Franco Zambonelli

Developing multiagent systems: The Gaia methodology

Systems composed of interacting autonomous agents offer a promising software engineering approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, this multiagent system paradigm introduces a number of new abstractions and design/development issues when compared with more traditional approaches to software development. Accordingly, new analysis and design methodologies, as well as new tools, are needed to effectively engineer such systems. Against this background, the contribution of this article is twofold. First, we synthesize and clarify the key abstractions of agent-based computing as they pertain to agent-oriented software engineering. In particular, we argue that a multiagent system can naturally be viewed and architected as a computational organization, and we identify the appropriate organizational abstractions that are central to the analysis and design of such systems. Second, we detail and extend the Gaia methodology for the analysis and design of multiagent systems. Gaia exploits the aforementioned organizational abstractions to provide clear guidelines for the analysis and design of complex and open software systems. Two representative case studies are introduced to exemplify Gaias concepts and to show its use and effectiveness in different types of multiagent system.

A survey of autonomic communications

Autonomic communications seek to improve the ability of network and services to cope with unpredicted change, including changes in topology, load, task, the physical and logical characteristics of the networks that can be accessed, and so forth. Broad-ranging autonomic solutions require designers to account for a range of end-to-end issues affecting programming models, network and contextual modeling and reasoning, decentralised algorithms, trust acquisition and maintenance---issues whose solutions may draw on approaches and results from a surprisingly broad range of disciplines. We survey the current state of autonomic communications research and identify significant emerging trends and techniques.

Coordination for Internet Application Development

The adoption of a powerful and expressive coordination model represents a key-point for the effective design and development of Internet applications. In this paper, we present the TuCSoN coordination model for Internet applications based on network-aware and mobile agents, and show how the adoption of TuCSoN can positively benefit the design and development of such applications, firstly in general terms, then via a TuCSoN-coordinated sample application. This is achieved by providing for an Internet interaction space made up of a multiplicity of independently programmable communication abstractions, called tuple centres, whose behaviour can be defined so as to embody the laws of coordination.

Organisational Abstractions for the Analysis and Design of Multi-agent Systems

The architecture of a multi-agent system can naturally be viewed as a computational organisation. For this reason, we believe organisational abstractions should play a central role in the analysis and design of such systems. To this end, the concepts of agent roles and role models are increasingly being used to specify and design multi-agent systems. However, this is not the full picture. In this paper we introduce three additional organisational concepts--organisational rules, organisational structures, and organisational patterns--that we believe are necessary for the complete specification of computational organisations.We view the introduction of these concepts as a step towards a comprehensive methodology for agent-oriented systems.

MARS: a programmable coordination architecture for mobile agents

Mobile agents offer much promise, but agent mobility and Internet openness make coordination more difficult. Mobile Agent Reactive Spaces (MARS), a Linda-like coordination architecture with programming features, can handle a heterogeneous network while still allowing simple and flexible application design.

Challenges and Research Directions in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering

Agent-based computing is a promising approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, despite the great deal of research in the area, a number of challenges still need to be faced (i) to make agent-based computing a widely accepted paradigm in software engineering practice, and (ii) to turn agent-oriented software abstractions into practical tools for facing the complexity of modern application areas. In this paper, after a short introduction to the key concepts of agent-based computing (as they pertain to software engineering), we characterise the emerging key issues in multiagent systems (MASs) engineering. In particular, we show that such issues can be analysed in terms of three different “scales of observation”, i.e., in analogy with the scales of observation of physical phenomena, in terms of micro, macro, and meso scales. Based on this characterisation, we discuss, for each scale of observation, what are the peculiar engineering issues arising, the key research challenges to be solved, and the most promising research directions to be explored in the future.

Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems

The Grid is a large-scale computer system that is capable of coordinating resources that are not subject to centralised control, whilst using standard, open, general-purpose protocols and interfaces, and delivering non-trivial qualities of service. In this chapter, we argue that Grid applications very strongly suggest the use of agent-based computing, and we review key uses of agent technologies in Grids: user agents, able to customize and personalise data; agent communication languages offering a generic and portable communication medium; and negotiation allowing multiple distributed entities to reach service level agreements. In the second part of the chapter, we focus on Grid service discovery, which we have identified as a prime candidate for use of agent technologies: we show that Grid-services need to be located via personalised, semantic-rich discovery processes, which must rely on the storage of arbitrary metadata about services that originates from both service providers and service users. We present UDDI-MT, an extension to the standard UDDI service directory approach that supports the storage of such metadata via a tunnelling technique that ties the metadata store to the original UDDI directory. The outcome is a flexible service registry which is compatible with existing standards and also provides metadata-enhanced service discovery.

Mobile-agent coordination models for Internet applications

Internet applications face challenges that mobile agents and the adoption of enhanced coordination models may overcome. Each year more applications shift from intranets to the Internet, and Internet-oriented applications become more popular. New design and programming paradigms call help harness the Webs potential. Traditional distributed applications assign a set of processes to a given execution environment that, acting as local-resource managers, cooperating a network-unaware fashion. In contrast, the mobile-agent paradigm defines applications as consisting of network-aware entities-agents-which can exhibit mobility by actively changing their execution environment, transferring themselves during execution. The authors propose a taxonomy of possible coordination models for mobile-agent applications, then use their taxonomy to survey and analyze resent mobile-agent coordination proposals. Their case study, which focuses on a Web-based information-retrieval application, helps show that the mobility of application components and the distribution areas breadth can create coordination problems different from those encountered in traditional distributed applications.

Fast track article: Looking ahead in pervasive computing: Challenges and opportunities in the era of cyber-physical convergence

The physical environment is becoming more and more saturated with computing and communication entities that interact among themselves, as well as with users: virtually everything will be enabled to source information and respond to appropriate stimuli. In this technology-rich scenario, real-world components interact with cyberspace via sensing, computing and communication elements, thus driving towards what is called the Cyber-Physical World (CPW) convergence. Information flows from the physical to the cyber world, and vice-versa, adapting the converged world to human behavior and social dynamics. Indeed humans are at the center of this converged world since information about the context in which they operate is the key element to adapt the CPW applications and services. Alongside, a new wave of (human) social networks and structures are emerging as important drivers for the development of novel communication and computing paradigms. In this article we present some of the research issues, challenges and opportunities in the convergence between the cyber and physical worlds. This article is not a comprehensive survey of all aspects of the CPW convergence. Instead, it presents some exciting research challenges and opportunities identified by members of the journals editorial board with a goal to stimulate new research activities in the emerging areas of CPW convergence.

Engineering Self-Organising Systems

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