinator node and two sensor nodes located respectively on the waist and the thigh of the monitored assisted living. The coordinator relies on a JADE-based enhancement of the SPINE coordinator and allows configuring sensors, receiving their data, and recognizing pre-defined human activities. On the other hand, each sensor node runs a MAPS-based agent that performs sensing of the 3-axial accelerometer sensor, computation of significant features on the acquired data, feature aggregation and transmission to the coordinator. The experimentation phase of the prototype, which allows evaluating the obtainable monitoring performances and activity recognition accuracy, is described. Moreover, a comparison of the monitoring system based on MAPS, AFME and SPINE in terms of programming effectiveness and system performances is discussed.

Development of Body Sensor Network applications using SPINE

SPINE (signal processing in node environment) is a framework for the development of body sensor network (BSN) applications. It provides developers of signal processing algorithms with APIs and libraries of protocols, utilities and data processing functions. Hence, it offers application developers new abstractions that improve interoperability and allow to reduce development time. This paper presents the architecture and the capabilities of the SPINE framework, and shows its use in the development of a real-time activity monitoring system prototype.

Personalized Recommendation of TV Programs

This paper presents the recommendation techniques applied in Personal Program Guide (PPG), a system generating personalized Electronic Program Guides for digital TV. The PPG recommends TV programs by relying on the integration of heterogeneous user modeling techniques.

Analysis of audio streaming capability of Zigbee networks

Although formerly conceived for industrial sensing and control over Wireless Sensor Networks, LR-WPANs are registering an increasing interest in experimenting multimedia applications, with particular emphasis on evaluating the streaming capability of Zigbee networks. Due to their limited throughput they are not expected to provide high QoS, nevertheless there are several application scenarios such as distributed surveillance, emergency and rescue where audio and video streaming over low cost Zigbee networks is highly desirable. In this paper we first investigate the feasibility of Zigbee-like networks for low-rate voice streaming applications. We analyze important streaming metrics such as throughput, packet loss and jitter in multi-hop topologies. We propose some improvements in the stack implementation and show the performance in order to determine the streaming capacity limits of LR-WPAN networks.