Milan Vidaković

Android4TV: A proposition for integration of DTV in Android devices

This paper presents a proposition for integration of DTV in Android devices. The proposed system offers complete DTV functionality, while enabling users to use the TV device as a regular Android device. The proposition also includes a specification of a Java API that should be used to access DTV content from Android applications.

Radigost: Interoperable web-based multi-agent platform

Recent improvements of web development technologies, commonly referred to as HTML5, have resulted in an excellent framework for developing a fully-featured, purely web-based multi-agent platform. This paper presents an architecture of such a platform, named Radigost. Radigost agents and parts of the system itself are implemented in JavaScript and executed inside the clients web browser, while an additional set of Java-based components is deployed on an enterprise application server. Radigost is platform-independent, capable of running, without any prior installation or configuration steps, on a wide variety of software and hardware configurations, including personal computers, smartphones, tablets, and modern television sets. The system is standards-compliant and fully interoperable, in the sense that its agents can transparently interact with agents in existing, third-party multi-agent solutions. Finally, performance evaluation results show that the execution speed of Radigost is comparable to that of a non web-based implementation.

Extensible Java EE-Based Agent Framework – Past, Present, Future

EXtensible Java EE − based Agent Framework (XJAF) is a modular, FIPA-compliant multi-agent system developed by the authors of this chapter. The main motivation behind the development of XJAF was to demonstrate how existing, standardized Java EE technologies, tools, and libraries, such as JNDI, JMS, and EJB, can be used to implement a large subset of functionalities required from a multi-agent system. Immediate direct benefits of this approach are shorter development time of the system itself, delegation of agent load-balancing to the enterprise server, flatter learning curve for new developers of the system, etc. The first implementation of XJAF has been published several years ago and has since been used in several real-life applications. In the meantime, some disadvantages and weaknesses of the system were noticed, and the work is underway to provide a new implementation with an improved quality. The most recent focus of improvements has been on the addition of fault-tolerant techniques, and the increase of interoperability through a SOA-based design and web service interfaces.

Improving fault-tolerance of distributed multi-agent systems with mobile network-management agents

Large-scale agent-based software solutions need to be able to assure constant delivery of services to end-users, regardless of the underlying software or hardware failures. Fault-tolerance of multi-agent systems is, therefore, an important issue. We present an easy and flexible way of introducing fault-tolerance to existing agent frameworks. The approach is based on two new types of mobile agents that manage efficient construction and maintenance of fault-tolerant multi-agent system networks, and implement a robust agent tracking technique.

A java API interface for the integration of DTV services in embedded multimedia devices

Most of the modern DTV sets and set top boxes are embedded Linux devices. Apart from playing broadcast transport streams, some of these devices offer network connectivity and various applications. The development of software for these devices is not unified, so there is no compatibility between applications developed by different vendors. On the other hand, there are embedded systems developed on top of the embedded Linux kernel which offer network connectivity and a large number of applications that are available for download. Most of the applications developed for these platforms are developed in the Java programming language. However, those platforms do not support DTV services. This paper presents a proposal for the integration of DTV services into embedded systems which support the Java programming language. The proposed solution offers complete DTV functionality, along with the operation of regular applications. The proposal includes two API specifications: the Java API that is used to access DTV content from Java applications, and the DTV Middleware API that is used to connect the native code to the Java API.

Introducing ALAS: A Novel Agent‐Oriented Programming Language

Agent‐oriented programming languages represent a family of programming languages that provide developers with high‐level abstractions and constructs necessary for implementing and using agent‐related concepts. In this paper a novel agent‐oriented programming language for rapid and efficient development of reactive agents, named ALAS, is presented. The simple, but powerful set of language constructs is designed to support the execution of agents in heterogenous environments, and to enable easy employment of advanced agent features, such as mobility and web service integration.

SLA-Driven Adaptive Monitoring of Distributed Applications for Performance Problem Localization

Continuous monitoring of software systems under production workload provides valuable data about application runtime behavior and usage. An adaptive monitoring infrastructure allows controlling, for instance, the overhead as well as the granularity and quality of collected data at runtime. Focusing on application-level monitoring, this paper presents the DProf approach which allows changing the instrumentation of software operations in monitored distributed applications at runtime. It simulates the process human testers employ-monitoring only such parts of an application that cause problems. DProf uses performance objectives specified in service level agreements (SLAs), along with call tree information, to detect and localize problems in application performance. As a proof-of-concept, DProf was used for adaptive monitoring of a sample distributed application.

Hybrid broadcast broadband TV implementation in java based applications on digital TV devices

HbbTV (Hybrid broadcast broadband television) is an open standard for network-enabled TV sets. It is a European initiative for providing both broadcast and broadband content delivery on TV sets and set-top boxes. HbbTV standard adds a new aspect to the experience of watching TV by providing interactivity to plain TV broadcast. The content to be delivered is the HbbTV application. HbbTV application presents a combination of web content and live digital TV broadcast. In this paper we present one solution for integration of HbbTV standard into Java applications which are being developed for DTV devices. We present modifications to the underlying operating system, JavaScript plug-ins, and DTV-related modules which are necessary to be implemented in order to have the HbbTV features enabled. We also present performance measurement comparing our solution to an embedded Linux one and one commercial solution.

Agent-based approaches to managing fault-tolerant networks of distributed multi-agent systems

Large-scale agent-based software solutions need to be able to assure constant delivery of services to end-users, regardless of the underlying software or hardware failures. Fault-tolerance of multi-agent systems is, therefore, an important issue. We present two algorithms for an easy and flexible introduction of fault-tolerance to existing agent frameworks. The first algorithm is based on a new type of mobile agent, named Connection Agent, for efficient construction and maintenance of fault-tolerant multi-agent system networks. The algorithm has been experimentally verified, and then significantly optimized by relying on the mobility feature of Connection Agents. Secondly, a robust agent tracking technique based on a special type of agent, named RemnantAgent, is proposed.

A Scalable Distributed Architecture for Web-Based Software Agents

In recent years, the web has become an important software platform, with more and more applications becoming purely web-based. The agent technology needs to embrace these trends in order to remain relevant in the new era. In this paper, we present recent developments of our web-based multiagent middleware named Siebog. Siebog employs enterprise technologies on the server side in order to provide automatic agent load-balancing and fault-tolerance. On the client, it relies on HTML5 and related standards in order to run on a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. Now, with automatic clustering and state persistence, Siebog can support thousands of external devices hosting tens of thousands of client-side agents.