Michal Pěchouček

Holons & Agents: Recent Developments and Mutual Impacts

This position paper briefly gathers together the recent trends in the related aras of holonic systems and multi-agent systems with the main goal to present the Holonic Manufacturing Systems area to the MAS community. The vision of a Holonic Factory is very near to being realized, and draws a number of its concepts from the world of multi-agent systems. That is why many similarities can be identified between these two areas, and many opportunities exist for the crossover of research results. The IEC 61499 standard for real-time function-block oriented holonic control was completed recently. It has been recognized by the holonic manufacturing system community that this standard is able to help in solving low-level control tasks only. That is, where the time horizon of decisions made by holons (e.g. concerning stopping the physical movement of robots, or executing safety-critical tasks) is in the range of microseconds to seconds. Yet this standard does not address all the topics needed to construct an intelligent agile factory. The MAS area can significantly help to avoid the current deadlocks in HMS research. In terms of mutual impacts, holonic systems are based on pragmatic manufacturing control requirements, and so they can offer a wealth of attractive opportunities for deploying agent-based ideas into real industrial settings. And vice versa, the application of agents into manufacturing domains, connected with physical production, should motivate a MAS community that has (until now) concentrated on just information agents.

Crossing the agent technology chasm: Lessons, experiences and challenges in commercial applications of agents

Agent software technologies are currently still in an early stage of market development, where, arguably, the majority of users adopting the technology are visionaries who have recognized the long-term potential of agent systems. Some current adopters also see short-term net commercial benefits from the technology, and more potential users will need to perceive such benefits if agent technologies are to become widely used. One way to assist potential adopters to assess the costs and benefits of agent technologies is through the sharing of actual deployment histories of these technologies. Working in collaboration with several companies and organizations in Europe and North America, we have studied deployed applications of agent technologies, and we present these case studies in detail in this paper. We also review the lessons learnt, and the key issues arising from the deployments, to guide decision-making in research, in development and in implementation of agent software technologies.

A -globe: Agent Development Platform with Inaccessibility and Mobility Support

At present several Java-based multi-agent platforms from different developers are available, but none of them fully supports agent mobility and communication inaccessibility simulation. They are thus unsuitable for experiments with large scale real-world simulation. In this chapter we describe architecture of A-globe, fast, scalable and lightweight agent development platform with environmental simulation and mobility support. Beside the functions common to most agent platforms it provides a position-based messaging service, so it can be used for experiments with extensive environment simulation and communication inaccessibility. Simple benchmarks that compare the A-globe performance against other available agent platforms are also included.

Cooperative Information Agents XII

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, CIA 2008, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in September 2008. The book contains 5 invited papers and 19 revised full papers which were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Trust, Applications, Coordination and Communications, and Negotiation.

Commercial applications of agents: lessons, experiences and challenges

As has been argued very eloquently and effectively, there is a chasm that needs to be crossed in the adoption of any new technology [8], and the marketing of such technologies must somehow try to bridge the gap that arises. Many currently see agent technologies in the middle of that chasm period of adoption, where addressing the visionaries as well as the pragmatists (or early adopters) who avoid risks but readily see the advantages of tested technologies [11], is necessary. As part of the needed marketing exercise, we believe that a catalogue of case studies of deployed applications with real quantified business benefit, can help convince those wavering pragmatists. Perhaps more importantly, the lessons that can be drawn from such case studies may also be used to guide the efforts of new commercial agent technology providers, both in developing the technology itself, and in understanding the concerns and constraints of early adopters.

Autonomous agents for air-traffic deconfliction

This contribution presents a deployment exercise of multi-agent technology in the domain of deconflicted air-traffic control among several autonomous aerial vehicles (manned as well as unmanned). Negotiation based deconfliction algorithm have been developed and integrated in the agent-based model of the individual flight. Operation of the underlying multi-agent system has been integrated with freely available, geographical and tactical data sources in order to demonstrate openness of the technology. An additional, web client visualization and access component has been developed in order to facilitate a multi-user, platform independent use of the system. The features and application design is illustrated in the demonstration video clip.

A-Globe: Agent Platform with Inaccessibility and Mobility Support

At present several Java-based multi-agent platforms from different developers are available, but none of them fully supports agent mobility and communication inaccessibility. They are thus no suitable for experiments with real-world simulation. In this paper we describe architecture of newly developed agent platform A-GLOBE. It is fast and lightweight platform with agent mobility support. Beside the functions common to most of agent platforms it provides the Geographical Information System service to user, so it can be used for experiments with environment simulation and communication inaccessibility. A-GLOBE performance benchmarks compared against other agent platforms are also stated in this paper.

FIPA Standards and Holonic Manufacturing

This paper documents the fact that the research in the two areas of holonic manufacturing systems and multi-agent systems contains substantial overlap. Many technologies and results achieved in the multi-agent area can be applied with advantage in the holonic field. This is especially true when talking about standardisation, which should enable interoperability of systems. The FIPA international consortium has introduced a systematic approach to development and maintenance of specifications and standards for the multi-agent domain. The principles of the FIPA Abstract Architecture are briefly described. Two examples of applications of FIPA standards in different areas within the scope of holonic systems (control, and production planning and supply chain management) are presented. FIPA standards have been recognised as a suitable candidate for ensuring complete interoperability in the holonic field.

Using multi-agent simulation to improve the security of maritime transit

Despite their use for modeling traffic in ports and regional waters, multi-agent simulations have not yet been applied to model maritime traffic on a global scale. We therefore propose a fully agent-based, data-driven model of global maritime traffic, focusing primarily on modeling transit through piracy-affected waters. The model employs finite state machines to represent the behavior of several classes of vessels and can accurately replicate global shipping patterns and approximate real-world distribution of pirate attacks. We apply the model to the problem of optimizing the Gulf of Aden group transit. The results demonstrate the usefulness of agent-based modeling for evaluating and improving operational counter-piracy policies and measures.

Runtime Monitoring and Dynamic Reconfiguration for Intrusion Detection Systems

Our work proposes a generic architecture for runtime monitoring and optimization of IDS based on the challenge insertion. The challenges, known instances of malicious or legitimate behavior, are inserted into the network traffic represented by NetFlow records, processed with the current traffic and the systems response to the challenges is used to determine its effectiveness and to fine-tune its parameters. The insertion of challenges is based on the threat models expressed as attack trees with attached risk/loss values. The use of threat model allows the system to measure the expected undetected loss and to improve its performance with respect to the relevant threats, as we have verified in the experiments performed on live network traffic.