Hideki Tai

The Aglets project

We humans may ultimately realize we can’t dictate the mechanism, or “how I want you to work,” to an agent, but as long as we reach a reasonable agreement on interfaces, human needs may be served. Even so, given the dynamics of detached and deferred interaction, few of us anticipate designing or deploying systems without user interaction, especially when (as is likely to happen) there is a conflict in user goals. Most humans want to review and validate proposed transactions before their agents commit to them.

Model-driven development of large-scale web applications

This paper describes our approach to support the development of large-scale Web applications. Large development efforts have to be divided into a number of smaller tasks of different kinds that can be performed by multiple developers. Once this process has taken place, it is important to manage the consistency among the artifacts in an efficient and systematic manner. Our model-driven approach makes this possible. In this paper, we discuss how a metamodel is used to describe part of the specification as a central contract among the developers. We also describe a tool that we implemented on the basis of the metamodel. The tool provides a variety of code generators and a mechanism for checking whether view artifacts, such as JavaServer PagesTM, are compliant with the model. This feature helps developers manage the consistency between a view artifact and the related business logic--HyperText Transfer Protocol request handlers.

A security scheme for aglets

Aglets, a framework and runtime platform for mobile agents developed by the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory, is an advanced system of mobile agents written in Java, and is already used in some commercial applications. Using mobile agent technologies provides potential benefits to applications, but they also pose security threats to those applications. These threats not only come as malicious agents, but also in the form of malicious hosts. In this paper we introduce security features against these threats. Access control and message protection can prevent attacks by malicious agents. Server authentication allows agents to avoid movement to malicious hosts and blocks suspicious agents coming from malicious hosts. Copyright

Architecture of an agent server capable of hosting tens of thousands of agents

In this paper, we describe technologies for an agent server capable of hosting tens of thousands of agents. The agent server needs a thread management mechanism, a memory management mechanism, and a recovery management mechanism. We have developed a framework and agent running environment named Caribbean. We describe the application scenario and the technologies used in Caribbean. The results of a performance evaluation are also given.

An agent server for the next generation of Web applications

We expect that the next generation of Web applications will provide services based on information about individual users, and will be integrated with e-mail notification services. However, existing approaches are not adequate for developing such applications. We therefore provide a framework and running environment, named Caribbean. The framework is based on a concept of multi-agent systems. Modules, namely agents, are partitioned in accordance with the roles of participants. The authors first explain the type of applications for which Caribbean is intended by describing two examples that were developed. Then, they introduce the Caribbean framework. Finally, they discuss the benefits of the framework for application developers.

Agent-based simulation of CO2 emissions trading and large-scale traffic flow

The first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocols has started this year to prevent the global warming. There are many efforts and discussions on effective greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction. The emissions trading is one of important issues. Several experimental markets are starting by governments and private sectors. However, there are some opinions against the trading itself. Also, the estimation of trading amount and market price is difficult with such a huge and emerging market. In this paper, we introduce the international emissions trading with the agent-based approach and a scalable simulation framework applied to large-scale traffic flow.

Controlled modeling environment using flexibly-formatted spreadsheets

As modeling in software and system development becomes increasingly prevalent, many engineers need to collaboratively develop models spanning many disciplines such as requirements management, system design, software, etc. However, integrating modeling languages for various disciplines is challenging, because UML and SysML are too complex for many engineers to understand. Therefore, in complicated engineering processes, engineers with different areas of expertise often find it difficult to access the same information in different domain-specific modeling environments. Our approach to address this problem is to share and edit the models as task-oriented spreadsheets, using a unified model (in UML or SysML) and a unified user interface (in the spreadsheet program). The formats of the spreadsheets are optimized for various tasks while the target models remain in a unified modeling language. Since the transformation between the spreadsheets and the models is automated and transparent, users do not have to be skilled with the modeling languages to edit the spreadsheets. Using our novel approach, we were able to reduce the errors and time, and also the difficulty for each task without providing specialized training for the engineers. A preliminary user study showed that, by applying the spreadsheet-based approach, we could reduce the number of errors with less time for typical systems engineering tasks.