Autonomous Service Research Articles

AFAWS: An Agent based Framework for Autonomic Web Services

Autonomic computing is about systems that can manage themselves. Self-management includes self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimization, etc. self-* properties. Agent technology offers key advantages for the development of autonomic computing systems as it supports autonomy, adaptability, etc. Current Web service standards and technologies do not provide a suitable architecture in which all aspects of self-management can be designed. Moreover, traditional registries are passive entities and are not able to participate, in an autonomic manner, to the Web service adaptation process. In this paper, we present an Agent-based Framework for Autonomic Web Services AFAWS. This framework is based on two agent-based systems which collaborate to enrich Web services and registries with self-* capabilities.

On Capability-Related Adaptation in Networked Service Systems

Networked services are considered. A networked service is offered by a service system consisting of components, which by their interworkings provide a service in the role of a service provider to users. An adaptable service system is a service system that is able to adapt to changes brought about by users, nodes, capabilities, system performance, and service functionalities. A capability is defined as an inherent property of a node, which is used as a basis to implement a service. This thesis focuses on adaptability aspects related to nodes and capabilities.A service framework is a system for the specification, management, and execution of adaptable service systems. Functionalities of the service framework enable various adaptability types, as follows: capability-related adaptation, functionality-related adaptation, and context-related adaptation. The capability-related adaptation is considered in this thesis. Capability-related adaptation is related to the shortage of capabilities with appropriate logical functionality or the overload or failure of capabilities leading to reduced system performance.This thesis presents a service framework for capability-related adaptation. This service framework consists of a computing architecture, concepts, ontologies, service component models, mechanisms, system architectures, and service execution platforms. The service framework presented is related to TAPAS (Telematics Architecture for Play-based Adaptable Service Systems). The TAPAS concepts and architectures that existed at the beginning of this Ph.D. study are the foundation of this thesis. On the other hand, the research work presented in this thesis has contributed to new TAPAS concepts, ontologies, service component models, mechanisms, system architectures, and service execution platforms.The service framework is classified into six contibutions (C1-C6) as follows:C1: Ontology-based computing architectureC2: Ontologies, models, and representationsC3: Policy-based reasoningC4: Autonomic-based modelC5: Capability-related adaptation functionality realisationC6: Service execution platforms, prototypes, and simulationsOntology-based computing architecture is an architectural framework for the specification and execution of adaptable service systems that provide any service functionality. Ontologies, models, and representations are applied for the formalisation and representation of the necessary concepts; these are also the basis for the formal definition of the requirements of the capabilities and service component specifications, i.e., the policy and goal specifications. Policy-based reasoning is a support functionality that takes adaptation actions based on flexible and expressive behavioural specifications. The Autonomic-based model is composed of the specification and learning mechanism of the Autonomic Elements that make up an autonomic service system, which is a specialised version of adaptable service systems. Capability-related adaptation functionality realisation defines specific functionalities, interworkings, and structural organisation of the service components that implement the functionalities required for capability-related adaptation. Finally, service execution platforms, prototypes, and simulations provide the validation and evaluation of the remaining contributions

A distributed resource management model for Virtual Private Networks: Tit-for-Tat strategies

In this paper, we address the autonomic resource management problem for Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) in the presence of stochastic and selfish VPN operators. Resource management is one of the most important problems that faces Internet Service Providers. In the literature, the Autonomic Service Architecture is proposed to provide a resource management model that allows systems to manage themselves and aiming to utilize optimally the unused resources. Unfortunately, this model suffers from two major limitations. First, unused resources from underloaded VPNs ( lenders) are utilized over the overloaded ones ( borrowers) without considering the unexpected changes of the VPNs’ state, which may often happen in the case of multimedia transmissions. This may affect negatively the Quality-of-Service (QoS) of the lenders while improving the QoS of the borrowers. Second, underloaded VPNs’ operators might behave selfishly and refuse to lend their unused (spare) resources to other overloaded VPNs. To overcome these limitations, we propose a distributed autonomic resource management, which is modeled as a repeated non-cooperative game with stochastic and selfish players. The classical Tit-for-Tat strategy is modified to cope with VPN operators who are not always able to lend some resources to others. Four different strategies are derived from Tit-for-Tat to motivate VPN operators to lend their resources to others. As far as we know, our work is among the first efforts that uses repeated non-cooperative game theory to motivate selfish participants to cooperate and to distinguish between stochastic and purely selfish VPNs’ operators. In our setting, this results in cooperative sharing of unused resources among VPNs. Simulation results show that Tit-for-Tat strategy leads to deadlocks, while our strategies assure good gains to cooperative VPN operators and punish the selfish ones.

A Distributed Algorithm for Web Service Composition Based on Service Agent Model

Agent-based service composition has provided a promising computing paradigm for the automatic web service composition. In this paper, a formal service agent model is proposed, which integrates the web service and software agent technologies into one cohesive entity. Based on the service agent model, a distributed planning algorithm for web service composition called DPAWSC is presented. DPAWSC formalizes web service composition into a graph search problem according to the dependence relations among service agents. The key to DPAWSC is that the alternative solution with smaller length has higher priority to be searched than one with larger length. DPAWSC is based on the distributed decision making of the autonomous service agents and addresses the distributed nature of web service composition. We evaluate the algorithm by simulation experiments and the results demonstrate that DPAWSC is effective for its ability to produce the high quality solution at a low cost of communications.

An enabling platform for autonomic management of the future internet

This article shows an autonomic management solution based on the recently defined programmable node architecture NetServ. The article starts with a general description of the classical network management requirements and their adaptation to the expected network evolution. After a description of the major issues characterizing the management of the expected Future Internet, the main autonomic management paradigms, and some recently introduced autonomic service platforms, we show and demonstrate the effectiveness of the NetServ architecture. Born as a means to deploy and execute networked services at runtime over programmable routers, NetServ has proved to be a suitable environment for hosting an autonomic management architecture.

Institution-governed cross-domain agent service cooperation: a model for trusted and autonomic service cooperation

Constructing Virtual Organizations (VOs) by creating service cooperation (i.e. service-oriented cooperation) has become a mainstream approach for reforming the development of application software systems in Web environments. However, the inherent non-controllability of business services across different management domains has brought on the so-called "trust" crisis that the success and benefit of cooperation cannot be ensured. It is this crisis that cumbers the achievement of autonomic cooperation and thereby the large-scale deployment of VOs. Therefore, this paper proposes a model, called IGTASC, to conquer this crisis and make service cooperation both trusted and autonomic by developing three closely-coupled technologies: institution-governed cooperation, policy-driven self-management, and community facilitation management.

On Our Own: Starting an Interlibrary Loan Service From Scratch

In August 2009, the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine Medical Library opened its doors to students, faculty, and staff. One of the many challenges before opening the library was developing a unique and autonomous interlibrary loan service for its patrons. This article examines the decisions in choosing the best document delivery system, the management of funds, and the selection of holdings for a new medical library. Along with these decisions, there is discussion on the significance of costs, turnaround times, and challenges going forward.

Cooperative evolution of services in ubiquitous computing environments

As the number and capabilities of mobile devices is rapidly increasing, new challenges arise in the way services are currently designed. Users are seeking for more complex and advanced functionalities able to satisfy their increasing requirements. As a consequence, in ubiquitous environments, a different way to design services has to be introduced in order to guarantee services always up to date in a transparent and efficient way. In this paper, we present and analyze a framework for distributed cooperative service evolution in a wireless nomadic environment. In particular, we assume a disconnected network architecture, where users' mobility is exploited to achieve a scalable behavior, and communication is based on localized peer-to-peer interactions among neighboring nodes. Service management is achieved by introducing autonomic services, whose operations are based on a distributed evolution process, which draws tools and concepts from evolutionary computation (and genetic algorithms in particular). The latter relies on the concept of recombination , i.e., the exchange of information among service users, which collaborate to enhance their fitness , defined as the ability of the actual service to fulfill user's requirements. We introduce a general framework for analyzing service recombination policies and exploit results from martingales theory to study their convergence properties.

Johnny: An Autonomous Service Robot for Domestic Environments

In this article we describe the architecture, algorithms and real-world benchmarks performed by Johnny Jackanapes, an autonomous service robot for domestic environments. Johnny serves as a research and development platform to explore, develop and integrate capabilities required for real-world domestic service applications. We present a control architecture which allows to cope with various and changing domestic service robot tasks. A software architecture supporting the rapid integration of functionality into a complete system is as well presented. Further, we describe novel and robust algorithms centered around multi-modal human robot interaction, semantic scene understanding and SLAM. Evaluation of the complete system has been performed during the last years in the RoboCup@Home competition where Johnnys outstanding performance led to successful participation. The results and lessons learned of these benchmarks are explained in more detail.

A relaxable service selection algorithm for QoS-based web service composition

Context: Web Services are emerging technologies that enable application to application communication and reuse of autonomous services over Web. Composition of web services is a concept of integrating individual web services to conduct complex business transactions based on functionality and performance constraints Objective: To satisfy user requirements, technologies of Quality of service (QoS)-based web service composition (QWSC) are widely used to build complex applications by discovering the best-fit web services in term of QoS. Method: In this paper, a QoS-based service selection (RQSS) algorithm is proposed to help composite web application development by discovering feasible web services based on functionalities and QoS criteria of user requirements. The RQSS recommends prospective service candidates to users by relaxing QoS constraints if no suitable or available web service could exactly fulfill user requirements. Results: A generic framework is implemented to demonstrate the feasibility and performance of RQSS by adapting WS-BPEL standards, and can be reused for QoS-based web composition applications. Conclusion: The experimental results show that the RQSS algorithm indeed performs well and increases the system availability and reliability.

Evaluating Service Description to Guarantee Quality of U-service Ontology

Efficient service description and modeling methodologies are essential for dynamic service composition to provide autonomous services for users in ubiquitous computing environments. In our previous research, we proposed a 'u-service' ontology which is an abstract and structured concept for device operations in ubiquitous environments. One of the problems that we faced during the design process was that there are not enough standards to analyze the effectiveness of a u-service ontology. In this paper, we propose a quality evaluation model to facilitate the design process of a uservice ontology. We extract modeling goals and evaluation indicators based on the uservice description specification. We also present quality metrics to quantify each of the design properties. The experiment result of the proposed quality model shows that we can use it to analyze the design of u-service ontology from various angles. Also, it shows that the model can provide a guideline, and offer appropriate recommendations for improvements.

Web-Enabled Robots

In this article, we describe and discuss the use of information that is available in the World Wide Web and intended for human use as a knowledge resource for autonomous service robots. To this end, we introduce several categories of Web sites that can serve as information sources and explain which kinds of information they provide. We then investigate several information processing methods that can access these Web sites to provide robots with necessary knowledge for performing everyday manipulation tasks. The use of the Web as a knowledge resource is a promising alternative to the hard and tedious task of coding comprehensive specific knowledge bases for robots.

Gobernanza de las políticas de proximidad: análisis de calidad y rendimiento democrático de los Consejos Locales Bienestar (Murcia, Espana)

El artículo presenta un análisis y evaluación de las oportunidades, contribuciones y limitaciones que presentan los órganos de participación institucionalizada en materia de servicios sociales municipales para profundizar en los procesos democratizadores de las políticas sociales públicas gestionadas por las administraciones locales, así como las propuestas y alternativas que desde sus actores participantes supondría su intensificación para la gobernanza local y la eficacia de centros, organizaciones y profesionales de la intervención social. Para su adecuada ilustración y contextualización se alude a la línea de reformas que introducen las recomendaciones y normas de carácter internacional, nacional, así como las nuevas leyes de servicios sociales autonómicas y los hallazgos y conclusiones obtenidos en una investigación empírica sobre participación ciudadana en las políticas sociales de la región de Murcia, contrastando y comparando sus resultados con realidades y tendencias observadas en otros estudios y experiencias.

Network Games: Theory, Models, and Dynamics

Traditional network optimization focuses on a single control objective in a network populated by obedient users and limited dispersion of information. However, most of today's networks are large-scale with lack of access to centralized information, consist of users with diverse requirements, and are subject to dynamic changes. These factors naturally motivate a new distributed control paradigm, where the network infrastructure is kept simple and the network control functions are delegated to individual agents which make their decisions independently (selfishly). The interaction of multiple independent decision-makers necessitates the use of game theory, including economic notions related to markets and incentives. This monograph studies game theoretic models of resource allocation among selfish agents in networks. The first part of the monograph introduces fundamental game theoretic topics. Emphasis is given to the analysis of dynamics in game theoretic situations, which is crucial for design and control of networked systems. The second part of the monograph applies the game theoretic tools for the analysis of resource allocation in communication networks. We set up a general model of routing in wireline networks, emphasizing the congestion problems caused by delay and packet loss. In particular, we develop a systematic approach to characterizing the inefficiencies of network equilibria, and highlight the effect of autonomous service providers on network performance. We then turn to examining distributed power control in wireless networks. We show that the resulting Nash equilibria can be efficient if the degree of freedom given to end-users is properly designed.

AutoHome

This article introduces the design of the AutoHome service-oriented framework to simplify the development and runtime adaptive support of autonomic pervasive applications. To this end, we describe our novel open infrastructure for building and executing home applications. This includes the amalgamation of the two computing areas of autonomics and service orientation, to produce a component-based platform providing facilities including monitoring, touchpoints, and other common autonomic services. This infrastructure uniquely blends the advantages of distributed autonomic control with global conflict management in a management hierarchy. We discuss this platform in terms of pervasive home systems and show how one would develop such a system for two examples of automated home applications: intruder detection and medical support, respectively. Both applications were built within our framework and evaluated showing that the use of the framework introduces minimal overheads but provides many benefits. We then conclude by highlighting the contributions of AutoHome and a discussion about the lessons learned, limitations, and future research directions.

Mobile Agent Based Network Defense System in Enterprise Network

Security has become the Achilles’ heel of many organizations in today’s computer-dominated society. In this paper, a configurable intrusion detection and response framework named Mobile Agents based Distributed (MAD) security system was proposed for enterprise network consisting of a large number of mobile and handheld devices. The key idea of MAD is to use autonomous mobile agents as lightweight entities to provide unified interfaces for intrusion detection, intrusion response, information fusion, and dynamic reconfiguration. These lightweight agents can be easily installed and managed on mobile and handheld devices. The MAD framework includes a family of autonomous agents, servers and software modules. An Object-based intrusion modeling language (mLanguage) is proposed to allow easy data sharing and system control. A data fusion engine (mEngine) is used to provide fused results for traffic classification and intrusion identification. To ensure Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements for end users, adaptive resource allocation scheme is also presented. It is hoped that this project will advance the understanding of complex, interactive, and collaborative distributed systems.

A Dual Framework and Algorithms for Targeted Online Data Delivery

A variety of emerging online data delivery applications challenge existing techniques for data delivery to human users, applications, or middleware that are accessing data from multiple autonomous servers. In this paper, we develop a framework for formalizing and comparing pull-based solutions and present dual optimization approaches. The first approach, most commonly used nowadays, maximizes user utility under the strict setting of meeting a priori constraints on the usage of system resources. We present an alternative and more flexible approach that maximizes user utility by satisfying all users. It does this while minimizing the usage of system resources. We discuss the benefits of this latter approach and develop an adaptive monitoring solution Satisfy User Profiles (SUPs). Through formal analysis, we identify sufficient optimality conditions for SUP. Using real (RSS feeds) and synthetic traces, we empirically analyze the behavior of SUP under varying conditions. Our experiments show that we can achieve a high degree of satisfaction of user utility when the estimations of SUP closely estimate the real event stream, and has the potential to save a significant amount of system resources. We further show that SUP can exploit feedback to improve user utility with only a moderate increase in resource utilization.

2P1-K16 ロボカップ@ホームのオープンプラットフォーム化(RTミドルウェアとオープンシステム)

The RoboCup@Home league is the global domestic robot competition for autonomous service and assistive robots. It is part of the RoboCup competition. Several benchmark tasks are used to evaluate the robots' abilities in a realistic home environment setting. In the RoboCup@Home, the focus is applied to the following things Human-Robot-Interaction, navigation and mapping in dynamic environments, computer vision and object manipulation. We are developing on the globalization of the software platform of RoboCup@Home.

A decentralized coordination method for optimal load redistribution in heterogeneous service grids

The optimal load redistribution problem is solved in this paper for heterogeneous non-dedicated service grids in a decentralized way. A coordination policy is proposed to make networked servers reach their optimal generic task acceptance rates in order to minimize the average service time of all the generic tasks in a grid. Autonomous servers networked in the grid only need to coordinate with their neighbors iteratively, and their optimal generic acceptance rates are reached by task migration among them. The design scheme of the policy is introduced, and the convergence properties and the implementation aspects of the coordination system are discussed in detail in this paper. A set of computer simulations have been conducted, validating the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Semantic Interoperability Aggregation in Service Requirements Refinement

Semantic refinement of stakeholders’ requirements is a fundamental issue in requirements engineering. Facing with the on-demand collaboration problem among the heterogeneous, autonomous, and dynamic service resources in the Web, service requirements refinement becomes extremely important, and the key issue in service requirements refinement is semantic interoperability aggregation. A method for creating connecting ontologies driven by requirement sign ontology is proposed. Based on connecting ontologies, a method for semantic interoperability aggregation in requirements refinement is proposed. In addition, we discover that the necessary condition for semantic interoperability is semantic similarity, and the sufficient condition is the coverability of the agreed mediation ontology. Based on this viewpoint, a metric framework for calculating semantic interoperability capability is proposed. This methodology can provide a semantic representation mechanism for refining users’ requirements; meanwhile, since users’ requirements in the Web usually originate from different domains, it can also provide semantic interoperability guidance for networked service discovery, and is an effective approach for the realization of on-demand service integration. The methodology will be beneficial in service-oriented software engineering and cloud computing.