Mercedes Amor

Malaca: A component and aspect-oriented agent architecture

The production of maintainable and reusable agents depends largely on how well the agent architecture is modularized. Most commercial agent toolkits provide an Object-Oriented (OO) framework, whose agent architecture does not facilitate separate (re)use of the domain-specific functionality of an agent from other concerns. This paper presents Malaca, an agent architecture that combines the use of Component-based Software Engineering and Aspect-Oriented Software Development, both of which promote better modularization of the agent architecture while increase at the architectural level. Malaca supports the separate (re)use of the domain-specific functionality of an agent from other communication concerns, providing explicit support for the design and configuration of agent architectures and allows the development of agent-based software so that it is easy to understand, maintain and reuse.

Self-configuring agents for ambient assisted living applications

Ambient assisted living (AAL) is advocated as the technological solution that will enable the elderly population to maintain their independence for a longer period of time than would otherwise be the case. The inherently heterogeneous nature of AmI environments and special requirements of the elderly population pose new challenges for the design and implementation of AAL systems. Thus, the development of these systems demands a context-aware, open, scalable, and distributed software technology that incorporates both intelligent and autonomic reconfiguration techniques. In this contribution, we focus on the design and implementation challenges of an agent-based AAL system that incorporates self-configuring tasks, by means of applying autonomic computing to software agents’ internal architecture. We use an agent-based system for tracking elderly people’s activity using common commercially available electronic devices as case study. We have validated our approach focusing on response time (a main concern in AAL) using different tests and the results are satisfactory.

Collaborative virtual environment development: an aspect-oriented approach

Nowadays, the interest in collaborative environments has increased considerably, probably due to current technological advances, especially in Internet computing. However, the lack of a standard reference architecture for the development of these systems makes the development of useful collaborative environments, that can be used in real work, difficult. Our goal is the development of a framework for the construction of collaborative virtual environments. We consider aspect-oriented programming to be very suitable for both the design and implementation of these systems. Thus, we present an aspect-oriented approach for the development of collaborative virtual environments.

Putting together web services and compositional software agents

Web services are the newest trend in information technology, being considered the most used alternative for building distributed open systems. Although currently Web services involve a single client-server access, the market is demanding cooperative Web services to provide a global solution. Recently software agents appear as a good option that can cope with the control of Web services composition, obtaining an integral solution. This paper presents an approach to integrate Web services and software agent technologies. The basis of our approach is the use of the component technology for the development of adaptive software agents. Our compositional software agent performs automated software composition based on the flexibility provided by the component orientation, which makes possible to plug Web services into the agent functionality and compose them during the agent interaction.

A model driven engineering process of platform neutral agents for ambient intelligence devices

Ambient intelligence (AmI) systems are now considered a promising approach to assist people in their daily life. AmI proposes the development of context aware systems equipped with devices that can recognize your context and act accordingly. Agents provide an effective way to develop such systems since agents are reactive, proactive and exhibit an intelligent and autonomous behavior. However, current agent approaches do not adequately fulfill the requirements posed by AmI systems. From a modeling point of view, the aim should be to help in the design by providing adequate tools that assist in the development of important properties of AmI systems, such as context-awareness; and from an implementation point of view, agent technologies must be adapted to the diversity of AmI devices and communication technologies. As a solution to these issues we propose a Model driven engineering process, which supports the automatic generation of agent-based AmI systems. The source metamodel is PIM4Agents, a general purpose agent metamodel that we have adapted to support the explicit modeling of context aware systems, and the target metamodel is Malaca, an aspect-oriented agent architecture. Aspect-orientation makes Malaca platform-neutral for FIPA compliant agent platforms, simplifying the model driven process. The solution generates MalacaTiny agents, an implementation of Malaca that is able to run in AmI devices. We have evaluated the convenience of applying a model driven approach by measuring the degree of automation of our process and we have evaluated MalacaTiny for mobile phones by assessing different parameters, related to the scarcity of resources in AmI systems. All the results obtained are satisfactory.

A Software Product Line Process to Develop Agents for the IoT

One of the most important challenges of this decade is the Internet of Things (IoT), which aims to enable things to be connected anytime, anyplace, with anything and anyone, ideally using any path/network and any service. IoT systems are usually composed of heterogeneous and interconnected lightweight devices that support applications that are subject to change in their external environment and in the functioning of these devices. The management of the variability of these changes, autonomously, is a challenge in the development of these systems. Agents are a good option for developing self-managed IoT systems due to their distributed nature, context-awareness and self-adaptation. Our goal is to enhance the development of IoT applications using agents and software product lines (SPL). Specifically, we propose to use Self-StarMASMAS, multi-agent system) agents and to define an SPL process using the Common Variability Language. In this contribution, we propose an SPL process for Self-StarMAS, paying particular attention to agents embedded in sensor motes.

Dynamic reconfiguration of security policies in wireless sensor networks.

Providing security and privacy to wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) is very challenging, due to the heterogeneity of sensor nodes and their limited capabilities in terms of energy, processing power and memory. The applications for these systems run in a myriad of sensors with different low-level programming abstractions, limited capabilities and different routing protocols. This means that applications for WSNs need mechanisms for self-adaptation and for self-protection based on the dynamic adaptation of the algorithms used to provide security. Dynamic software product lines (DSPLs) allow managing both variability and dynamic software adaptation, so they can be considered a key technology in successfully developing self-protected WSN applications. In this paper, we propose a self-protection solution for WSNs based on the combination of the INTER-TRUST security framework (a solution for the dynamic negotiation and deployment of security policies) and the FamiWare middleware (a DSPL approach to automatically configure and reconfigure instances of a middleware for WSNs). We evaluate our approach using a case study from the intelligent transportation system domain.

A Component-Based Approach for Interoperability across FIPA-Compliant Platforms

Software Agents are becoming one of the most important approaches for developing open distributed systems. Interoperability is a critical issue to develop open and flexible agent-based applications, as it would make reusability possible across heterogeneous agent systems. Agent interoperability can be achieved through the use of FIPA standardized specifications. Although most major FIPA-compliant platforms have reached a consensus on the different alternative specifications to interoperate, for other platforms this would remain an open issue. For the latter cases FIPA suggests the use of gateways, but sometimes it is not possible to extend or provide the basic gateway for all cases. This paper presents an approach for developing heterogeneous agent-based systems regardless of the FIPA-compliant agent platforms involved. The basis of our proposal is the use of component technology for the development of adaptive software agents. Our compositional software agent separates the distribution of messages according to different transport services, which reduces platform dependency on the agent coordinated behaviour. This agent capability allows using these agents as gateways between agent platforms, providing an immediate solution to interoperability.

Building Software Agents from Software Components

The widespread use of the Internet has favored the development of distributed multi-agent systems. The development of agent-based applications is carried out with Agent-Oriented Software Engineering methods, techniques and tools. Although there are several different platforms and methodologies for software agents design, the lack of flexible agent architectures makes the development of multi-agent systems a tiresome and hard task. Current agent architectures provided by these platforms and methodologies do not offer enough flexibility for the development of flexible software agents, placing little emphasis on reuse. This paper presents a software agent development approach using a component-based architecture that promotes building agents from reusable software components. The basis of our approach is the use of component-based software development concepts and the separation of concerns principle to separate agent functionality into independent entities increasing the maintainability and adaptability of the agent to new environments and demands. This architecture simplifies the software agent development process, reducing it to the description of the agents’ software components and interaction protocols using XML documents. The power of Java and Jess technologies has been exploited in the implementation of our compositional model of software agents.

The Sol agent platform: Enabling group communication and interoperability of self-configuring agents in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things IoT for short envisions a world in which a set of heterogeneous devices are interconnected and using the Internet, work together to provide valuable services for users. The deployment of applications in the IoT requires managing a high diversity of devices, achieving their communication through different communication protocols, dealing with the incompatibilities between underlying networks, even at runtime. So, the main goal of the IoT is to cope with these interoperability issues adequately. Agent technology offers the necessary means to manage distribution and many other requirements of the IoT satisfactorily, however current agent platforms neither deal adequately with the heterogeneity of these environments, nor provide explicit support for the dissemination of data to a group of related IoT nodes. In addition, current agent architectures are normally implemented and deployed for a specific agent platform using a concrete communication protocol. But agent platforms have paid scant attention to providing agent architectures with a flexible communication infrastructure that makes the modification of communication-related concerns possible both at design and even at runtime. In this paper we present Sol, an agent platform that deals with all these limitations suffered by current agent platforms. The main motivation of this work is to promote the use of agents for the development of IoT systems by providing the necessary services required by software agents running embedded in heterogenous devices and interconnected by different communication networks. The Sol platform also makes it possible for software agents to self-configure their communication-related concerns by binding the appropriate plug-in. We illustrate the benefits of our approach with several scenarios of a real Intelligent Museum, and show its feasibility in terms of reconfiguration times and data exchange through heterogeneous wireless technologies, so important in the IoT.