P2P Agent Research Articles

Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Enabled Optimal Decentralized Operation of Smart Distribution Grids

Currently, the distribution systems are moving towards decentralized operation due to the high penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs). Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading has been an emerging concept that promotes autonomous DER participation in energy markets while preserving their privacy concerns. In this work, a novel P2P energy trading enabled decentralized market framework is proposed for the optimal operation of distribution grids. Nodal agents and P2P agents are established as market participants, and market equilibrium is iteratively achieved via alternating direction method of multipliers based algorithms. The proposed market framework guarantees grid constraint satisfaction, market equilibrium, and global optimality for all market participants without violating their privacy concerns. The agent coordination and local optimization are designed such that fairness of the market clearing mechanism, prosumer autonomy, and prosumer anonymity is preserved without compromising the market efficiency. Further, costs/rewards of ancillary services associated with the P2P energy transactions are considered as trade-offs within the market mechanism, and those are accurately allocated to the respective trading pairs. The case studies illustrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed market framework.

A Resilient Device Monitoring System in Collaboration Environments

In this paper, a resilient device monitoring system is proposed in which agents on remote devices can collaborate with each other. The system consists of collaboration groups, proxy servers and a device monitoring server. A collaboration group consists of P2P agents and a P2P host which represents the collaboration group. The system is resilient in the sense that it finds an alternative P2P host or proxy server to continue its works in the event of a failure of the original ones. Communication protocols including communication messages and flow sequences for finding alternatives are proposed in detail, and some implementation results are explained.

Open networks of agents

This paper presents developed by authors P2P agent platform, a special software product. Instances of P2P agent platform are deployed in the nodes of P2P network over standard P2P service and altogether produce distribute knowledge database, intended for organizing of semantic agents’ interaction with each other. Agents of applied system are deployed in the nodes of P2P network over instances of P2P agent platform. The functional architecture, intended for further implementation and standardization, developed by FIPA working group was taken as basis of development. Implemented program product supports such mechanisms as P2P agents’ interacting on the basis of ACL — agent communication language, white and yellow pages. These mechanisms are also were developed by authors of this paper. The role, functions and functioning process are shown using two implemented examples, which are quite important from practical point of view. These examples were also used to test and verify main system mechanisms, proposed in this paper, in particular, registering and deregistering of agents and their services in white and yellow pages, distributed searching of agents and their services in the network.

Secure P2P Cross-Community Health Record Exchange in IHE Compatible Systems

This paper investigates a secure mechanism for Electronic Health Records (EHR) exchange over a Peer to Peer (P2P) agent based coordination framework. Our study is based on the SemHealthCoord framework, a platform for the exchange of EHR between autonomous health organisations that extends the existing interoperability standards as proposed by the Integrating Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). Every health organisation in SemHealthCoord represents a community within a P2P network. Communities use a set of autonomous agents and a set of distributed coordination rules to coordinate the agents in the search of specific health records. To enable secure interactions among communities, we propose the use of asymmetric keys and digital certificates. We specify the interaction protocols to provide integrity and authenticity between the communities, and, to illustrate the scalability of our approach, we evaluate the proposed solution in distributed settings by comparing the performance between secured and unsecured data exchange. The contribution of this work is that enables IHE based health communities to dynamically exchange EHR of patients with a secure P2P agent coordination framework.

Resource discovery in grid systems: a survey

Resource Discovery (RD) is one of the key issues in successful Grid systems. Yet, new methodologies for RD are constantly researched owing to the dynamicity, heterogeneity and large-scale characteristics of Grids. Recently, synergy and convergence between Grid, Agent and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems were pointed out clearly. This paper provides a survey and a qualitative comparison of the most promising approaches (P2P techniques and agent systems) for RD. Viability of Grid systems relies mainly on efficient integration of P2P techniques and mobile agent (MA) systems to bring scaling and decentralised control properties to Grids.

Agent-based distributed decision-making in dynamic operational environments

The paper presents an approach and the supporting software tools for integration of intelligent multi-agent systems and the peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies to support the development of heterogeneous distributed decision making applications operating in dynamic ubiquitous environment. Particularly, the proposed technology integrates two software tools, MASDK 4.0 software tool and a P2P agent platform. MASDK 4.0 is provided with a graphical application specification language that supports the thorough and consistent conceptual analysis, detailed design, code generation and deployment of multi-agent systems applications including those operating in dynamic environments. P2P agent platform is a FIPA compliant middleware enabling transparent P2P interaction of agents operating in heterogeneous and ubiquitous environment. The platform is fully compatible with the multi-agent applications developed by MASDK 4.0. The combined application of MASDK 4.0 and P2P agent platform is demonstrated by a case study of the air traffic control and emergency management. In this case study a model of autonomous air traffic control is implemented by a set of distributed intelligent agents. This application is a typical example of a modem agent-based distributed decision making system operating in a dynamic P2P environment.

Development tools for open agent networks

Distributed peer-to-peer computing in which no centralized control server is assumed, and in some cases, client-server architecture is actually rejected, has been the subject of intense investigations in the field of information technologies in the recent years. This new paradigm of designing large-scale distributed intelligent systems attracts attention of both researchers and developers of industrial applications. This paradigm provides qualitatively new capabilities, especially for designing systems consisting of a large number of autonomous instances which can appear and disappear from the system at any time instant. The idea of integration of these systems (hereinafter, P2P systems for brevity) and multi-agent technologies is especially attractive; it realizes the advantages of both paradigms, namely, the maturity of technologies and the relative simplicity of creation of multi-agent systems consisting of autonomous intelligent programs which interact via a high-level language, as well as the openness, the scalability, and the reliability of P2P systems. This integration seems quite natural. Indeed, multi-agent systems is the set of autonomous intelligent programs; therefore, the structuring of these programs into the network whose nodes interact directly without any intermediate server is the natural step if the technology of P2P interactions has been well developed using a high level language. However, for practical realization of this idea, it is necessary to make one very important step, namely, to develop mechanisms for agent interaction on a semantic level, when agents query some functionalities (services) from each other, possibly, not knowing a priori what particular agents can provide the queried functionality (service) and whether these agents exist in the network. The application of the agent variant of the architecture, the service oriented architecture, another new paradigm of construction of information systems, provides practical capability of realization of mechanisms of semantic interaction of agents of the open P2P network. This work represents the P2P agent platform developed by the authors whose instances installed on the network nodes above the standard P2P service form the distributed meta-knowledge knowledge base intended for organization of semantic P2P interaction of agents. Application-oriented agents placed on the network nodes above the instances of the agent platform receive the capability of semantic interaction. The program realization of the platform is supported by the mechanism of P2P interaction of agents using messages with standard formats and pair communications of the network nodes. The role, functions, and the essence of the processes of operation of this platform is explained using two applications as the examples; these applications are sufficiently important from the practical point of view. They are used for verification of basic solutions presented in this work.

Self-Organizing and Adaptive Peer-to-Peer Network

In this paper, an algorithm that forms a dynamic and self-organizing network is demonstrated. The hypothesis of this work is that in order to achieve a resilient and adaptive peer-to-peer (P2P) network, each network node must proactively maintain a minimum number of edges. Specifically, low-level communication protocols are not sufficient by themselves to achieve high-service availability, especially in the case of ad hoc or dynamic networks with a high degree of node addition and deletion. The concept has been evaluated within a P2P agent application in which each agent has a goal to maintain a preferred number of connections to a number of service providing agents. Using this algorithm, the agents update a weight value associated with each connection, based on the perceived utility of the connection to the corresponding agent. This utility function can be a combination of several node or edge parameters, such as degree k of the target node, or frequency of the message response from the node. This weight is updated using a set of Hebbian-style learning rules, such that the network as a whole exhibits adaptive self-organizing behavior. The principal result is the finding that by limiting the connection neighborhood within the overlay topology, the resulting P2P network can be made highly resilient to targeted attacks on high-degree nodes, while maintaining search efficiency.

협력적 필터링 기법을 이용한 P2P 모바일 에이전트 기반 사용자 컨텍스트 인식 및 서비스 처리 구조

컨텍스트 인식은 유비쿼터스 컴퓨팅 환경에서 사용자의 주변환경과 상태에 따라 양질의 서비스를 제공할 수 있는 중요한 요소이다. 컨텍스트 인식을 위한 정보 수집 도구로는 이동이 편리한 소형 모바일 장치와 그 안에 내장된 모바일 에이전트를 이용하고 있다. 현재 모바일 에이전트는 각 사용자의 컨텍스트 정보를 수집하고 인식하는데 많은 시간과 비용이 소모되고 있다. 이에 모바일 에이전트의 부하를 줄이고, 빠른 시간내에 사용자의 컨텍스트 정보 인식을 위한 구조에 대한 연구가 필요하다. 본 논문에서는 모바일 에이전트에 협력적 필터링 기법과 P2P 에이전트를 혼합한 P2P 모바일 에이전트 구조를 제안한다. 제안한 구조는 동일 지역내에서 각 사용자의 컨텍스트 정보를 분석하고, 비슷한 선호도를 갖는 사용자들로 그룹핑하며, 그룹핑된 사용자는 P2P 모바일 에이전트를 이용하여 정보를 공유한다. 또한 이 구조는 사용자들의 행위와 서비스를 지속적으로 관찰 및 학습하여 새로운 상관 관계를 측정하도록 하였다. Context-awareness is an important element that can provide service of good quality according to users' surrounding environment and status in ubiquitous computing environment. Information gathering tools for context-awareness use small size mobile devices which have easy movement and a mobile agent in mobile device. Now, Mobile agents are consuming much times and expense to collect and recognize each users' context information. Therefore, needs research about structure for users' context information awareness in early time to reduce mobile agent's load. This paper proposes a P2P mobile agent structure that mikes filtering techniques and a P2P agent in mobile agent. The proposed structure analyzes each user's context information in same area, and groups users who have similar preference degree. Grouped users share information using a P2P mobile agent. Also this structure observes and learns to continue on users' action and service, and measures new interrelation.

Authentication with P2P Agents

The problem of network security is now heavily focused on user and agent authentication. In particular, higher levels of automated management and autonomous behaviour are economically necessary within security services. This work focuses on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network architecture in support of an authentication service application. The paper considers whether the key properties of P2P systems, such as scalability, robustness and resilience, may be of significant value in the context of designing a secure agent-based user authentication service. The task of authenticating legitimate network users across distributed systems and services remains a challenging process. The proposed solution is to use a distributed agent-based application to address the process of client authentication and the maintenance of user credentials. Using an agent-to-agent platform, an autonomous and scalable defence mechanism has been constructed. The agent architecture provides a number of security services with the goal of automating the process of user authentication and trust management. In particular, the agents handle all password, encryption keys and certificate management.

Peer-to-Peer Technology Business and Service Models: Risks and Opportunities

The sharing and downloading of information goods over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has become a common way for millions of Internet users worldwide to find and trade music, software and other digital media files. In order for P2P networks to evolve into efficient economic marketplaces several issues need to be addressed. Peers may act in different roles, they can be contributors or consumers of the traded goods. Intermediaries may or may not emerge to better facilitate the trade. This paper discusses supplier risks and business opportunities arising from P2P service models. We propose some participation incentive mechanisms to mitigate free riding risk and improve the overall economic efficiency of P2P trading services and briefly outline how these could be implemented as software features in P2P application systems. This paper also examines the roles of P2P agents and concludes with a three-layer model that describes P2P services at the technology application level, the community application level, and th...