Hiroki Suguri

The IEEE FIPA approach to integrating software agents and web services

In many settings Web services are now perceived as the first choice technology to provide neatly encapsulated functionality for Web-based computation. To date, many standards have been produced and adoption is accelerating across numerous application domains. This uptake has long been recognized by members of software agent community with several approaches reported that explore various means of extending the utility of Web services with the autonomous control offered by agents. This paper reports on the recent work of several members of this community to consolidate their approaches into a common specification describing how to seamlessly interconnect FIPA compliant agent systems with W3C compliant Web services. This work has been conducted within the context of the IEEE FIPA Agent and Web Service Integration working group and will be shortly published as a new FIPA specification.

AgentWeb Gateway - a middleware for dynamic integration of multi agent system and Web services framework

Web services framework has been evolved in context of convergence of Web and service oriented computing and then to Web services resource framework acting as basis for grid computing. It provides a loose coupled and implementation neutral infrastructure for distributed applications. On the other hand, multi agent systems has evolved as distributed system in context of autonomic computing having ultimate aim of self-managing systems to overcome their rapidly growing complexity and to enable their further growth. In this paper, we present our solution for dynamic and seamless integration of type the distributed systems. It would help in facilitating the requirements of next generation distributed applications requiring higher demands and complexity. The AgentWeb Gateway acts as middleware between both the technologies for dynamic integration and provides protocol transformations including service discovery, service description and service invocation.

Scalable fault tolerant Agent Grooming Environment: SAGE

Scalable fault tolerant Agent Grooming Environment (SAGE) is first open source initiative in South-Asia. It is a multi-agent system which has been developed according to FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) 2002 specifications. SAGE has been designed with a distributed and decentralized architecture to achieve fault tolerance and scalability as its key features. Due to these characteristics, SAGE is not only regarded as 2nd generation Multi Agent System but also provides a competitive edge over other platforms.

Autonomous Semantic Grid: Principles of Autonomous Decentralized Systems for Grid Computing

Grid computing is an open, heterogeneous and highly dynamic environment based on the principles of service oriented computing. It focuses on basic infrastructure for coordinated resource sharing among virtual organizations to achieve high performance and availability. However, use of existing Grid computing environment is quite complex and requires a lot of human intervention. In order to avoid this intervention, enhancements are required in bringing autonomy and semantics in existing Grid infrastructure. Semantics would act as glue for autonomy in the process of efficient resource discovery and utilization. Several ontologies and ontology languages have been proposed in this regard which not only have some shortcoming but also poses a sort of overhead for the Grid environment. On the other hand, agents are autonomous problem solving entities, and can negotiate semantically for interoperation with each other in dynamic environments. Inspired from the concept of Autonomous Decentralized Systems, we propose that the above mentioned goals can be achieved by integrating FIPA Multi Agent Systems with the Grid Service Architecture and hence to lay the foundation for Autonomous Semantic Grid. Autonomous Semantic Grid system architecture is aimed to provide an improved infrastructure by bringing autonomy, semantic interoperability and decentralization in the Grid computing for emerging applications. This paper then presents implementation details of first milestone toward Autonomous Semantic Grid realization based on a middleware, namely AgentWeb Gateway for integration of Multi Agent Systems and Grid Service Architecture. Evaluation of the system has also been performed over a number of application scenarios.

An Efficient Approach Towards IP Network Topology Discovery for Large Multi-Subnet Networks

Knowledge of the up-to-date network topology (i.e. Layer 2 & Layer 3) is crucial for efficient network management. Issues like congestion avoidance, resource management, resource discovery, root-cause analysis and event correlation require accurate information of the topology map. Due to dynamic nature of today’s IP networks, keeping track of topology information manually is a daunting task. Thus efficient algorithms for automatically discovering physical network topology are necessary. The earlier work has typically concentrated on discovering topology either using completely SNMP-MIB or ICMP echo request/reply, DNS, Trace route, etc. Our proposed algorithm does not rely totally on SNMP-MIB information as it is not usually supported by all devices in the network. Instead we propose an approach where SNMP agent should only be enabled on the routers and managed switches. Rest of the network computers/hosts need not have SNMP agent enabled. We propose an efficient algorithm not only to find available computers/hosts but also to find appropriate timeouts and delays in the network. The experimental results validate our approach, demonstrating that our algorithm discovers accurate physical topology.

Ontology Services between Agents and OWL Based Web Services

Agents and grid services are distinct technologies which arose independent of each other, having their own standards and specifications. Introduction of semantics in grid services play a pivotal role in making them programmable by software agents. Different ontology languages have been proposed for semantic description of these technologies i.e. Ontology Web Language (OWL) is a W3C standard for emerging semantic web, while FIPA SL is FIPA standard for Multiagent systems. These semantic description languages have different underlying support for the terms, syntax, semantics and implementation constraints, which hinder semantic interoperability among these technologies. Therefore, our research focus has been on integrating agent technology with grid services without changing their standards and specifications. We have proposed a middleware known as middleware ontology service, which provide semantic interoperability between agents and grid services by providing translation of ontologies i.e. translation of OWL ontology to FIPA SL ontology for agents and translation of FIPA SL ontology to OWL for grid services. We describe how the proposed architecture registers the translated ontology on middleware and exposes it to grid and agent communities for further querying of concepts, properties and actions. We also describe the test bed configuration through which a software agent will invoke and use a grid service published in OWL and vice versa.

Supply chain optimization towards personalizing web services

Personalization, which has the ultimate goal of satisfying userpsilas requests, can be perceived in terms of QoS measurement. As one of the means for the success of semantics Web, many techniques have been effectively used in modeling and developing Web service personalization. However, most of these methodologies relied heavily on detailed implicit and explicit information supply by users during initial and subsequent interactions with the systems. We propose in this paper a novel approach using the supply chain management (SCM) technique in personalizing Web services as against the conventional notion of applying SCM only to product manufacturing. Our user-model based framework uses multi-agent system (MAS) components in taking requests from users and working towards their satisfaction including seeking for additional information outside the system as the need arises. Only basic stereotype information furnished by potential users at initial contact is required for personalization during subsequent interactions with the system. The system is adaptive and aimed at high quality autonomous information services where users are successfully presented preferred Web services with minimum information request.

SAGE-LITE: An Architecture and Implementation of Light Weight Multiagent System

The escalating popularity of multi-agent systems makes it one of the promising technologies that provide the environment for developing collaborative intelligent software systems. We have proposed the light weight and fault tolerant architecture for multi-agent systems. SAGE-Lite is a lightweight context aware multi-agent system which senses the capabilities of the light-weight devices and reacts accordingly. Agents existing on lightweight devices can communicate and provide services via Bluetooth and the communication with the server is done via WAP. The intelligence may be pretty minimal but often will include some degree of learning from past experience. This paper addresses the issues of wireless environment and gives the detailed design of lightweight architecture context-aware light-weight multi-agent system of SAGE-Lite and its evaluation. The main objective is to allow light weight agents to participate in flexible communicating environment. As the system is based on the latest FIPA specifications, agent uses the FIPA-ACL for communication and bit-efficient protocol for encoding and decoding of ACL message

Persistent architecture for context aware lightweight multi-agent system

Application development on handheld devices using software agent technology is becoming more and more popular around the world. Escalation in the use of lightweight devices and PDAs leads us to create a concrete base for future nomadic applications, positioned in a changing environment. However, constrained characteristics of handheld devices serve as the main hindrance towards achieving this goal. This paper presents the architecture of context aware FIPA complaint multi agent system for the lightweight devices called SAGE-Lite, which are capable of providing fault tolerance through the mechanism of object persistence. Agents existing on lightweight devices can communicate and provide services via Bluetooth and the communication with the server is done via WAP. Since agents communicate via sending and receiving ACL messages, this architecture will minimize communication latency with in the platform. This framework allows implementing agent-based applications like business applications or e-commerce applications on these resource-constrained devices.

Using Honey Bee Teamwork Strategy in Software Agents

Teamwork among software agents is an active research area in the agent community. Researchers are working to define efficient teamwork architecture but a limited progress has been made towards efficient task execution mechanisms by group of agents in collaboration and coordination with each other. We have developed a teamwork architecture to enhance the performance and task execution efficiency of software agents. This architecture has been inferred from Honey Bee teamwork strategies and a short comparison has been made between the similarities of Honey Bee and Agents teamwork. We have also classified and analyzed two different teamwork approaches depending upon the type of collaboration among agents using case study approach