FIPA-compliant Agent Platform Research Articles

Multi-Agent System in Web Services

The term "service-oriented architecture" (SOA) refers to a software paradigm for creating systems made up of a variety of services that interact with one another to accomplish a certain task. The communications involve more than just transmitting data back and forth; they also connect two or more services to coordinate the required operations. Cross-platform communication is necessary for the coordinating process when services are spread across several platforms. Several web service standards and specifications are used in the present SOA implementation. Based on the prototype's implementation and simulation, this proposed research study has been validated and evaluated. The suggested cross-platform communications architecture is implemented using NetBeans, JADE, WSIG, and OWL-S. An integrated development environment for Java is offered by Oracle in the form of NetBeans. Telecom Italia's Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE) is an agent software framework that is entirely built in the Java language. Web Service Integration Gateway (WSIG), which helps to facilitate JADE agent services being called by Web service clients. The core fundamental engine of the suggested framework is OWL-S. It is a web ontology language used to describe Semantic Web Services in the Semantic Web's OWL-based framework. A quantitative approach is used in this study's performance analysis and comparative investigation for evaluation and validation. The prototype's major element is the Java agent development framework (JADE), which was used to create a multi-agent system for the agent-based MOM framework that has been presented. The creation of the multi-agent systems was facilitated by the JADE platform. JADE 3.7 was the version that was employed. Two key features of JADE are a FIPA-compliant agent platform and a package for creating Java agents. The implementation results show that the proposed agent-based MOM framework was successful communicate between multiple types of SOA application with a better performance of the average of round-trip time where the proposed framework was successful in responding to all the requests.

A model driven engineering process of platform neutral agents for ambient intelligence devices

Ambient intelligence (AmI) systems are now considered a promising approach to assist people in their daily life. AmI proposes the development of context aware systems equipped with devices that can recognize your context and act accordingly. Agents provide an effective way to develop such systems since agents are reactive, proactive and exhibit an intelligent and autonomous behavior. However, current agent approaches do not adequately fulfill the requirements posed by AmI systems. From a modeling point of view, the aim should be to help in the design by providing adequate tools that assist in the development of important properties of AmI systems, such as context-awareness; and from an implementation point of view, agent technologies must be adapted to the diversity of AmI devices and communication technologies. As a solution to these issues we propose a Model driven engineering process, which supports the automatic generation of agent-based AmI systems. The source metamodel is PIM4Agents, a general purpose agent metamodel that we have adapted to support the explicit modeling of context aware systems, and the target metamodel is Malaca, an aspect-oriented agent architecture. Aspect-orientation makes Malaca platform-neutral for FIPA compliant agent platforms, simplifying the model driven process. The solution generates MalacaTiny agents, an implementation of Malaca that is able to run in AmI devices. We have evaluated the convenience of applying a model driven approach by measuring the degree of automation of our process and we have evaluated MalacaTiny for mobile phones by assessing different parameters, related to the scarcity of resources in AmI systems. All the results obtained are satisfactory.

Design of reconfiguration mechanism for holonic manufacturing systems based on formal models

One of the key design issues of holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) is to effectively respond to resource failures based on the flexible holonic architecture. The objective of this paper is to propose a viable design methodology to implement reconfiguration mechanism in HMS. A reconfiguration mechanism is developed to accommodate changes based on collaboration of holons without leading to chaos at the shop floor. To deal with resource failures in HMS, an impact function is defined to characterize the impact of resource failures on different holons in a holarchy. A collaborative reconfiguration mechanism based on an impact function is proposed to effectively reconfigure the systems to achieve minimal cost solutions. The design and implementation methodology combines contract net protocol for negotiation of holons, Petri net for the representation of individual product holons and resource holons and FIPA-compliant agent platform for publication/discovery of holons. A simulation system is developed to verify the proposed reconfiguration mechanism.

Extending process automation systems with multi-agent techniques

This paper presents a design of a process automation system extended with multi-agent systems (MAS) and experiments with its implementation. According to this design, MAS can be used to extend the functionality of ordinary process automation systems at higher levels of control. Anticipated benefits of this include enhanced reconfigurability, responsiveness and flexibility of the resulting automation system. The design also takes into account particular characteristics of process automation. An agent platform for process automation is presented as a basis for applying MAS. A FIPA-compliant agent platform is extended with process automation specific functionality. The platform utilizes a hierarchical agent organization and a BDI-agent model. Two applications are implemented using the platform. One of these shows how the techniques of distributed planning can be applied in discrete control. The other provides a model for supervisory continuous control using the techniques of distributed search. Experiments performed with a laboratory test environment using the applications are presented. They are able to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in test scenarios.

Ontology-driven intelligent service for configuration support in networked organizations

Nowadays, organizations must continually adapt to market and organizational changes to achieve their most important goals. Migration to business services and service-oriented architectures provides a valuable opportunity to attain the organization objectives. This migration causes evolution both in organizational structure and in technology-enabling businesses to dynamically change vendors and services. One of the forms of organizational structures is the form of networked organization. Technologies of business intelligence and Web intelligence effectively support business processes within the networked organizations. While business intelligence focuses on development of services for consumer needs recognition, information search, and evaluation of alternatives; Web intelligence addresses advancement of Web-empowered systems, services, and environments. The paper proposes a technological ontology-driven framework for configuration support as applied to networked organization. The framework integrates concepts of business intelligence and Web intelligence into a collaboration environment of a networked organization on the base of attainment of knowledge logistics purposes. This framework referred to as KSNet is based on the integration of software agent technology and Web services. Knowledge logistics functions of KSNet are complemented by technological functions of knowledge-gathering agents. The services of these agents are implemented with CAPNET, a FIPA compliant agent platform. CAPNET allows consuming services of agents in a service-oriented way. Applicability of the approach is illustrated through a “Binni scenario”-based case study of a portable field hospital configuration.

Agent-based collaborative product design engineering: An industrial case study

Globalization and rapid evolving of Internet and Web-based technologies have revolutionized the product development process. Engineering a product is a complex process involving the integration of distributed resources, such as human beings, engineering tools, and a large variety of product-related information systems. Software agents have been playing an increasingly important role in this area to reduce the need for large, complex, and centralized systems. This paper presents the results of an industrial case study in the development of a collaborative e-Engineering environment for mechanical product design engineering by applying intelligent software agents, Internet/Web, workflow, and database technologies. A software prototype system has been implemented on a FIPA-compliant agent platform, with a wheel–axle assembly being used as a test case for system validation.

Soft-computing technologies for configuration of cooperative supply chain

In this article, the problem of dynamic configuration of cooperative supply chain (CSC) as a dynamic, flexible and agile system is considered. Members of the CSC negotiate and compromise on the optimal configuration in a spirit of Cupertino, in order to meet commitments made to each other. Based on this framework, the proposed approach considers configuring as: (i) coalition formation and (ii) product and resource allocation tasks in multi-agent environment. To solve the configuring task, an application of different techniques of soft computing is examined. The first approach permits to find sub-optimal solution applying the theory of games with fuzzy coalitions. In this case, genetic algorithms (GA) are used to find solutions of the game. The second approach uses: (i) genetic algorithms directly and (ii) constraint satisfaction problem solving for resource allocation task. Ontologies codified as object oriented constraint networks are used for task description and decomposition. A multi-agent test-bed based on FIPA compliant agent platform is developed and used to conduct the experiments. The above techniques are compared and the simulation results are discussed.