Event-driven Rules Research Articles

Smart and safe self‐adaption of connected devices based on discrete controllers

The Internet-of-things, which designates the interconnection of physical objects, is a growing research area with many challenges. One of these challenges is the management of failures and unforeseen situations when using connected devices in real world applications. To this end, the authors propose a self-adaptation framework to deal with changes and take into account storage, computational and communication constraints. Their self-adaptation framework relies on constraints expressed in terms of quality of service (QoS) and event-driven rules to specify control objectives. Internally, the framework generates labelled transitions systems and builds on the fly synchronous controllers to guarantee QoS properties. Moreover, their framework has capabilities to concurrently deal with dynamic control objectives, monitoring and self-adaptation. To prove the practicality of their framework, they present a healthcare case-study to remotely monitor a patient at risk of myocardial infarction recurrence. The objective control rules easily specify how wearable devices should coordinate their behaviours to ensure safety, resilience and health-awareness factors. The implementation of their framework is fully distributed and scalable and include their development of a wearable, remotely configurable, QoS aware cardiac activity sensor.

An Emotion Aware Task Automation Architecture Based on Semantic Technologies for Smart Offices.

The evolution of the Internet of Things leads to new opportunities for the contemporary notion of smart offices, where employees can benefit from automation to maximize their productivity and performance. However, although extensive research has been dedicated to analyze the impact of workers’ emotions on their job performance, there is still a lack of pervasive environments that take into account emotional behaviour. In addition, integrating new components in smart environments is not straightforward. To face these challenges, this article proposes an architecture for emotion aware automation platforms based on semantic event-driven rules to automate the adaptation of the workplace to the employee’s needs. The main contributions of this paper are: (i) the design of an emotion aware automation platform architecture for smart offices; (ii) the semantic modelling of the system; and (iii) the implementation and evaluation of the proposed architecture in a real scenario.

Agent communication and artificial institutions

In this paper we propose an application-independent model for the definition of artificial institutions that can be used to define open multi-agent systems. Such a model of institutional reality makes us able also to define an objective and external semantics of a commitment-based Agent Communication Language (ACL). In particular we propose to regard an ACL as a set of conventions to act on a fragment of institutional reality, defined in the context of an artificial institution. Another contribution of the work presented in this paper is an operational definition of norms, a crucial component of artificial institutions. In fact in open systems interacting agents might not conform to the specifications. We regard norms as event-driven rules that when are fired by events happening in the system create or cancel a set of commitments. An interesting aspect of our proposal is that both the definition of the ACL and the definition of norms are based on the same notion of commitment. Therefore an agent capable of reasoning on commitments can reason on the semantics of communicative acts and on the system of norms.

E-DEVICE: an extensible active knowledge base system with multiple rule type support

This paper describes E-DEVICE, an extensible active knowledge base system (KBS) that supports the processing of event-driven, production, and deductive rules into the same active OODB system. E-DEVICE provides the infrastructure for the smooth integration of various declarative rule types, such as production and deductive rules, into an active OODB system that supports low-level event-driven rules only by: (1) mapping each declarative rule into one event-driven rule, offering centralized rule selection control for correct run-time behavior and conflict resolution, and (2) using complex events to map the conditions of declarative rules and monitor the database to incrementally match those conditions. E-DEVICE provides the infrastructure for easily extending the system by adding: (1) new rule types as subtypes of existing ones, and (2) transparent optimizations to the rule matching network. The resulting system is a flexible, yet efficient, KBS that gives the user the ability to express knowledge in a variety of high-level forms for advanced problem solving in data intensive applications.

Processing production rules in DEVICE, an active knowledge base system

Production rules are useful for several tasks in active database systems, such as integrity constraint checking, derived data maintenance, database state monitoring, etc. Furthermore, production rules can express knowledge in a high-level form for problem solving in Knowledge Base Systems (KBS). Present active object-oriented database (OODB) systems traditionally provide event-driven rules which are triggered by events, i.e. database modifications. This paper describes DEVICE, a high-level rule integration scheme in an active OODB system, resulting in an active KBS. The paper emphasises the run-time processing of production rules, namely the incremental matching of rule conditions, as well as rule selection and firing. The matching of production rules requires special algorithms based on the flow of updated data through a discrimination network, like RETE, TREAT, etc. DEVICE offers a smooth integration of production rules into an active OODB system that only supports event-driven rules, without introducing new data structures, maintaining at the same time the properties of discrimination networks. This is achieved using complex events to map the conditions of production rules and monitor the database to incrementally match those conditions. DEVICE maps each production rule into one event-driven rule that is easy to maintain and offers centralised rule selection control for correct run-time behaviour and conflict resolution. Furthermore, DEVICE provides the infrastructure for the integration of various other rule paradigms into a single KBS, like deductive rules and integrity constraints and leaves room for the optimisation of the matching process through variations of the basic discrimination network.

DEVICE: Compiling production rules into event-driven rules using complex events

This paper describes a technique for the smooth integration of production rules into an active Object-Oriented Database (OODB) system that provides Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules only, called DEVICE. The emphasis is given on the compilation of rule conditions into a discrimination network for incremental matching at run-time. The network consists of primitive, logical and complex events that save information about partial condition element matching, as in RETE algorithm, and trigger one ECA rule that corresponds to the production rule. The DEVICE method re-uses the primitives of active OODB systems, without introducing low-level data structures and provides an infrastructure for the integration of all database rule paradigms into a single knowledge base system.

Implementing configuration management policies for distributed applications

The central purpose of this paper is to present a novel framework supporting the specification and the implementation of configuration management policies for distributed applications. The introduced approach is part of a system called PRISMA (A platform for integrated construction and management of distributed applications). It provides an integrated application development environment comprising of a distributed application model, a specification language and several design, implementation and management tools. To reduce management complexity, we introduce a technique which permits the definition of configuration management policies as an integral part of an application specification. A configuration management policy is composed of one or more instantiation rules and termination rules for component creation and termination, and event-driven reconfiguration rules.

A REFLECTIVE APPROACH FOR DATA-DRIVEN RULES

This paper presents an alternative to the E-C-A approach adopted by most active database models, in which, whenever a given event occurs the database triggers some actions. A reflective paradigm is implemented in a dependency-oriented fashion. According to this paradigm, data driven rules are specified as invariants. The invariants are translated to a dependency graph and the execution logic is being self-determined at run-time using this dependency graph. This architecture is presented and discussed as a solution for data-driven rules with an extension to support event-driven rules.