Autonomous Software Research Articles

Topological rewriting and the geometrization of programming

Spatial computing is an emerging field that recognizes the importance of explicitly handling spatial relationships at three levels: computer architectures, programming languages and applications. In this context, we present MGS, an experimental programming language where data structures are fields on abstract spaces. In MGS, fields are transformed using rules. We show that this approach is able to unify, at least for programming purposes, several computational models like Lindenmayer systems and cellular automata. The MGS notions of topological collection and transformation are formalized using concepts developed in algebraic topology. We propose to use transformations in order to implement a discrete version of some differential operators. These transformations satisfy a Stokes-like theorem. This result constitutes a geometric view of programming where data are handled like fields in physics. The relevance of this approach for the design of autonomic software systems is discussed in the conclusion.

Multiagent resource allocation in k-additive domains: preference representation and complexity

We study a framework for multiagent resource allocation where autonomous software agents negotiate over the allocation of bundles of indivisible resources. Connections to well-known combinatorial optimisation problems, including the winner determination problem in combinatorial auctions, shed light on the computational complexity of the framework. We give particular consideration to scenarios where the preferences of agents are modelled in terms of k-additive utility functions, i.e. scenarios where synergies between different resources are restricted to bundles of at most k items.

An autonomous GP-based system for regression and classification problems

The aim of this research is to develop an autonomous system for solving data analysis problems. The system, called Genetic Programming-Autonomous Solver (GP-AS) contains most of the features required by an autonomous software: it decides if it knows or not how to solve a particular problem, it can construct solutions for new problems, it can store the created solutions for later use, it can improve the existing solutions in the idle-time it can efficiently manage the computer resources for fast running speed and it can detect and handle failure cases. The generator of solutions for new problems is based on an adaptive variant of Genetic Programming. We have tested this part by solving some well-known problems in the field of symbolic regression and classification. Numerical experiments show that the GP-AS system is able to perform very well on the considered test problems being able to successfully compete with standard GP having manually set parameters.

Autonomous software: Myth or magic?

AbstractWe discuss work by the eSTAR project which demonstrates a fully closed loop autonomous system for the follow up of possible micro‐lensing anomalies. Not only are the initial micro‐lensing detections followed up in real time, but ongoing events are prioritised and continually monitored, with the returned data being analysed automatically. If the “smart software” running the observing campaign detects a planet‐like anomaly, further follow‐up will be scheduled autonomously and other telescopes and telescope networks alerted to the possible planetary detection.We further discuss the implications of this, and how such projects can be used to build more general autonomous observing and control systems. (© 2008 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

Specification, decomposition and agent synthesis for situation-aware service-based systems

Service-based systems are distributed computing systems with the major advantage of enabling rapid composition of distributed applications, such as collaborative research and development, e-business, health care, military applications and homeland security, regardless of the programming languages and platforms used in developing and running various components of the applications. In dynamic service-oriented computing environment, situation awareness (SAW) is needed for system monitoring, adaptive service coordination and flexible security policy enforcement. To greatly reduce the development effort of SAW capability in service-based systems and effectively support runtime system adaptation, it is necessary to automate the development of reusable and autonomous software components, called SAW agents, for situation-aware service-based systems. In this paper, a logic-based approach to declaratively specifying SAW requirements, decomposing SAW specifications for efficient distributed situation analysis, and automated synthesis of SAW agents is presented. This approach is based on AS 3 calculus and logic, and our declarative model for SAW. Evaluation results of our approach are also presented.

Predictions of Hepatic Disposition Properties Using a Mechanistically Realistic, Physiologically Based Model

Quantitative mappings were established between drug physicochemical properties (PCPs) and parameter values of a physiologically based, mechanistically realistic, in silico liver (ISL). The ISL plugs together autonomous software objects that represent hepatic components at different scales and levels of detail. Microarchitectural features are represented separately from the mechanisms that influence drug metabolism. The same ISL has been validated against liver perfusion data for sucrose and four cationic drugs: antipyrine, atenolol, labetalol, and diltiazem. Parameters sensitive to drug-specific PCPs were tuned so that ISL outflow profiles from a single ISL matched in situ perfused rat liver outflow profiles of all five compounds. Quantitative relationships were then established between the four sets of drug PCPs and the corresponding four sets of PCP-sensitive, ISL parameter values; those relationships were used to predict PCP-sensitive, ISL parameter values for prazosin and propranolol given only their PCPs. Relationships were established using three different methods: 1) a simple linear correlation method, 2) the fuzzy c-means algorithm, and 3) a simple artificial neural network. Each relationship was used separately to predict ISL parameter values for prazosin and propranolol, given their PCPs. Those values were applied in the ISL used earlier to predict the hepatic disposition details for each drug. Although we had only sparse data available, all predicted disposition profiles were judged reasonable (within a factor of 2 of referent profile data). The order of precision, based on a similarity measure, was 3 > 2 > 1.

An Application Directed Adaptive Framework for Autonomic Software

Autonomic computing is gradually becoming accepted as a viable approach to achieving self-management in systems and networks, with the goal of lessening the impact of the complexity crisis on the computing industry. The authors propose the integration of high level selforganisation features into an Application Directed Adaptive Framework (ADAF), an autonomic-oriented software development process, which when used during the development of software applications, enables those applications to exhibit autonomic behaviour. This paper discusses the infrastructure of the ADAF and demonstrates two self-managing capabilities that come about in a software application as a result of applying the ADAF, namely selfmonitoring and self-diagnosis.

Action Programming Languages

Artificial systems that think and behave intelligently are one of the most exciting and challenging goals of Artificial Intelligence. Action Programming is the art and science of devising high-level control strategies for autonomous systems which employ a mental model of their environment and which reason about their actions as a means to achieve their goals. Applications of this programming paradigm include autonomous software agents, mobile robots with high-level reasoning capabilities, and General Game Playing. These lecture notes give an in-depth introduction to the current state-of-the-art in action programming. The main topics are Table of Contents: Introduction / Mathematical Preliminaries / Procedural Action Programs / Action Programs and Planning / Declarative Action Programs / Reactive Action Programs / Suggested Further Reading

Perspectives for using software agents in e-Government applications

Governing a country includes a set of decentralised processes. Moreover, in the unions ofcountries with integrated economic space, the decentralisation issue gains the attention. The mostknown examples of federated governments are two of the biggest world economies: the UnitedStates of America and the European Union. The decentralisation is even more significant whenconsidering resources for businesses. Specifically the workforce, the land and the infrastructure arecommonly managed at the local or the sub-local level. The paper addresses the issues concerningcitizens’ mobility (both for personal and professional purposes) and businesses’ pan-Europeanoperations.Application of autonomous software agents to aid cross-border businesses operations andcitizens movements is addressed. The paper presents the possibility of making citizens’movements smoother and involving less paperwork. To support these ideas, the foundations andconclusions from Infocitizen initiative are introduced.In the conclusions of the paper, it is suggested that the agent-based technology for openingagents-ready virtual offices by agencies at all levels of government should be used. It wouldbenefit the users if they were allowed to set up software agents to act on their behalf and to searchall possible locations in order to find required resources. The mentioned task would be impossibleor extremely resource-consuming when done manually.

A Review of Virtual Simulators for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs)

This paper overviews graphical simulators used for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) development. Graphical simulators allow researchers to develop autonomous software without the need for the actual vehicle. There are many graphical simulators developed to date, for somebody who is involved in AUV research it becomes difficult to decide which simulator to use without going through extensive literature review, this then necessitate a summary and classification of available simulators. Instead of a review of all underwater virtual environments developed to date, the paper describes a selection which only reflects the authors’ preference and proposes a classification.

Implementation of business processes in service-oriented systems

Service-oriented software systems (SOSS) are the most promising philosophy, methodology and tool of contemporary software engineering. SOSS are virtual peer-to-peer networks of autonomous software components behaving like the services in real world mass service systems. However, service-oriented systems have no inherent tool to support business processes. The paper proposes an implementation of business processes in SOSS allowing them to meet practical requirements. The implementation can be easily improved to allow datastores to be integrated into SOSS and used together with the classical message passing middleware. It indicates that service orientation is based on a paradigm different from the object-oriented one. The proposed solution leads to a specific structure of peer-to-peer architecture and requires development cycle aspects substantially different from the classical software development cycle.

Web-Scale Workflow: Integrating Distributed Services

Modular applications, components, and services are all ways of describing the product of an organization's efforts to embody its capabilities in autonomous software modules. In fact, the integration of services using well-established workflow paradigms could amplify an organization's capabilities with the creation of a full-blown, inter-organizational system of systems. This is the essence of Web-scale workflows. Considering the recent popularity and acceptance of service-oriented technologies, the application of such distributed systems is only limited by imagination, but it's also important to understand existing research challenges and their implications to various Web-scale workflow domains.

Introduction: DARPA Urban Grand Challenge

THE Urban Challenge is the third in a series of robotic grand challenges put on by the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA). The grand challenges have the goal of developing robotic technologies that will reduce the number of warfighters operating in hazardous conditions and is in support of the government mandate that one-third of the military’s vehicles be autonomous by 2015. The first Grand Challenge was in March 2004 and was over a 142 mile course in the desert between Barstow, CA and Primm, NV. Fifteen vehicles made the final round, but none finished. The second Grand Challenge was in October 2005 and was over a similar 132 mile course. In this race four vehicles successfully completed the course with “Stanley” from Stanford University coming in first and winning the $2 million prize. The Urban Challenge will test the ability of robots to operate safely and effectively in populated, busy areas. It will feature autonomous ground vehicles maneuvering in a mock city environment, simulating military supply missions and must negotiate the course along with approximately 50 human-driven vehicles. The robotic vehicles will have to complete a 60-mile course in less than six hours and must obey California traffic laws while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections and avoiding obstacles. The final event will take place on November 3, 2007 at the urban military training facility located on the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, Calif. The location has a network of urban roads and simulates the type of environment the military operates in when deployed overseas. The awards will be for $2 million, $1 million and $500,000 and will go to the top three finishers that complete the course within the six hour time limit. More information about the event is available at the DARPA web site at www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge. This special issue has nine papers from entrants to the urban challenge. The first paper by Wooden et al. describes the Sting Racing Team’s modular control architecture based on nested hybrid automata. The second paper by Crane et al. describe Team Gator Nation’s solution to the challenge to the determination of pose, appropriate behavior mode, and the smooth transition of vehicle control between behavior modes. The third paper by Upcroft et al. of the Sydney-Berkeley Driving Team discusses their solution to denied GPS and their use of vision for localization. The fourth paper by Effertz describes the Team CarOLO approach for multi-target, multi-sensor data fusion based on an extended Kalman filter algorithm. The fifth paper by Yang et al. of TeamUCF discusses their real-time trajectory planning for their vehicle. The sixth paper by Herpin et al. discusses the steering controller of their CajunBot II. The seventh paper from Henrie and Wilde describe their approach to generating clothoid-based trajectories using constructive polylines. The eighth paper from Basarke et al. discusses their system and software engineering process for developing the intelligent autonomous software for Team CarOLO. The ninth paper from Johnson discusses the TeamNOVA approach for navigating in GPS denied areas using modified orienteering techniques.

Modeling and Simulation of Hepatic Drug Disposition Using a Physiologically Based, Multi-agent In Silico Liver

Validate a physiologically based, mechanistic, in silico liver (ISL) for studying the hepatic disposition and metabolism of antipyrine, atenolol, labetalol, diltiazem, and sucrose administered alone or in combination. Autonomous software objects representing hepatic components such as metabolic enzymes, cells, and microarchitectural details were plugged together to form a functioning liver analogue. Microarchitecture features were represented separately from drug metabolizing functions. Each ISL component interacts uniquely with mobile objects. Outflow profiles were recorded and compared to wet-lab data. A single ISL structure was selected, parameterized, and held constant for all compounds. Parameters sensitive to drug-specific physicochemical properties were tuned so that ISL outflow profiles matched in situ outflow profiles. ISL simulations were validated separately and together against in situ data and prior physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) predictions. The consequences of ISL parameter changes on outflow profiles were explored. Selected changes altered outflow profiles in ways consistent with knowledge of hepatic anatomy and physiology and drug physicochemical properties. A synthetic, agent-oriented in silico liver has been developed and successfully validated, enabling us to posit that static and dynamic ISL mechanistic details, although abstract, map realistically to hepatic mechanistic details in PBPK simulations.

Hyperion Next-Generation Battlespace Information Services

QinetiQ, Malvern Technology Centre, St Andrews Road, Malvern, Worcestershire WR14 3PS, UK*Corresponding author: robert.ghanea-hercock@bt.comThe future digital battlespace will be a fast-paced and frenetic environment that stresses informationcommunicationtechnologysystemstothelimit.Thechallengesaremostacuteinthetacticalandoper-ational domains where bandwidth is severely limited, security of information is paramount, thenetwork is under physical and cyber attack and administrative support is minimal. Hyperion is aclusterofresearchprojectsdesignedtoprovideanautomatedandadaptiveinformationmanagementcapability embeddedin defence networks. The overall system architecture isdesigned toimprove thesituational awareness of field commanders by providing the ability to fuse and compose informationservices in real time. The key technologies adopted to enable this include: autonomous softwareagents, self-organizing middleware, a smart data filtering system and a 3-D battlespace simulationenvironment. This paper reviews some of the specific techniques under development within theHyperion sub-projects and the results achieved to date.Keywords: agents; autonomous systems; middleware; data visualizationReceived 14 May 2007; revised 14 May 2007

Design and implementation of a smart system for personalization and accurate selection of mobile services

Wireless mobile services are computing applications that run on handheld wireless devices. Such applications must work within the daunting constraints of the devices, which include memory, processing power, input capabilities, and size of display. It is therefore important that mobile services take into account the user’s context, optimize resource usage, and minimize input effort imposed on the user. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a smart agent-enabled system for personalizing wireless mobile services and advertisements for Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) or Java ME, and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) enabled devices. We use software agents for context filtering because such autonomous software entities have characteristics that can benefit mobile devices and the wireless environment, and the Composite Capability/Preference Profiles (CC/PP) standard for defining profiles for user preferences and device capabilities. The system incorporates the use of artificial neural networks to adaptively and iteratively learn to select the best available service based on contextual information. The system is evaluated using practical operating scenarios, as well as empirical data and results show an 87% success rate in the selection of the best available service.

Distributed personnel scheduling—negotiation among scheduling agents

This paper introduces a model for Distributed Employee Timetabling Problems (DisETPs) and proposes a general architecture for solving DisETPs by using a Multi Agent System (MAS) paradigm. The architecture is composed of a set of autonomous software Scheduling Agents (SAs) that solve the Employee Timetabling Problems (ETP) for each department. Each agent has its own local ETP problem and its own goals. The Scheduling Agents must coordinate their local solution with the other agents in order to achieve a global solution for the whole organization that yields a better result with respect to the organization’s global targets. To achieve a coherent and consistent global solution, the SAs make use of a sophisticated negotiation protocol among scheduling agents that always ends in an agreement (not ensured to be optimal). The main functionalities of this protocol are agent to agent relation definition, a mechanism to approve a chain of Request for Changes and an electronic marketplace for bidding on preferred common time slots.

STRATUM: A METHODOLOGY FOR DESIGNING HEURISTIC AGENT NEGOTIATION STRATEGIES

Automated negotiation is a powerful (and sometimes essential) means for allocating resources among self-interested autonomous software agents. A key problem in building negotiating agents is the design of the negotiation strategy, which is used by an agent to decide its negotiation behavior. In complex domains, there is no single, obvious optimal strategy. This has led to much work on designing heuristic strategies, where agent designers usually rely on intuition and experience. In this article, we introduce STRATUM, a methodology for designing strategies for negotiating agents. The methodology provides a disciplined approach to analyzing the negotiation environment and designing strategies in light of agent capabilities and acts as a bridge between theoretical studies of automated negotiation and the software engineering of negotiation applications. We illustrate the application of the methodology by characterizing some strategies for the Trading Agent Competition and for argumentation-based negotiation.

Development of an Ontology for an Industrial Domain

This article presents a method for ontology construction and its application in developing an ontology in the domain of natural gas pipeline operations. Both the method, as well as the application ontology developed, contribute to the infrastructure of Semantic Web that provides semantic foundation for supporting information processing by autonomous software agents. This article presents the processes of knowledge acquisition and ontology construction for developing a knowledge-based decision support system for monitoring and control of natural gas pipeline operations. Knowledge on the problem domain was acquired and analyzed using the Inferential Modeling Technique; then the analyzed knowledge was organized into an application ontology and represented in the Knowledge Modeling System. Since an ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization that provides a comprehensive foundation specification of knowledge in a domain, it provides semantic clarifications for autonomous software agents that process information on the Internet.

COCOA: COnversation-based service COmposition in pervAsive computing environments with QoS support

Pervasive computing environments are populated with networked services, i.e., autonomous software entities, providing a number of functionalities. One of the most challenging objectives to be achieved within these environments is to assist users in realizing tasks that integrate on the fly functionalities of the networked services opportunely according to the current pervasive environment. Towards this purpose, we present COCOA, a solution for COnversation-based service COmposition in pervAsive computing environments with QoS support. COCOA provides COCOA-L, an OWL-S based language for the semantic, QoS-aware specification of services and tasks, which further allows the specification of services and tasks conversations. Moreover, COCOA provides two mechanisms: COCOA-SD for the QoS-aware semantic service discovery and COCOA-CI for the QoS-aware integration of service conversations towards the realization of the user task’s conversation. The distinctive feature of COCOA is the ability of integrating on the fly the conversations of networked services to realize the conversation of the user task, by further meeting the QoS requirements of user tasks. Thereby, COCOA allows the dynamic realization of user tasks according to the specifics of the pervasive computing environment in terms of available services and by enforcing valid service consumption.