Vicent J. Botti

An engineering framework for Service-Oriented Intelligent Manufacturing Systems

HighlightsA complete software development method is presented for Service Oriented Intelligent Manufacturing Systems.The software development method provides a CASE tool that automatically generates executable code for the system execution.A specific and complete set of service guidelines for the development of Service Oriented Intelligent Manufacturing Systems is provided.The completeness of the approach is evaluated under two views: an empirical by means of case studies; and a qualitative analysis. Nowadays fully integrated enterprises are being replaced by business networks in which each participant provides others with specialized services. As a result, the Service Oriented Manufacturing Systems emerges. These systems are complex and hard to engineer. The main source of complexity is the number of different technologies, standards, functions, protocols, and execution environments that must be integrated in order to realize them. This paper proposes a framework and associated engineering approach for assisting the system developers of Service Oriented Manufacturing Systems. The approach combines multi-agent system with Service Oriented Architectures for the development of intelligent automation control and execution of manufacturing systems.

A distributed architecture for enforcing norms in open MAS

Norms have been promoted as a coordination mechanism for controlling agent behaviours in open MAS. Thus, agent platforms must provide normative support, allowing both norm-aware and non norm-aware agents to take part in MAS controlled by norms. In this paper, the most relevant proposals on the definition of norm enforcement mechanisms have been analysed. These proposals present several drawbacks that make them unsuitable for open MAS. In response to these problems, this paper describes a new Norm-Enforcing Architecture aimed at controlling open MAS.

A formal model based on Game Theory for the analysis of cooperation in distributed service discovery

New systems can be designed, developed, and managed as societies of agents that interact with each other by offering and providing services. These systems can be viewed as complex networks where nodes are bounded rational agents. In order to deal with complex goals, they require cooperation of the other agents to be able to locate the required services. The aim of this paper is formally and empirically analyze under which circumstances cooperation emerges in decentralized search of services. We propose a repeated game model that formalizes the interactions among agents in a search process where agents are free to choose between cooperate or not in the process. Agents make decisions based on the cost of their actions and the expected reward if they participate forwarding queries in a search process that ends successfully. We propose a strategy that is based on random-walks, and we study under what conditions the strategy is a Nash equilibrium. We performed several experiments in order to evaluate the model and the strategy and to analyze which network structures are more appropriate to promote cooperation.

Adding new communication services to the FIPA message transport system

Agent communication is one of the most important aspects in the multi-agent system area. In recent years, several works have been developed that are related to the agent communication problem. This paper presents a new method for agent and agent platform communication in accordance with FIPA proposals. It uses the Jabber protocol as a new message transport protocol (MTP). This protocol provides additional services that are not included in the current standard FIPA MTP. It provides facilities for “presence notification”, “multi-user conference” and “security services“. As a result of this work, a new plug-in for the JADE platform that incorporates this transport protocol has been developed.

Analyzing users' activity in online social networks over time through a multi-agent framework

The number of people and organizations using online social networks as a new way of communication is continually increasing. Messages that users write in networks and their interactions with other users leave a digital trace that is recorded. In order to understand what is going on in these virtual environments, it is necessary systems that collect, process, and analyze the information generated. The majority of existing tools analyze information related to an online event once it has finished or in a specific point of time (i.e., without considering an in-depth analysis of the evolution of users’ activity during the event). They focus on an analysis based on statistics about the quantity of information generated in an event. In this article, we present a multi-agent system that automates the process of gathering data from users’ activity in social networks and performs an in-depth analysis of the evolution of social behavior at different levels of granularity in online events based on network theory metrics. We evaluated its functionality analyzing users’ activity in events on Twitter.

The MMOG Layer: MMOG Based on MAS

Massively Multiplayer Online Games present a new and exciting domain for service-oriented agent computing as the mechanics of these virtual worlds get more and more complex. Due to the eminently distributed nature of these game systems and their growing necessity of modern AI techniques, it is time to introduce design methods that take advantage of the power of Multi-Agent Systems, Agent Organizations and Electronic Institutions in order to face the challenges of designing a modern Massively Multiplayer Online Game. This article follows previous pieces of work in the line of Multi-Agent Systems and Massively Multiplayer Online Games research into a common ontology to represent the information that agents store and share and towards the use of the THOMAS service architecture and the SPADE agent platform to address these challenges. The main focus of the article is the so called MMOG Layer: a software layer which is independent of the environment simulation and the human-interface devices. An example implementation of such layer is also set out.

An Open Architecture for Affective Traits in a BDI Agent

Recently an increasing amount of research focuses on improving agents believability by adding affective features to the traditional agent-based modeling. This is probably due to the demand of reaching ever more realistic behaviors on agent-based simulations which extends to several and diverse application fields. The present work proposes O3A: an Open Affective Agent Architecture, which extends a traditional BDI agent architecture improving a practical reasoning with more “human” characteristics. This architecture tries to address disperse definitions combining the main elements of supporting psychological and neurological theories.

Designing normative open virtual enterprises

There is an increasing interest on developing virtual enterprises in order to deal with the globalisation of the economy, the rapid growth of information technologies and the increase of competitiveness. In this paper we deal with the development of normative open virtual enterprises (NOVEs). They are systems with a global objective that are composed of a set of heterogeneous entities and enterprises that exchange services following a specific normative context. In order to analyse and design systems of this kind the multi-agent paradigm seems suitable because it offers a specific solution for supporting the social and contractual relationships between enterprises and for formalising their business processes. This paper presents how the Regulated Open Multi-agent systems (ROMAS) methodology, an agent-oriented software methodology, can be used to analyse and design NOVEs. ROMAS offers a complete development process that allows identifying and formalising of the structure of NOVEs, their normative context and the interactions among their members. The use of ROMAS is exemplified by means of a case study that represents an automotive supply chain.

Multi-Agent systems over RT-Java for a mobile robot control

There are a great number of programming languages and frameworks for multi-agent system development, but most of them do not allows us create and later manage real-time multi-agent systems. In this paper, we propose the use of the RT-Java language for real-time multi-agent development. We also present the jART platform as an appropriate framework for the execution of agents of this kind. A mobile robot control is implemented and analyzed using this framework.

Using Geo-Tagged Sentiment to Better Understand Social Interactions

Social media have played a relevant role in facilitating communication and coordination among people. Digital traces generated by users in social media sites provides a promising source of data for use in different contexts. The avast amount of data contains information not only about the content of the message but also about who generated the information and to whom it was directed, the instant of time it was published, or the location of the user at the time of publication. Thanks to all this meta-information, the study of users’ actions can be analyzed at different levels of detail and taking into account different perspectives.