Gregory M. P. O’Hare

Agent factory micro edition: a framework for ambient applications

Ambient Intelligence represents a vision of the future whereby the world will be saturated with embedded electronic devices that are sensitive and responsive to people. This technology will combine the concepts of intelligent systems with that of pervasive computing. Intelligent agents of varying capabilities will provide the foundations for many applications within this domain. As a means of achieving this objective a framework – Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME) has been developed to enable the creation of agent-based applications on computationally constrained devices such as cellular digital mobile phones. It has been specifically designed to tackle the performance and memory footprint issues associated with executing intentional agents on mobile devices.

Robotic UBIquitous COgnitive Network

Robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to perform complex tasks. While their potential makes them increasingly popular, one fundamental problem is how to make them self-adaptive, so as to reduce the amount of preparation, pre-programming and human supervision that they require in real world applications. The EU FP7 project RUBICON develops self-sustaining learning solutions yielding cheaper, adaptive and efficient coordination of robotic ecologies. The approach we pursue builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics, agent control systems, wireless sensor networks and machine learning. This paper briefly illustrates how these techniques are being extended, integrated, and applied to AAL applications.

ACCESS: An Agent Architecture for Ubiquitous Service Delivery

This paper introduces the Agents Channeling ContExt Sensitive Services (ACCESS) architecture, an agent-based architecture that supports the development and deployment of context sensitive services. Specifically, ACCESS is comprised of two sub-systems: a run-time system that delivers the minimum functionality necessary to execute ACCESS Agents, and a development environment that delivers structured tool-based support for the creation, development, and visualization of u-commerce services.

Multi-agent system architectures for wireless sensor networks

Traditionally Multi-Agent Systems have been thought of in terms of devices that possess a relatively rich set of resources e.g. power, memory, computational ability and communication bandwidth. This is usually necessary due to the complex deliberation and negotiation processes they require to fulfil their goals. Recently, networked devices have become available on the millimeter scale called Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which pose new challenges because of their constrained resources. However what these devices lack in resources they make up for in numbers due to their small inexpensive nature. In this paper we identify some of the existing MAS architectures for WSNs, and we propose some novel architectures of our own.

SIXTH: A Middleware for Supporting Ubiquitous Sensing in Personal Health Monitoring

For an arbitrary event, a lack of the prevailing context compromises understanding. In health monitoring services, this may have serious repercussions. Yet many biomedical devices tend to exhibit a lack of openness and interoperability that reduces their potential as active nodes in broader healthcare information systems. One approach to addressing this deficiency rests in the realization of a middleware solution that is heterogeneous in a multiplicity of dimensions, whilst supporting dynamic reprogramming as the needs of patients change. This paper demonstrates how such functionality may be interwoven into a middleware solution, both from a design and implementation perspective.

ACCESS: an agent based architecture for the rapid prototyping of location aware services

We describe the Agents Channelling ContExt Sensitive Services (ACCESS) architecture, an open agent-based architecture that supports the development and deployment of multiple heterogeneous context sensitive services. We detail the ACCESS architecture and describe the scenario of an individual arriving in a city and using his ACCESS enabled PDA to secure lodgings.

VIPER: A VIsual Protocol EditoR

Agent interactions play a crucial role in Multi-Agent Systems. Consequently graphical formalisms, such as Agent UML, have been adopted that allow agent developers to abstract away from implementation details and focus on the core aspects of such interactions. Agent Factory (AF) is a cohesive framework that supports the development and deployment of agent-oriented applications. This paper introduces the Visual Protocol Editor (VIPER), a graphical tool that allows users to diagrammatically construct agent interaction protocols. These protocols are subsequently realised through AF-APL, the purpose-built Agent-Oriented Programming language that sits at the heart of AF. In particular, we focus upon the design of interaction protocols using a subset of Agent UML. To this end, we specify a number of tools and an associated process through which developers can supplement these protocols with application- and domain-dependant AF-APL rules to create useful agents that adhere to the protocol constraints.

A Smart and Balanced Energy-Efficient Multihop Clustering Algorithm (Smart-BEEM) for MIMO IoT Systems in Future Networks †

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are typically composed of thousands of sensors powered by limited energy resources. Clustering techniques were introduced to prolong network longevity offering the promise of green computing. However, most existing work fails to consider the network coverage when evaluating the lifetime of a network. We believe that balancing the energy consumption in per unit area rather than on each single sensor can provide better-balanced power usage throughout the network. Our former work—Balanced Energy-Efficiency (BEE) and its Multihop version BEEM can not only extend the network longevity, but also maintain the network coverage. Following WSNs, Internet of Things (IoT) technology has been proposed with higher degree of diversities in terms of communication abilities and user scenarios, supporting a large range of real world applications. The IoT devices are embedded with multiple communication interfaces, normally referred as Multiple-In and Multiple-Out (MIMO) in 5G networks. The applications running on those devices can generate various types of data. Every interface has its own characteristics, which may be preferred and beneficial in some specific user scenarios. With MIMO becoming more available on the IoT devices, an advanced clustering solution for highly dynamic IoT systems is missing and also pressingly demanded in order to cater for differing user applications. In this paper, we present a smart clustering algorithm (Smart-BEEM) based on our former work BEE(M) to accomplish energy efficient and Quality of user Experience (QoE) supported communication in cluster based IoT networks. It is a user behaviour and context aware approach, aiming to facilitate IoT devices to choose beneficial communication interfaces and cluster headers for data transmission. Experimental results have proved that Smart-BEEM can further improve the performance of BEE and BEEM for coverage sensitive longevity.

AToM: atomic topology management of wireless sensor networks

This paper explores the structural and behavioural similarities that exist between the chemical constitution of natural substances and WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) topology. It introduces Atomic Topology Management (AToM), which uses concepts like WSN electron, WSN nucleus, WSN photon, and WSN atom to model sensor node, base station, message and basic WSN subset consisting of one base station and several sensor nodes. We subsequently extend the modeling to explain the basic behaviours of WSNs. The paper describes naming rules for topology management and based upon this, we devise and test some basic algorithms for energy and load balancing.

Realising reusable agent behaviours with ALPHA

This paper describes how roles have been used to engender reuse within the ALPHA agent programming language.