Mercedes Garijo

A Survey of Agent-Oriented Methodologies

This article introduces the current agent-oriented methodologies. It discusseswhat approacheshave been followed (mainly extending existing objectoriented and knowledge engineering methodologies), the suitability of these approaches for agent modelling, and some conclusions drawn from the survey.

Analysis and Design of Multiagent Systems Using MAS-Common KADS

This article proposes an agent-oriented methodology called MAS-CommonKADS and develops a case study. This methodology extends the knowledge engineering methodology CommonKADS with techniques from objectoriented and protocol engineering methodologies. The methodology consists of the development of seven models: Agent Model, that describes the characteristics of each agent; Task Model, that describes the tasks that the agents carry out; Expertise Model, that describes the knowledge needed by the agents to achieve their goals; Organisation Model, that describes the structural relationships between agents (software agents and/or human agents); Coordination Model, that describes the dynamic relationships between software agents; Communication Model, that describes the dynamic relationships between human agents and their respective personal assistant software agents; and Design Model, that refines the previous models and determines the most suitable agent architecture for each agent, and the requirements of the agent network.

Evaluating social choice techniques into intelligent environments by agent based social simulation

The primary hypothesis stated by this paper is that the use of social choice theory in Ambient Intelligence systems can improve significantly users satisfaction when accessing shared resources. A research methodology based on agent based social simulations is employed to support this hypothesis and to evaluate these benefits. The result is a sixfold contribution summarized as follows. Firstly, several considerable differences between this application case and the most prominent social choice application, political elections, have been found and described. Secondly, given these differences, a number of metrics to evaluate different voting systems in this scope have been proposed and formalized. Thirdly, given the presented application and the metrics proposed, the performance of a number of well known electoral systems is compared. Fourthly, as a result of the performance study, a novel voting algorithm capable of obtaining the best balance between the metrics reviewed is introduced. Fifthly, to improve the social welfare in the experiments, the voting methods are combined with cluster analysis techniques. Finally, the article is complemented by a free and open-source tool, VoteSim, which ensures not only the reproducibility of the experimental results presented, but also allows the interested reader to adapt the case study presented to different environments.

Towards a Holistic Framework for the Evaluation of Emergency Plans in Indoor Environments

One of the most promising fields for ambient intelligence is the implementation of intelligent emergency plans. Because the use of drills and living labs cannot reproduce social behaviors, such as panic attacks, that strongly affect these plans, the use of agent-based social simulation provides an approach to evaluate these plans more thoroughly. (1) The hypothesis presented in this paper is that there has been little interest in describing the key modules that these simulators must include, such as formally represented knowledge and a realistic simulated sensor model, and especially in providing researchers with tools to reuse, extend and interconnect modules from different works. This lack of interest hinders researchers from achieving a holistic framework for evaluating emergency plans and forces them to reconsider and to implement the same components from scratch over and over. In addition to supporting this hypothesis by considering over 150 simulators, this paper: (2) defines the main modules identified and proposes the use of semantic web technologies as a cornerstone for the aforementioned holistic framework; (3) provides a basic methodology to achieve the framework; (4) identifies the main challenges; and (5) presents an open and free software tool to hint at the potential of such a holistic view of emergency plan evaluation in indoor environments.

Beast methodology: An agile testing methodology for multi-agent systems based on behaviour driven development

This paper presents a testing methodology to apply Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) techniques while developing Multi-Agent Systems (MASs), termed BEhavioural Agent Simple Testing (BEAST) Methodology. This methodology is supported by the open source framework (BEAST Tool) which automatically generates test cases skeletons from BDD scenarios specifications. The developed framework allows the testing of MASs based on JADE or JADEX platforms. In addition, this framework offers a set of configurable Mock Agents with the aim of being able to execute tests while the MAS is under development. The BEAST Methodology presents transparent traceability from user requirements to test cases. Thus, the stakeholders can be aware of the project status. The methodology and the associated tool have been validated in the development of a MAS for fault diagnosis in FTTH (Fiber To The Home) networks. The results have been measured in quantifiable way obtaining a reduction of the tests implementation time.

An agent architecture to fulfill real-time requirements

Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents. Barcelona, Spain: 3-7 june, 2000.

A Survey of Twitter Rumor Spreading Simulations

Viral marketing, marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks, has experienced a significant encouragement in the last years. In this scope, Twitter is the most studied social network in viral marketing and the rumor spread is a widely researched problem. This paper contributes with a survey of research works which study rumor diffusion in Twitter. Moreover, the most useful aspects of these works to build new multi-agent based simulations dealing with this interesting and complex problem are discussed. The main four research lines in rumor dissemination found and discussed in this paper are: exploratory data analysis, rumor detection, epidemiological modeling, and multi-agent based social simulation. The survey shows that the reproducibility in the specialized literature has to be considerably improved. Finally, a free and open-source simulation tool implementing several of the models considered in this survey is presented.

FIRST-ORDER LOGIC RULE INDUCTION FOR INFORMATION EXTRACTION IN WEB RESOURCES

Information extraction out of web pages, commonly known as screen scraping, is usually performed through wrapper induction, a technique that is based on the internal structure of HTML documents. As...

A Framework for Goal-Oriented Discovery of Resources in the RESTful Architecture

One of the challenges facing the current web is the efficient use of all the available information. The Web 2.0 phenomenon has favored the creation of contents by average users, and thus the amount of information that can be found for diverse topics has grown exponentially in the last years. Initiatives such as linked data are helping to build the Semantic Web, in which a set of standards are proposed for the exchange of data among heterogeneous systems. However, these standards are sometimes not used, and there are still plenty of websites that require naive techniques to discover their contents and services. This paper proposes an integrated framework for content and service discovery and extraction. The framework is divided into several layers where the discovery of contents and services is made in a representational stateless transfer system such as the web. It employs several web mining techniques as well as feature-oriented modeling for the discovery of cross-cutting features in web resources. The framework is used in a scenario of electronic newspapers. An intelligent agent crawls the web for related news, and uses services and visits links automatically according to its goal. This scenario illustrates how the discovery is made at different levels and how the use of semantics helps implement an agent that performs high-level tasks.

Modeling Strategic Decisions Using Activity Diagrams to Consider the Contribution of Dynamic Planning in the Profitability of Projects Under Uncertainty

In this paper, a framework to consider the contribution of decision making and dynamic planning in the profitability of a project under uncertainty is proposed. Unified modeling language (UML) activity diagrams are constructed for different strategies of an ongoing engineering project whose final profitability is highly influenced by a set of uncertain variables, such as demand, costs and prices, or unexpected events. Some of these strategies can be, for instance, expanding, contracting, switching, abandoning, waiting, transferring, etc. A method to derive a simple mathematical model for carrying out a project from any UML activity diagram describing the strategy is also presented. This mathematical model can be easily implemented in a simulation environment, where the random nature of the different uncertain variables of the project, the relationships between them, and its final profitability can be considered. An example of the application of the proposed model is shown. This example also illustrates how to model the uncertainty in demand by means of a stochastic Bass process. We suggest that the proposed methodology be used by itself or as a complementary tool to the existing methods of capital budgeting by solving some of the deficiencies found in them. For instance: 1) net present value or return on investment is static in nature and cannot cope with uncertainty; 2) real options valuation may be an obscure technique and in many cases does not allow an operational strategy to be derived for guiding the project in real life; and 3) decision analysis occurs within the problem of the “flaw of averages,” by using expected values of different uncertain variables to calculate the profitability of a project instead of their complete probability distribution.