Sébastien Leriche

INCOME : multi-scale context management for the internet of things

Nowadays, context management solutions in ambient networks are well-known. However, with the IoT paradigm, ambient information is not anymore the only source of context. Context management solutions able to address multiple network scales ranging from ambient networks to the Internet of Things (IoT) are required. We present the INCOME project whose goal is to provide generic software and middleware components to ease the design and development of mass market context-aware applications built above the Internet of Things. By revisiting ambient intelligence (AmI) context management solutions for extending them to the IoT, INCOME allows to bridge the gap between these two very active research domains. In this landscape paper, we identify how INCOME plans to advance the state of the art and we briefly describe its scientific program which consists of three main tasks: (i) multi-scale context management, (ii) management of extrafunctional concerns (quality of context and privacy), and (iii) autonomous deployment of context management entities.

OSIF: a framework to instrument, validate, and analyze simulations

In most existing simulators, the outputs of a simulation run consist either in a simulation report generated at the end of the run and summarizing the statistics of interest, or in a (set of) trace file(s) containing raw data samples produced and saved regularly during the run, for later post-processing. In this paper, we address issues related to the management of these data and their on-line processing, such as: (i) the instrumentation code is mixed in the modeling code; (ii) the amount of data to be stored may be enormous, and often, a significant part of these data are useless while their collect may consume a significant amount of the computing resources; and (iii) it is difficult to have confidence in the treatment applied to the data and then make comparisons between studies since each user (model developer) builds its own ad-hoc instrumentation and data processing. In this paper, we propose OSIF, a new component-based instrumentation framework designed to solve the above mentioned issues. OSIF is based on several mature software engineering techniques and frameworks, such as COSMOS, Fractal and its ADL, and AOP.

Development of flexible peer-to-peer information systems using adaptable mobile agents

Wide-area networks provide an easy access to many different distributed and heterogeneous data sources. The development of automated operating tools is still complex, particularly because of evolution and adaptation requirements (to the data sources structures and to the network quality of service). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the advantages of adaptable mobile agents in order to simplify the development and the deployment. As an experiment, we develop a prototype of peer-to-peer information system, and we show how agent mobility and adaptation abilities help in implementing various forms of adaptation: adaptation to the execution context, access to new servers with initially unknown communication protocols, dynamic modification of search algorithms based on results provided by the servers. Then, we show how these techniques can be easily extended to other problems such as search and upgrade of software components.

Adaptive Autonomous Agent Models for Open Distributed Systems

Currently, there is a lack of tools to build autonomous software systems in a pervasive and distributed context. In this paper, we present a model and a development tool called Agentphi for building flexible agent architectures from fine-grained components. Reusable components implement non-functional mechanisms such as communication, mobility or adaptation skills. Each agent can dynamically and autonomously change its components to suit its runtime context, improving safety and performances of applications, particularly in open, pervasive or large-scale distributed applications. We also show how to use our agents to build applications from autonomous and adaptable systems.

Flexible Architectures and Agents for Adaptive Autonomic Systems

In order to simplify the development of autonomic and autonomous systems, we propose a model of adaptive agent built from fine-grained reusable components which implement non-functional mechanisms such as communication, mobility or adaptation skills. Each agent can dynamically and autonomously change its components to fit its runtime context, improving safety and performance in particular for open, pervasive or large-scale distributed applications. We describe a tool called Agent phi for adaptive agent modeling and we present the design of an embedded agent

Un framework à composants et agents pour les applications réparties à grande échelle

Design of large-scale distributed applications must take into account the frequent evolutions of the network structure as well as the volatility of resources and services (localization, disponibility...). In order to meet these requirements satisfactorily, we propose to exploit the complementarity of agent, software component and peer-to-peer technologies. Our approach relies on a peer-to-peer organization structured as a component assembly in which autonomous, mobile and adaptable agents perform deployment, dynamic adaptation and localization of the components. In this paper, we expose the principles of our proposal, we describe its implementation as a JAVA framework and we show how to use it.

Validation of COSMOS DSL programs

COSMOS DSL is a language dedicated to the domain of composition of context information. It allows, through its high-level constructions, to treat very large amounts of context data coming from distributed sources, whatsoever in ubiquitous systems or large-scale distributed systems. In this paper, we focus on the safety of programs developed in COSMOS DSL. We discuss the needs of reliability and validation of specific properties such as the lack of deadlocks and vivacity of context information. Then we propose an automatable modeling of COSMOS DSL using the Petri nets formalism to allow verification of behavioral properties in a software tool.