Franco Zambonelli – författare

This book provides an overview of the many approaches that can adopted for programming and deploying highly-adaptive and large-scale IoT systems, with a specific focus on the key results achieved within the Fluidware research project. The authors start by presenting Fluidware, which develops a novel programming model for IoT services and applications, along with the associated and robust large-scale IoT services and applications. Starting from previous findings in the areas of field-based coordination, collective adaptive systems, stream computing and aggregate computing, the authors address the complexity of building modern, large-scale IoT systems, by a full-fledged engineering approach revolving around a new notion of distributed programming. The authors show how the key innovative idea of Fluidware is to abstract collectives of devices of the IoT fabric as sources, digesters, and targets of distributed "flows" of contextualized events, carrying information about data produced and actuating commands. The book is divided into three parts: (i) the first part is a general introduction to the Fluidware ideas and to the key problems associated with programming IoT systems, (ii) the second part presents the key results achieved within the Fluidware project; (iii) the third part identified open challenges and research directions.

As information handling systems get more and more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage them using traditional approaches based on centralized and pre-defined control mechanisms. Over recent years, there has been a significant increase in taking inspiration from biology, the physical world, chemistry, and social systems to more efficiently manage such systems - generally based on the concept of self-organisation; this gave rise to self-organising applications.

This book constitutes a reference and starting point for establishing the field of engineering self-organising applications. It comprises revised and extended papers presented at the Engineering Self-Organising Applications Workshop, ESOA 2003, held at AAMAS 2003 in Melbourne, Australia, in July 2003 and selected invited papers from leading researchers in self-organisation. The book is organized in parts on applications, natural metaphors (multi-cells and genetic algorithms, stigmergy, and atoms and evolution), artificial interaction mechanisms, middleware, and methods and tools.

More and more, software systems involve autonomous and distributed software components that have to execute and interact in open and dynamic environments, such as in pervasive, autonomous, and mobile applications. The requirements with respect to dynamics, openness, scalability, and decentralization call for new approaches to software design and development, capable of supporting spontaneous configuration, tolerating partial failures, or arranging adaptive reorganization of the whole system.

Inspired by the behaviour of complex natural systems, scientists and engineers have started to adjust their mechanisms and techniques for self-organization and adaption to changing environments.

In line with these considerations, Mamei and Zambonelli propose an interaction model inspired by the way masses and particles in our universe move and self-organize according to contextual information represented by gravitational and electromagnetic fields. The key idea is to have the components’ actions driven by computational force fields, generated by the components themselves or by some infrastructures, and propagated across the environment. Together with its supporting middleware infrastructure – available with additional information under http://www.agentgroup.unimore.it – this model can serve as the basis for a general purpose and widely applicable approach for the design and development of adaptive distributed applications.

Agent and multiagent concepts offer higher level abstractions and mechanisms which address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coordination, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, perception, commitments, goals, beliefs, and intentions all of which need conceptual modeling. The AOSE 2005 workshop sought to examine the credentials of agent-based approaches as a software engineering paradigm, and to gain an insight into what agent-oriented software engineering will look like, and what its benefits will be.

This book represents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2005, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in July 2005 as part of AAMAS 2005. The 18 revised full papers were carefully selected from 35 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on modeling tools, analysis and validation tools, multiagent systems design, implementation tools, and experiences and comparative evaluations.

Nowadays, engineering large-scale software systems means dealing with complex systems composed of pervasive software components that move around and adapt to nondeterministic and open environments, like the Internet, in order to achieve systems design goals through the coordination of autonomously distributed services. The agent metaphor, in particular software agents and multi-agent systems (MAS), constitutes a promising approach for covering most of the software development life cycle, from conceptual modeling and requirements specification to architectural definition, design, and implementation.

This book presents 17 carefully reviewed papers arranged in order to provide a coherent survey of how to exploit agent properties and MAS issues in today''s software systems. The book offers the following topical sections:

- software engineering foundations

- requirements engineering and software architecture

- coordination and mobility

- reuse

-dependability

-empirical studies and applications

Software architectures that contain many dynamically interacting components, each with their own thread of control, and engaging in complex coordination protocols, are difficult to correctly and efficiently engineer. Agent-oriented modelling techniques are important for supporting the design and development of such applications. This book provides a diverse and interesting overview of the work that is currently being undertaken by a growing number of researchers and research groups in the area of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. The papers present leading edge research in this field, which is of critical importance in facilitating industry take-up of powerful agent technologies.

This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2006, held in Hakodate, Japan, in May 2006 as part of AAMAS 2006. The 13 revised full papers were carefully selected from numerous submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement and have been complemented by invited papers from leading researchers in the field. The papers are organized in topical sections on modelling and design of agent systems, modelling open agent systems, formal reasoning about designs, as well as testing, debugging and evolvability.