Martin Fredriksson

Coordination and control in computational ecosystems: a vision of the future

In computational ecosystems the focus is on creating and maintaining value-adding chains of e-services. The e-services are created, maintained and used by actors with a common interest in an ecosystem. Ecosystems can be seen as hubs supporting, for instance, financial services, distributed health-care or smart homes. We argue that coordination and control in an ecosystem have to support trust among participating parties. This means, among other things, that the architecture and infrastructure of the ecosystem have to incorporate societal support to meet requirements such as trust creation and maintenance. More precisely, we advocate that basic societal concepts to support are Ownership, Responsibility, and Accessibility (ORA). The paper gives an introduction to the concept of ecosystems. We also provide an example of a potential e-service in the form of a comfort management system (COMFY) in a smart home. The paper also includes an layered ORA architecture built on top of SUNs Jini platform.

Sustainable information ecosystems

Fundamental challenges in engineering of large-scale multi-agent systems involve qualitative requirements from, e.g., ambient intelligence and network-centric operations. We claim that we can meet these challenges if we model our multi-agent systems using models of evolutionary aspects of living systems. In current methodologies of multi-agent systems the notion of system evolution is only implicitly addressed, i.e., only closed patterns of interaction are considered as origin of dynamic system behaviour. In this paper we argue that service discovery and conjunction, by means of open patterns of interaction, are the basic tools for sustainable system behaviour. In effect, we introduce a framework for sustainable information ecosystems. Consequently, we describe basic principles of our methodology as well as a couple of applications illustrating our basic ideas. The applications coexist on our supporting agent society platform SOLACE and their respective behaviour is visualized using our system analysis tool DISCERN. The paper is concluded with a summary and a number of open research issues in the area.

A Methodological Perspective on Engineering of Agent Societies

We propose a new methodological approach for engineering of agent societies. This is needed due to the emergence of the Embedded Internet. We argue that such communication platforms call for a methodology that focuses on the concept of open computational systems, grounded in general system theory, and natural systems from an engineering perspective. In doing so, it stands clear that forthcoming research in this problem domain initially have to focus on cognitive primitives, rather than domain specific interaction protocols, in construction of agent societies.

First international workshop on theory and practice of open computational systems

This report summarizes the presentations and related discussions of the first international workshop on Theory and practice of open computational systems (TAPOCS) at the twelfth international workshop on Enabling technologies: Infrastructure for collaborative enterprises (WETICE). The balance between two topics of open computational systems in particular was in focus during the workshop discussions: theory and practice. As such, we introduced these topics by means of a presentation on Visions of open computational systems and concluded them by means of a presentation on an envisioned Roadmap of open computational systems.

Process algebras as support for sustainable systems of services

Process algebras are indispensable tools in modeling concurrent processes in theoretical computer science. We propose a novel use of process algebra as a back-bone in designing and maintaining complex open distributed information systems. Our π-calculus approach allows us to create and maintain service based mission oriented tasks with intended behaviors and with support for observing and maintaining mission critical systemic criteria.

Online engineering and open computational systems

We strongly believe that agent-oriented approaches to system development come with a natural level of abstraction and therefore have something valuable to offer. However, in doing so, any comprehensive agent-oriented methodology necessarily has to be grounded in issues and solutions of relevance in contemporary research and development areas such as Grid computing and autonomic computing - in order to realize the visions of ambient intelligence. Current efforts of AOSE, however, mostly focus on traditional methods of software development, provides implementations of stand-alone agent systems, or isolated experimental platforms. These efforts are, of course, worthwhile in themselves but have clear limitations when it comes to their contribution and fulfillment of visions such as ambient intelligence. Consequently, in this chapter we introduce the methodological approach of online engineering. As such, this methodology has explicitly been designed to meet what we conceive as the major challenges and limitations in contemporary approaches of AOSE. In fact, we argue that these limitations primarily are due to a strong focus on current practice in software engineering, rather than on engineering of grounded open computational systems. In this respect, online engineering provides us with the models, methods, and tools to facilitate the necessary transition from programming of abstract machines towards development of grounded physical systems, e.g., from software engineering to engineering of open computational systems.

Humans and complex systems : Sustainable information societies

Advanced information systems are crucial in many applications. An important such application is to maintain a sustainable ecosystem on our earth. However, emergence of information systems of that complexity calls for new methodologies in software engineering that take a holistic view of the systems and their embedding in our social and natural fabric. In fact, the metaphor of information ecologies gives us the language and concepts with which to address challenges of high complexity, such as networks of people and smart information artifacts communicating and sharing knowledge. Thus, the ultimate goal can be phrased as: Development of a comprehensive methodology supporting sustainable information ecologies.

Methodological principles in construction and observation of open computational systems

Research and development of information systems for defense and warfare have changed most dramatically during the last decade; from weapons of mass destruction to sustainable systems of services. The involved information systems can be comprised by a wide range of complex, interacting, and proactive services. Consequently, construction and observation of complex multiagent systems is an important issue to pursue. We argue that methodological principles of the involved systems most appropriately can be dealt with in terms of open computational systems. In this paper we therefore introduce the general characteristics of open computational systems and briefly outline a practical case of such systems in a network-centric warfare setting, in order to identify particular issues of the proposed approach and related tools.

Quality of service in network-centric warfare and challenges in open computational systems engineering

The concept of open computational systems represents physical and dynamic environments populated with self-organizing networks of cognitive entities, i.e., open systems of human users and software technology continuously deliberating in a physical environment. The foremost challenge with this class of systems is that of automated sustainability, i.e., online assertion of systemic qualities. To that end, we introduce the application domain of trustworthy and sustainable operations in marine environments and our experience of applicable models in experimenting with quality of service in network-centric warfare. Finally, we conclude the paper with a discussion regarding challenges in the domain of open computational systems.

Trustworthy and sustainable operations in marine environments

In order to address challenges and opportunities of engineering information systems for network-centric warfare, we have developed a prototype for trustworthy and sustainable operations in marine environments (TWOSOME). The system developed addressed qualities such as information fusion, target acquisition, and self-organization in open computational systems; comprised of distributed services. As such, the system prototype executes on a service-oriented layered architecture for communicating entities (SOLACE) and, furthermore, different perspectives of the prototype are visualized by means of a distributed interaction system for complex entity relation networks (DISCERN).