Juan Manuel Corchado Rodríguez

Highlights on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

Research on Agents and Multi-Agent Systems has matured during the last decade and many effective applications of this technology are now deployed. PAAMS provides an international forum to present and discuss the latest scientific developments and their effective applications, to assess the impact of the approach, and to facilitate technology transfer. PAAMS started as a local initiative, but has since grown to become THE international yearly platform to present, to discuss, and to disseminate the latest developments and the most important outcomes related to real-world applications. It provides a unique opportunity to bring multi-disciplinary experts, academics and practitioners together to exchange their experience in the development and deployment of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. PAAMS intends to bring together researchers and developers from industry and the academic world to report on the latest scientific and technical advances on the application of multi-agent systems, to discuss and debate the major issues, and to showcase the latest systems using agent based technology. It will promote a forum for discussion on how agent-based techniques, methods, and tools help system designers to accomplish the mapping between available agent technology and application needs. Other stakeholders should be rewarded with a better understanding of the potential and challenges of the agent-oriented approach. This edition of PAAMS special sessions. This symposium is organized by the Bioinformatics, Intelligent System and Educational Technology Research Group (http://bisite.usal.es/http://bisite.usal.es/) of the University of Salamanca. The present edition will be held in Salamanca, Spain, from 28th to 30th March 2012. This edition of PAAMS special sessions. This symposium is organized by the Bioinformatics, Intelligent System and Educational Technology Research Group (http://bisite.usal.es/http://bisite.usal.es/) of the University of Salamanca. The present edition will be held in Salamanca, Spain, from 28th to 30th March 2012.

Argumentative SOX compliant and quality decision support intelligent expert system over the suppliers selection process

The objective of this paper is to define a decision support system over SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) compatibility and quality of the Suppliers Selection Process based on Artificial Intelligence and Argumentation Theory knowledge and techniques. Thepresent SOX Law, in effect nowadays, was created to improve financial government control over US companies. This law is a factor standard out United States due to several factors like present globalization, expansion of US companies, or key influence of US stock exchange markets worldwide. This paper constitutes a novel approach to this kind of problems due to following elements: (1) it has an optimized structure to look for the solution, (2) it has a dynamic learningmethod to handle court and control gonvernment bodies decisions, (3) it uses fuzzy knowledge to improve its performance, and (4) it uses its past accumulated experience to let the system evolve far beyond its initial state.

Non Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM): A State of the Art

The recent increase in smart meters installations in households and small bussiness by electric companies has led to interest in monitoring load techniques in order to provide better quality service and get useful information about appliance usage and user consumption behavior. This works summarizes the current state of the art in Non Intrusive Load Monitoring from its beginning, describes the main process followed in the literature to perform this technique and shows current methods and techniques followed nowadays. The possible application of this techniques in the context of ambient intelligence, energy efficiency, occupancy detection are described. This work also points the current challenges in the field and the future lines of research in this broad topic.

Multiagent systems and self-organizative virtual organizations, a step ahead in adaptive MAS

Organizations of agents based on Virtual Organizations needs to be supported by a coordinated effort that explicitly determines how the agents should be organized and carry out the actions and tasks assigned to them. The interactions of a multi-agent system cannot be only related to the agent and the communication skills, but also to the concepts of organizational engineering. Moreover, nowadays there is a clear trend towards using methods and tools that can help to develop and simulate virtual organizations by means of multiagent systems (MAS). Simulation is used for several purposes ranging from work flow to systems procedures representation. The contribution from agent based computing to the field of computer simulation mediated by ABS (Agent Based Simulation) is a new paradigm for the simulation of complex systems that require a high level of interaction between the entities of the system. The main goal of this work is a new global coordination model for an agent organization in a simulation context. The innovation of this work consists of the dynamic and adaptive planning capability to distribute tasks among the agent of the organization. The middleware used for simulation makes it possible to visualize the emergent agent behaviour and the entity agent.

Software Agents in Retinal Vessels Classification

This article presents a methodology for the classification of retinal vessels based on agreement technologies and artificial vision. Some studies have demonstrated a direct relationship between the information gathered from retinal images and certain pathologies such as hypertension or diabetes. There are different works that present methodologies based on image processing algorithms to extract that information, but there is no globally accepted methodology to obtain the information automatically, which is the objective of this work. The proposed methodology has been evaluated by one expert user and compared with other existing free software with similar features.

Argumentative SOX Compliant and Intelligent Decision Support Systems for the Suppliers Contracting Process

More and more our society is linked to the stability of financial markets and this stability depends on key players like private companies, financial markets, investors, analysts, government control agencies and so on. Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a mandatory law in EEUU market and a facto standard in rest of the world and has as main objective to keep the desire financial stability. Within this chapter it will be shown a new decision support intelligent financial model over SOX compatibility based on Artificial Intelligent technology together with Theory of Argumentation . The main aim of this model is to help and support private companies, auditors, executive boards and regulatory bodies to take a SOX compliant decision over an specific process of a typical purchasing financial cycle: The Contracting Process. The decision will be supported by the whole argumentation process drive by this model and will be reinforce with quality measures with the final objective to create a very clear argumentative background about the suggested decision. This model directly contributes to both scientific research artificial intelligence area and business sector. From business perspective it empowers the use of intelligent models and techniques to drive decision making over financial statements. From scientific and research area the impact is based on the combination of the following innovative elements: (1) an specific Information Seeking Dialog Protocol, (2) a Facts Valuation based Protocol in which previous gathered facts are analyzed, (3) the already incorporated initial knowledge coming from human expert knowledge, (4) the Intra-Agent Decision Making Protocol based on deductive argumentation and (5) the Semi Automated Fuzzy Dynamic Knowledge Learning Protocol giving as a result a novel approach to this kind of problems.