Tobias Küster

Towards a mapping from BPMN to agents

In industry, people who design business processes are often different from those designing the technical realization. Also, they generally use different languages, such as BPMN on the one hand and UML on the other. While agents are theoretically suitable for designing and implementing business ideas, multi-agent methodologies are generally not geared towards them. In this paper, we describe the first step of mapping business process diagrams to agent concepts. To this end, we present a graph based representation of BPMN together with structural and semantical analysis methods. These provide the necessary formal grounding for the mapping we have in mind.

A Multi-agent Approach to Professional Software Engineering

The community of agent researchers and engineers has produced a number of interesting and mature results. However, agent technology is still not widely adopted by industrial software developers or software companies--possibly because existing frameworks are infused with academic premises that rarely apply to industrial settings. In this paper, we analyse the requirements of current industry-driven software projects and show how we are able to cope with these requirements in the Java Intelligent Agent Componentware agent framework, JIACi¾źV. We argue that the lack of industry-grade requirements and features in other agent frameworks is one of the reasons for the slow acceptance of agent technology in the software industry. The JIACi¾źV framework tries to bridge that gap--not as a final solution, but as a stepping stone towards industrial acceptance.

Agent-based integration of an electric car sharing fleet into a smart distribution feeder

The paper presents an agent-based scheduling and energy management system for a smart distribution feeder which is installed on a test site and includes an electric car sharing fleet. Distributed Energy storage systems provide flexibility in the operation of the test site, where the integration of multiple power sources including Renewable Energy Sources and Distributed Generators is implemented. A software agent control architecture is introduced, which is divided into distinct subsystems in order to consider market roles of the Micro Smart Grid Operator, Car Sharing Operator and Distribution System Operator. Within this architecture, an optimization mechanism with the objective to maximize the utilization of Renewable Energy Sources for charging the electric vehicles is implemented and the functionality of the agent-based system is tested in response to a basic electric vehicle booking and charging scenario.

Towards Transformations from BPMN to Heterogeneous Systems

By now, the mapping from BPMN to BPEL has been implemented in numerous tools, greatly assisting the business architect in the creation of BPEL processes. However, most of these tools are tailored especially for this transformation, neglecting the original purpose of BPMN: Providing a language independent process model. To address this shortcoming, a pure BPMN editor is needed, being dynamically extensible with several export features and added editing functionality. In this paper, we present a tool that follows this approach, not only providing a compelling transformation to BPEL but at the same time being extensible to other languages.

Towards a Holistic Approach for Problems in the Energy and Mobility Domain

Abstract With the current rise of electric vehicles, it is possible to use those vehicles for storing surplus energy from renewable energy sources; however, this can be in conflict with providing and ensuring the mobility of the vehicles user. At DAI-Labor, we have a large number of both, past and upcoming projects concerned with those two aspects of managing electric vehicles: energy and mobility. To unify and facilitate developments in those projects, we developed common domain models describing the different aspects of the e-mobility domain. Those domain models are used in many of our projects for optimising charging schedules and for ensuring the users mobility.

Towards Process-Oriented Modelling and Creation of Multi-Agent Systems

Different ways of integrating business processes and agents have been proposed, but using restricted process models or targeting only single agents, none of them is truly convincing. Nevertheless, business processes have many notions in common with agents and would be well suited for modelling complex multi-agent systems. In this paper, we combine concepts of two existing approaches to a mapping from business process diagrams to readily executable agent components. The results are well-structured and extensible, and at the same time account for nearly the entire expressiveness of the process modelling notation.

Unifying JIAC agent development with AWE

In this paper we describe the Agent World Editor, a tool for designing multi-agent systems and generating executable agent code. The tool also unifies the handling of different agent frameworks through an abstract agent model and an extensible transformation infrastructure. Currently, the tool supports three different agent frameworks of the JIAC family, and we feel confident that the approach holds for other frameworks as well as for the generation of multi-agent systems on heterogenous platforms.

Herding cows with JIAC V

In this article we report on the JIAC V team for the agent programming competition 2009, going through the different phases of development and describing the JIAC V agent framework. Based on an iterative approach, we identified and implemented different agent roles. While there is no explicit team concept, the agents cooperate by informing each other of their perceptions and intentions, which leads to emergent team behavior which very dynamically and flexibly reacts to the state of the game.

A common approach to intelligent energy and mobility services in a smart city environment

Due to the fact that electric vehicles have not broadly entered the vehicle market there are many attempts to convince producers to integrate technologies that utilise embedded batteries for purposes different from driving. The vehicle-to-grid technology, for instance, literally turns electric vehicles into a mobile battery, enabling new areas of applications (e.g., to provide regulatory energy, to do grid-load balancing, or to buffer surpluses of energy) and business perspectives. Utilising a vehicle’s battery, however is not without a price—in this case: the driver’s mobility. Given this dependency, it is interesting that most available works consider the application of electric vehicles for energy and grid-related problems in isolation, that is, detached from mobility-related issues. The distributed artificial intelligence laboratory, or DAI-Lab, is a third-party funded research lab at Technische Universität Berlin and integrates the chair for agent technologies in business applications and telecommunication. The DAI-Lab has engaged in a large number of both, past and upcoming projects concerned with two aspects of managing electric vehicles, namely: energy and mobility. This article aims to summarise experiences that were collected during the last years and to present developed solutions which consider energy and mobility-related problems jointly.

Herding Agents - JIAC TNG in Multi-Agent Programming Contest 2008

Another essential problem of mankind must be solved in this years agent contest: cow capturing. We present the JIAC approach to this problem by applying the iterative and incremental JIAC methodology and JIAC tools. The solution will be designed and implemented using the next generation of the JIAC agent framework that provides easier way of agent construction, but that is in early beta state. We admire this contest as an evaluation platform for our developments (like our last years MicroJIAC team).