Whitestein Series in Software Agent Technologies and Autonomic Computing – serie

Agent Cities [4] is an ambitious project whose main aim is the construction of a worldwide, publicly accessible network of agent-based FIPA platforms!. In March 2003 there are around 50 active platforms. Each of them supports agents that offer services similar to those that can be found in a real city (facilities, amenities, attractions, information and commercial services). It is expected that, in the near future, it will be possible to implement intelligent complex compound services (e.g. agents that are able to help a user to plan a weekend away, including tasks such as booking air tickets, selecting and booking a room in an appropriate hotel, buying tickets for the theatre and reserving a table in a restaurant that is near the theatre and offers the user's favourite meal). The main aim of our work was to develop a set of agents that could offer to the citizens and visitors of a city not the usual leisure-oriented services but health-care related services. This interest is related with previous work that our research group had done in the last years in the application of AI techniques (especially agent-based technology) to the medical domain (see e.g. [6]). Therefore, we decided to design and implement a multi-agent system with the following features: • The user may request information about all the medical centres available in a particular geographical area.

Presenting mobile software agents for Internet service monitoring, this research monograph discusses newly standardized Internet technologies that allow service providers to offer secured Internet services with quality guarantees. Yet, today the customers of such services have no independent tool to verify (monitor) the service quality. This book shows why mobile software agents are best fit to fill the gap.Key features:- An introduction to standard Internet service enabling and managing technology such as IPSec, DiffServ and SNMP- A generic service monitoring architecture based on mobile agents- An object-oriented implementation of the architecture based on the Java programming language- Several implementations of mobile software agents that can monitor new and emerging Internet services such as virtual private networks(VPN)The book is addressed to mobile agent researchers looking for new and fruitful application areas. It will also be a valuable resource for innovative internet providers who are looking for a service monitoring infrastructure going beyond monthly reports.

Communication networks are very complex and interdependent systems requiring complicated management and control operations under strict resource and time constraints. A finite number of network components with limited capacities need to be shared for dynamically allocating a high number of traffic demands. Moreover, coordination of peer provider is required whenever these demands span domains controlled by distinct operators. In this context, traditional human-driven management is becoming increasingly inadequate to cope with the growing heterogeneity of actors, services and technologies populating the current deregulated market.This book proposes a novel approach to improve multi-provider interactions based on the coordination of autonomous and self-motivated software entities acting on behalf of distinct operators. Coordination is achieved by means of distributed constraint satisfaction techniques integrated within economic mechanisms, which enable automated negotiations to take place. This allows software agents to find efficient allocations of service demands spanning several networks without having to reveal strategic or confidential data. In addition, a novel way of addressing resource allocation and pricing in a compact framework is made possible by the use of powerful resource abstraction techniques.The book is addressed to researchers in the area of agent technology, automated negotiation, distributed constraint satisfaction, and networking, in particular for what concerns resource allocation and pricing. Furthermore, it should be a valuable resource for both network and service providers

"It is not the consciousness of men that defines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness." Karl Marx In recent years, several researchers have argued that the design of multi-agent sys­ tems (MAS) in complex, open environments can benefit from social abstractions in order to cope with problems in coordination, cooperation and trust among agents, problems which are also present in human societies. The agent-mediated electronic institutions (e-institutions for short) is a new and promising field which focuses in the concepts of norms and institutions in order to pro­ vide normative frameworks to restrict or guide the behaviour of (software) agents. The main idea is that the interactions among a group of (software) agents are ruled by a set of explicit norms expressed in a computational language representation that agents can interpret. Such norms should not be considered as a negative constraining factor but as an aid that guides the agents' choices and reduces the complexity ofthe environment making the behaviour of other agents more predictable.

1. 1 Background In this work, we develop a framework for the design of multi-agent systems inspired by (human) organizational principles. Organizations are complex entities formed to ov- come various limitations of individual agencies, such as cognitive, physical, temporal and institutional limitations. There is a parallel between the complexity of organizations and multi-agent systems. Therefore, we explore the use of concepts, methods and techniques from human organizational design as architectural principles for multi-agent systems. Three research lines are presented: organizational modeling and coordination, interop- ability and agent models. Organizational modeling and coordination are concerned with how resources (i. e. agents) can be identi?ed and related to each other. In order to have agents cooperate, several issues of interoperability have to be addressed. Agent models deal with the design of individual intelligent software agents, taking into account typical features of agent intelligence. Every (human) activity raises two challenges: division of labor and coordi- tion [Mintzberg, 1993]. Division of labor is the decomposition of work (or goals) into various distinct tasks. Coordination refers to managing relations between these tasks to carry out the work. The patterns of division of labor, responsibilities (people who do the work), clustering of responsibilities into units and coordination between units can be de?ned by organizational structures [Galbraith, 1973]. The design of an organization should cover how one or more actors are engaged in one or more tasks, where knowledge, capabilities and resources are distributed.

Constraint satisfaction problems are significant in the domain of automated reasoning for artificial intelligence. They can be applied to the modeling and solving of a wide range of combinatorial applications such as planning, scheduling and resource sharing in a variety of practical domains such as transportation, production, supply-chains, network management and human resource management. In this book we study new techniques for solving constraint satisfaction problems, with a special focus on solution adaptation applied to agent reasoning.

There is a growing interest in the use of ontologies for multi-agent system app- cations. On the one hand, the agent paradigm is successfully employed in those applications where autonomous, loosely-coupled, heterogeneous, and distributed systems need to interoperate in order to achieve a common goal. On the other hand, ontologies have established themselves as a powerful tool to enable kno- edge sharing, and a growing number of applications have bene?ted from the use of ontologies as a means to achieve semantic interoperability among heterogeneous, distributed systems. In principle ontologies and agents are a match made in heaven, that has failed to happen. What makes a simple piece of software an agent is its ability to communicate in a ”social” environment, to make autonomous decisions, and to be proactive on behalf of its user. Communication ultimately depends on und- standing the goals, preferences, and constraints posed by the user. Autonomy is theabilitytoperformataskwithlittleornouserintervention,whileproactiveness involves acting autonomously with no need for user prompting. Communication, but also autonomy and proactiveness, depend on knowledge. The ability to c- municate depends on understanding the syntax (terms and structure) and the semantics of a language. Ontologies provide the terms used to describe a domain and the semantics associated with them. In addition, ontologies are often comp- mented by some logical rules that constrain the meaning assigned to the terms. These constraints are represented by inference rules that can be used by agents to perform the reasoning on which autonomy and proactiveness are based.

Building effective and user-friendly transportation systems is one of the big challenges for engineers in the 21st century. There is an increasing need to understand, model, and govern such systems at both the individual (micro) and the society (macro) level. Still, this raises significant technical problems, as transportation systems may contain thousands of autonomous, "intelligent" entities that need to be simulated and/or controlled. Therefore, traffic and transportation scenarios are extraordinarily appealing for Distributed Artificial Intelligence, and (multi-) agent technology in particular. This book gives an overview of recent advances in agent-based transportation systems. It includes both a state-of-the-art survey and reports on cutting-edge research in the field.

This book introduces major agent platforms, frameworks, systems, tools, and applications. Each system is described by their developers in sufficient detail so that the reader can get a good understanding of the architecture, functionality, and application areas of the system. All systems are running systems. One main focus of the book lies on agent platforms and toolkits.

"Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM)" is one of the major topics in application-oriented Supply Chain Management. However, many solutions lack conceptual precision and currently available client-server SCEM-systems are ill-suited for complex supply networks in today's business environment. Agent-based proactive information logistics promises to overcome existing deficits by providing event-related information to all participants in the distributed environment. Hence, follow-up costs of disruptive events are significantly reduced for all network participants and performance of a supply network is increased. In this book a thorough analysis of the event management problem domain is the starting point to develop a generic agent-based approach to Supply Network Event Management. The main focus lies on practical issues of event management (e.g., semantic interoperability) and economic benefits to be achieved with agent technology in this state-of-the-art problem domain.

In the last years electronic markets, especially online auctions, have become very popular and received more and more attention in both, business (B2B) as well as in public practice (B2C and C2C). Science, however, is still far from having studied all phenomena and effects which can be observed on electronic markets. Apart from theoretic analysis, other approaches are necessary to evaluate and understand market effects. This book shows that and how software agents can be used to simulate bidding behaviour in electronic auctions.The main emphasis of this book is to apply computational economics to market theory. It summarizes the most common and up-to-date agent-based simulation methods and tools and develops the simulation software AMASE. On basis of the introduced methods a model is established to simulate bidding behaviour under uncertainty.The book addresses researchers, computer scientists, economists and students who are interested in applying agent-based computational methods to electronic markets. It helps to learn more about simulations in economics in general and common agent-based methods and tools in particular. The reader finds basic definitions and learns how to build an appropriate model for the posed research question. It is the first time that quantitative results are presented for the problem of valuation uncertainty. These results significantly contribute to existing research in computational economics and supplements interesting research aspects.

Multi-agent systems are already a focus of studies for more than 25 years. Despite substantial effort of an active research community, modeling of multi-agent systems still lacks complete and proper definition, general acceptance, and practical application. Due to the vast potential of these systems e.g., to improve the practice in software and to extent the applications that can feasibly be tackled, this book tries to provide a comprehensive modeling language - the Agent Modeling Language (AML) - as an extension of UML 2.0, concentrating on multi-agent systems and applications.

The Workshop on Emerging Web Services Technology (WEWST06) took place in conjunction with the 4th European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS’06) on 4th December 2006, in Zurich, Switzerland. Acting as the natural extension to the main ECOWS conference, the main goal of the WEWST workshop is serving as a forum for providing early exposure andmuchneededfeedbacktogrowandestablishoriginalandemergingideaswithin the Web Services community. The wide variety of tools, novel techniques and emergingtechnologicalsolutionspresentedinWEWSTshareone commonfeature: they advance the current Web services research in new directions by introducing new and sometimes controversial ideas into the ?eld. WEWST focuses on research contributions advancing the state of the art in Web services technologies in the following areas: Model Driven Engineering for SOA, Mobility and Services, Streaming Services and Event Driven Architectures, Dynamic Web Service Discovery and Composition, Lightweight Orchestration- gines, SLA Creation and Service Delivery, Semantic Web, Managing Change and Service Evolution, Business Driven Development, Service-Oriented Grid Comp- ing Middleware, Business Process Management for Web Services, Software and Service Engineering. WEWST covers the whole spectrum which makes it a very important part of ECOWS.

The agent paradigm has been a subject of research for the last years, and the purpose of this book is to present current status of this technology by looking at its application in different domains, such as electronic markets, e-tourism, ambience intelligence, and complex system analysis.It starts by discussing software engineering issues for the development of multi-agent systems, how much it costs to build a multi-agent system, and which methods and tools are currently available. Next chapters present some of the most relevant aspects that are considered for the development of multi-agent systems: ubiquitous computing, learning and planning, trust and security, electronic institutions and swarm intelligence. Last chapters focus on concrete applications of physical agents and e-tourism applications, to illustrate how to integrate the previously discussed aspects. The book is written by researchers with experience in technology transfer, and therefore it is oriented to practice.

Multi-agent systems are one of the most exciting research areas in Artificial Intelligence. In the last ten years there has been a growing interest in the application of agent-based systems in health care. Moreover, a growing European community of researchers interested in the application of intelligent agents in health care emerged as a result of the activities within the AgentCities.NET European network and the AgentLink III Technical Forum Group on Healthcare Applications of Intelligent Agents. This book reports on the results achieved in this area, discusses the benefits (and drawbacks) that agent-based systems may bring to medical domains and society, and also provides a list of the research topics that should be tackled in the near future to make the deployment of health-care agent-based systems a reality.

This book presents a comprehensive reference of state-of-the-art e?orts and early results in the area of autonomic networking and communication. The essence of autonomic networking, and thus autonomic communication, is to enable the - tonomic component, device or system to govern the set of services and resources delivered at any given time while protecting context-sensitive business goals. An additionalchallengeistoprovideself-governanceinthefaceofchanginguserneeds, environmental conditions, and business objectives. In other words, an autonomic network understands relevant contextual data and changes to those data, and adapts the services and resources it provides in accordance with business-driven policies that protect user and business interests. Autonomic computing is often described as self-CHOP (self-con?guration, -healing, -optimisation, and -protection). Autonomic networking instead focuses on self-knowledge,which is the foundation to build self-governance.Note that self- CHOP functionality is still provided, but the emphasis of autonomic networking is on the foundation to realise self-CHOP, not in the di?erent self-* technologies and bene?ts.

Defense and security related applications are increasingly being tackled by researchers and practioners using technologies developed in the field of Intelligent Agent research. This book is a collection of recent refereed papers drawn from workshops and other colloquia held in various venues around the world in the last two years. The contributions in this book describe work in the development of command and control systems, military communications systems, information systems, surveillance systems, autonomous vehicles, simulators and Human Computer Interactions. The broad nature of the application domain is matched by the diversity of techniques used in the papers that are included in the collection which provides, for the first time, an overview of the most significant work being performed by the leading workers in this area. It provides a single reference point for the state of the art in the field at the moment and will be of interest to Computer Science professionals working in the defense sector, and academics and students investigating the technology of Intelligent Agents that are curious to see how the technology is applied in practice.

A general architecture for service delivery and coordination in intelligent agent-based peer-to-peer (IP2P) environments, that has been developed within the CASCOM research project, is presented in this book. The CASCOM architecture provides support for business services for mobile workers and users across mobile and fixed networks. To its users, the CASCOM architecture makes easy and seamless access available to Semantic Web Services anytime, anywhere, and using any device. The system has successfully been validated in trials in healthcare applications, in particular in emergency medical assistance.The CASCOM architecture addresses the problem of seamlessly combining various novel technologies that establish the basis for self-adaptable and self-healing systems including semantic service discovery, matchmaking, composition planning and semantic service composition, reliable execution of composite services, and semantic failure handling. The book provides an in-depth introduction into these areas, presents how they have been extended in order to best support the needs for agent-based service coordination in IP2P environment, and finally shows how the different agents can be seamlessly combined.

Online auctions are a platform to trade goods on the Internet. In this context, negotiation capabilities for software agents in continuous double auctions (CDAs) are a central concern. Agents need to be able to prepare bids for and evaluate offers on behalf of the users they represent with the aim of obtaining the maximum benefit for their users.For the agents, their bids are decided according to some bidding strategy. However, in CDAs, it is a complex decision problem because of the inherent uncertainty and dynamics of the auction market. In this book, we present a new bidding strategy for agents to adopt in CDAs and propose tools to enhance the performance of existing bidding strategies in CDAs. The superior performance of the new bidding strategy as well as the tools presented in this book are illustrated through extensive experiments.

nd The 2 WorkshoponEmergingWeb ServicesTechnology(WEWST'07) wasco- th catedwiththe5 EuropeanConferenceonWebServices(ECOWS'07)whichtook place in November 2007 in Halle (Saale),Germany. WEWST focuses on research contributions advancing the state of the art in Web Services technologies. The main goal of the WEWST workshop is to serve as a forum for providing early exposure and much needed feedback to grow and establish original and emerging ideas within the Web Services community. The wide variety of tools,techniques and technologicalsolutions presentedin WEWST shareone common feature:they advance the currentWeb Servicesresearchin new directions by introducing new, sometimes controversial, ideas into the ?eld. As such, WEWST is the natural extension to the main ECOWS conference. Asitcanbeseenfromtheworkshopprogram,thespectrumofresearchtopics related to such emergent technologies includes: the challenge of adopting RESTful Web Services and Resource Oriented Architectures; Dynamic Web Service D- covery, Selection and Composition; extensions to the standard Business Process Execution Language; the management of composite Web Services; the delivery of well de?ned Quality of Service guarantees; the performance evaluation of Web Services.These are all still among the hot topics in Web Services research since no satisfactory solution has been found yet.