Agent Platform Research Articles

Echographic and physical characterization of albumin-stabilized nanobubbles

There has been increasing interest in using nanobubbles (NBs) for ultrasound mediated drug delivery as well as for ultrasound imaging. Albumin NBs are especially attractive for its potential of becoming a versatile platform for drug carriers and molecular targeted therapy agents. However, physical characterization of NBs is generally considered to be difficult due to various technical issues, such as concentration limitations, nanoparticle contamination, etc. In the present study, we measured the size distribution, concentration and weight density of albumin stabilized NBs by means of multiple nanoscale measurement modalities. Laser nanoparticle tracking analysis, multicolor flow cytometry, resonance mass evaluation showed consistent measurement results of the NBs with low mass weight density and diameter size ranging from 100 nm to 400 nm. Furthermore, the NB solution showed excellent images by high frequency ultrasound (30–50 MHz) in flow model acoustic phantoms. The NBs also induced acute cell disruption by low intensity ultrasound (0.8 W/cm2) irradiation. We successfully fabricated and characterized albumin stabilized NBs which could serve as an effective platform for future theranositic agents.

Basket of baskets (BoB): A modular, open label, phase II, multicenter study to evaluate targeted agents in molecularly selected populations with advanced solid tumors.

TPS3151 Background: Basket trials with targeted agents can show high response rates for tumors with specific molecular profiles, granting extension of the label of some drugs. In other cases, study results were disappointing, likely due to the rarity of molecular alterations, limits in trial design and the difficulties in applying molecular tumor profiling in the clinical setting. Methods: Basket of Baskets (BoB), NCT03767075, aims to bridge the gap between Academic Genomics and clinical applications (ready-to market multi-marker Companion Diagnostics) by providing a sustainable and adaptable (to new technologies, markers, and therapeutic agents) platform for co-development of drug/companion diagnostic. BoB is a novel platform trial from Cancer Core Europe, a recently established sustainable European network for innovative cancer research. This protocol has two parts: (1) Part A includes a molecular profiling program for subjects with advanced solid tumors (iPROFILER), a variant annotation tool, and a molecular tumor board to select the most appropriate treatment. It also enables testing/developing companion diagnostics linked with the therapeutic part (part B). (2) Part B includes iBASKET, a modular multi-arm basket trial for subjects with tumors harboing selected molecular alterations. Each module is focused on a certain molecular pathway or on certain molecular alterations that may confer sensitivity to the study drug or study drug combination evaluated in that module/arm. The current version of iBASKET (Module 1- Atezolizumab in genomically-selected patients) is open for enrollment for patients with advanced neoplasms bearing one of the following alterations: Arm 1A: BRCA1 or BRCA2; Arm 1B: MLH1, MSH2, MSH6, PMS2; Arm 1C: POLE, POLD1 mutations; Arm 1D: hypermutated tumors; Arm 1E: other mutations in DNA-repair genes; Arm 1F: PDL1 gene amplification. All patients enrolled in Module 1 will receive single-agent atezolizumab. New Modules for genomically selected populations can be added through amendments. Our final aim is to achieve drug repurposing of treatments, co-develop multi-marker companion diagnostics and a large database of knowledge in Precision Medicine. Clinical trial information: NCT03767075.

Programming Agents by Their Social Relationships: A Commitment-Based Approach

Multiagent systems can be seen as an approach to software engineering for the design and development of complex, distributed software. Generally speaking, multiagent systems provide two main abstractions for modularizing the software: the agents and the environment where agents operate. In this paper, we argue that also the social relationships among the agents should be expressed explicitly and become first-class objects both at design- and at development-time. In particular, we propose to represent social relationships as commitments that are reified as resources in the agents’ environment and can be directly manipulated by the agents via standard operations. We demonstrate that this view induces an agent programming schema that is substantially independent of the actual agent platform, provided that commitments are available as explained. The paper exemplifies the schema on two agent platforms, JADE and JaCaMo, where commitments are made available via the 2COMM library.

Innovation Adoption in Online Travel Agent Platforms

This paper analyzes the strategic opportunities enabled by the adoption of innovative features offered by a platform to partner firms. These features are part of a managerial innovation process and, if properly implemented, can enrich the whole platform ecosystem. Our analysis sheds empirical light on the antecedents of platform-enabled innovation adoption. In particular, we consider a new form of online discount offered by Booking.com, which renders the lodgings more prominent in the eyes of customers. This enables us to explore the role of heterogeneity in characteristics that makes lodgings more likely to embrace innovative practises. The empirical analysis indicates that the propensity to adopt this type of managerial innovation is positively affected by ratings and user perception, as well as online sales experience and chain affiliation. Conversely, we find that the type of lodging does not significantly affect the propensity to adopt the innovative discount feature.

A Heading Maintaining Oriented Compression Algorithm for GPS Trajectory Data

away from the underlying programming language in favour of using graphical means of programming, such as wizards and statecharts. Platforms. Closed frameworks such as DESIRE, strongly based on a platform, provide more complete solutions than others such as Jadex or TuCSoN. They usually offer an agent architecture and a system model, very useful for novel developers, together with the communication infrasA SURVEY OF LANGUAGES AND PLATFORMS. . . Informatica 30 (2006) 33–44 41 tructure and a range of robust services, such as directory facilitators, agent management services, and monitoring facilities. As a drawback, closed frameworks limit the development. For example, the design approach of the framework may not fit certain domain problems. Perhaps that is the reason why most researchers tend to use more open solutions. Currently, the most popular solution is to use JADE as underlying agent infrastructure combined with some other (higher-level) approach to program the agents’ behaviour. When dealing with more general frameworks (rather than tied to a platform), their use (i.e., defining the agents that will run within it, together with the required services and resources) should be automated as much as possible, in part to free the developer from low-level details (e.g. location of the configuration files, their concrete syntax, etc.). Despite this, few existing frameworks have IDE support. Concerning the paradigm of communication used, there are several on offer, often being an important issue when choosing which framework to adopt. TuCSoN is representative of tuple-centred communication, JADE of message passing, and DESIRE of data flow among processes. The various approaches mentioned along this survey indicate that there is still much work to be done. Among the major challenges faced by this research community are: – The conception and development of specialised debugging tools, in particular for cognitive agent languages; – The integration of agent tools into existing IDEs, rather than starting from scratch; – The separation of MAS frameworks from agent platforms, so that each framework can be used for deploying systems on a variety of platforms. – The dissemination of the MAS programming paradigm, so that programmers have a better understanding of its foundations as well as practical characteristics. We believe that the recent developments surveyed here show a lively interest in this area of research. Despite the large number of open issues and challenges, we expect that the experience gathered in developing MAS with these tools will take us closer to a more mature programming paradigm. Arguably, this is one of the few concrete ways for allowing wider audiences to use in practice, and in a systematic way, the various techniques that the MAS research community has developed over the last two decades.

A Heading Maintaining Oriented Compression Algorithm for GPS Trajectory Data

away from the underlying programming language in favour of using graphical means of programming, such as wizards and statecharts. Platforms. Closed frameworks such as DESIRE, strongly based on a platform, provide more complete solutions than others such as Jadex or TuCSoN. They usually offer an agent architecture and a system model, very useful for novel developers, together with the communication infrasA SURVEY OF LANGUAGES AND PLATFORMS. . . Informatica 30 (2006) 33–44 41 tructure and a range of robust services, such as directory facilitators, agent management services, and monitoring facilities. As a drawback, closed frameworks limit the development. For example, the design approach of the framework may not fit certain domain problems. Perhaps that is the reason why most researchers tend to use more open solutions. Currently, the most popular solution is to use JADE as underlying agent infrastructure combined with some other (higher-level) approach to program the agents’ behaviour. When dealing with more general frameworks (rather than tied to a platform), their use (i.e., defining the agents that will run within it, together with the required services and resources) should be automated as much as possible, in part to free the developer from low-level details (e.g. location of the configuration files, their concrete syntax, etc.). Despite this, few existing frameworks have IDE support. Concerning the paradigm of communication used, there are several on offer, often being an important issue when choosing which framework to adopt. TuCSoN is representative of tuple-centred communication, JADE of message passing, and DESIRE of data flow among processes. The various approaches mentioned along this survey indicate that there is still much work to be done. Among the major challenges faced by this research community are: – The conception and development of specialised debugging tools, in particular for cognitive agent languages; – The integration of agent tools into existing IDEs, rather than starting from scratch; – The separation of MAS frameworks from agent platforms, so that each framework can be used for deploying systems on a variety of platforms. – The dissemination of the MAS programming paradigm, so that programmers have a better understanding of its foundations as well as practical characteristics. We believe that the recent developments surveyed here show a lively interest in this area of research. Despite the large number of open issues and challenges, we expect that the experience gathered in developing MAS with these tools will take us closer to a more mature programming paradigm. Arguably, this is one of the few concrete ways for allowing wider audiences to use in practice, and in a systematic way, the various techniques that the MAS research community has developed over the last two decades.

Mobile Agent Platform based Wallet for Preventing Double Spending in Offline e-Cash

Electronic cash (or e-cash) research has been going on for more than three decades since it was first proposed. Various schemes and methods are proposed to improve privacy and secu-rity in e-cash, but there is one security issue that less discussed mainly in offline e-cash, namely, double-spending. Generally, the mechanism to deal with double-spending in offline e-cash is performing double-spending identification when depositing the coin. Even though the mechanism is successful in identifying double-spender, but it cannot prevent double-spending. This paper proposes the Mobile Agent Platform based Wallet (MAPW) to overcome the double-spending issue in offline e-cash. MAPW uses the autonomy and cooperation of agents to give protection against malicious agent, counterfeit coin and duplicate coin. This model has been verified using Colored Petri Nets (CPN) and has proven to be successful in preventing double-spending, and overcoming malicious agent, and counterfeit coins.

Indexing the Event Calculus: Towards practical human-readable Personal Health Systems.

Personal Health Systems (PHS) are mobile solutions tailored to monitoring patients affected by chronic non communicable diseases. In general, a patient affected by a chronic disease can generate large amounts of events: for example, in Type 1 Diabetic patients generate several glucose events per day, ranging from at least 6 events per day (under normal monitoring) to 288 per day when wearing a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) that samples the blood every 5 minutes for several days. Just by itself, without considering other physiological parameters, it would be impossible for medical doctors to individually and accurately follow every patient, highlighting the need of simple approaches towards querying physiological time series. Achieving this with current technology is not an easy task, as on one hand it cannot be expected that medical doctors have the technical knowledge to query databases and on the other hand these time series include thousands of events, which requires to re-think the way data is indexed. Anyhow, handling data streams efficiently is not enough. Domain experts' knowledge must be explicitly included into PHSs in a way that it can be easily readed and modified by medical staffs. Logic programming represents the perfect programming paradygm to accomplish this task. In this work, an Event Calculus-based reasoning framework to standardize and express domain-knowledge in the form of monitoring rules is suggested, and applied to three different use cases. However, if online monitoring has to be achieved, the reasoning performance must improve dramatically. For this reason, three promising mechanisms to index the Event Calculus Knowledge Base are proposed. All of them are based on different types of tree indexing structures: k-d trees, interval trees and red-black trees. The paper then compares and analyzes the performance of the three indexing techniques, by computing the time needed to check different type of rules (and eventually generating alerts), when the number of recorded events (e.g. values of physiological parameters) increases. The results show that customized jREC performs much better when the event average inter-arrival time is little compared to the checked rule time-window. Instead, where the events are more sparse, the use of k-d trees with standard EC is advisable. Finally, the Multi-Agent paradigm helps to wrap the various components of the system: the reasoning engines represent the agent minds, and the sensors are its body. The said agents have been developed in MAGPIE, a mobile event based Java agent platform.

Development of agent-oriented software components to retrieve the marketing information from the web

The article is devoted to researching the processes of extracting marketing information from the Web space. Conclusions are drawn on the need to introduce an information marketing system into modern business activities. A decision has been taken to develop software for the collection and analysis of marketing information. Identified and analyzed the main problems of collecting marketing information in the Web space. External systems for extracting and processing marketing information from the Web space were considered. During the analysis of the subject area, functional and non-functional requirements for the software being developed were formulated. Requirements for the selection of technologies for the development of an information system were defined. The analysis of software development technologies is carried out and the approach to the development of a software component is chosen. Such approaches to software development as: object-oriented programming, service-oriented architecture, component-oriented programming, agent-oriented programming were analyzed. A decision has been made to use the agent three-tier architecture in software development. The most commonly used programming languages in programming systems were: Java, KIF, KQML, AgentSpeak, April, TeleScript, Tcl / Tk, Oz. Analyzed such popular agent platforms and their functions as: JADE, Cougaar, ZEUS, Jason. For the development of software, the JADE platform was chosen, its classes, methods and interfaces were examined. The advantages and peculiarities of the SOLID principle are analyzed. In detail, the levels of the CLEAN architecture are examined. And also explained the possibilities of software implementation of this architecture. A software architecture was developed for the data collection system. In accordance with the requirements, a selection of software development tools has been made. It was decided to use the programming language Java, Spring Framework, GoF design pattern, the template Dependency Injection, SOLID and CLEAN architectural principles. A software component was developed for marketing information gathering systems, which allows to optimize this process. The limitations and ways to improve the software system are analyzed.

A novel trust-scoring system using trustability co-efficient of variation for identification of secure agent platforms.

Mobile Agent systems are prevalent in Distributed Environment due to the autonomy and adaptability in diversified situations. Mobile Agents are capable of movement from one platform to another and hence it is a need to ensure the safety of the Mobile Agent during the phase of transit. Since Mobile Agents are capable of deciding their itinerary dynamically, a decision support system which helps to ensure the trustworthiness of a platform would complement the decision. A Trust Scoring System is therefore proposed to measure the trustworthiness of a platform based on a metric termed Trust Score. Trust Score varies dynamically with respect to time and is based on a function comprising of five parameters namely Persistence, Competence, Reputation, Credibility and Integrity. In order to reduce the computational latency, another metric named Trust Rank for platforms, based on Trustability co-efficient of variation is introduced. The experimentation is done in cloud environment with platforms located at different geographic regions. The performance is evaluated in terms of response time and accuracy of decision. From the experimental results, it is evident that the Trust Ranking mechanism consumes less response time and improves the accuracy of decision of Mobile Agents during their itineraries, compared to that of the prototype system that uses Trust Score alone as a measure of decision-making.

Development and Application of a Real-Time Testbed for Multiagent System Interoperability: A Case Study on Hierarchical Microgrid Control

This paper presents the development and application of a real-time testbed for multiagent system interoperability. As utility independent private microgrids are installed constantly, standardized interoperability frameworks are required to define behavioral models of the individual agents for expandability and plug-and-play operation. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive hybrid agent framework combining the foundation for intelligent physical agents (FIPAs), IEC 61850, and data distribution service (DDS) standards. The IEC 61850 logical node concept is extended using FIPA-based agent communication language with application specific attributes and deliberative behavior modeling capability. The DDS middleware is adopted to enable a real-time publisher-subscriber interoperability mechanism between platforms. The proposed multi-agent framework was validated in a laboratory-based testbed involving developed intelligent electronic device prototypes and actual microgrid setups. Experimental results were demonstrated for both decentralized and distributed control approaches. Secondary and tertiary control levels of a microgrid were demonstrated for decentralized hierarchical control case study. A consensus-based economic dispatch case study was demonstrated as a distributed control example. It was shown that the developed agent platform is industrially applicable for actual smart grid field deployment.

Engineered Nanoporous Anodic Alumina Structures for the Development of Advanced Sensing and Drug Delivery Systems

Nanoporous anodic alumina (NAA) is a semiconductor material with interesting physical, mechanical, chemical and optical properties [1]. NAA is formed by the electrochemical etching of aluminum and presents a self-ordered hexagonal pore distribution with tunable pore diameters, pore lengths and interpore distances (figure 1) [2]. The high effective surface area of NAA (hundreds of m2/cm3) makes it a versatile and interesting platform for loading active agents like drugs or molecules as pores are used as reservoirs [3]. Based on this principle, we present here the use of NAA to develop advanced drug delivery systems and gated materials for biosensing applications. The development of a new generation of local and selective drug delivery platforms with sustained release profiles is necessary to overcome the disadvantages of conventional treatments (generally oral or intravenous administrations) with considerable adverse effects [4]. The high effective surface area of NAA makes it an ideal material for drug delivery applications: the pores are nanocontainers with regular and controlled structural characteristics where active agents like drugs or molecules can be loaded [5]. Besides, the surface of NAA can be easily functionalized to be selective for specific molecules and covered with biodegradable, chemical, or pH responsive agents to trigger and regulate the release [6]. The pore geometry is one of the most important factors for the drug loading and for the release profile. Three-dimensional pore structures, with complex pore geometries and increasing surface area are promising morphologies for sustained drug release. However, their fabrication can be expensive and difficult. NAA, readily and cost-effectively fabricated by electrochemical anodization, permits obtaining elaborate and reproducible three dimensional pore geometries for sustained drug release platforms (figure 1) [7]. The biosensors we propose also follow the same concept of nanocontainer-pores introduced for the drug delivery systems. They consist of a NAA platform where the pores are loaded with a fluorophore and blocked by selected molecules that are able to recognize selectively a certain target analyte. The presence of the analyte unblocks the pores resulting in the selected release of the entrapped reporter. These gated biosensors based on NAA have high potential for the selective and sensitive detection of molecules that currently require complex and/or long processing. These nanostructured biosensors are very simple to prepare, easy to handle, reusable, and do not require trained personnel. We report here the use of these NAA biosensors for the selective detection of drugs and bacteria Figure 1

An embodied virtual agent platform for emotional Stroop effect experiments: A proof of concept

Abstract The need for experimentation of facial expression recognition in a more ecological manner necessitates the use of multimodal, interactive experimental stimuli. At the same time, the prerequisite of reproducibility of results and controlled conditions is still mandatory. An embodied conversational agent (ECA) is a pertinent framework that meets all these requirements. The VIB (Virtual Interactive Behavior) Platform is a SAIBA compliant system which supports the real-time generation of multimodal behavior for interacting with socio-emotional virtual agents. We created a new feature for this platform, namely VIB-Ex, which can be used for presenting real-time facial expressions and recording the user’s reaction time and interaction while exporting data for statistical purposes. In this paper, we present our proof of concept study in which a 3D male virtual character has been used to convey joyful or sad facial expressions. At the same time, the same character pronounced joyful or sad words in congruence or incongruence with its facial expression in order to trigger an emotional Stroop effect. Only 12 adults were sufficient in order to obtain an emotional Stroop effect within our virtual agent. The results of this study confirmed that the VIB-Ex platform can replicate a robust effect of psychological phenomena concerning recognition of facial expressions. VIB-Ex proves itself to be a suitable and a pertinent tool to perform experiments on a human’s automatic process of facial expression recognition. Finally, we discuss the possible future research topics with VIB-Ex to carry out other type of experiments in the field of social cognition.

An agent based architecture for high-risk neonate management at neonatal intensive care unit.

BackgroundIn recent years, the use of new tools and technologies has decreased the neonatal mortality rate. Despite the positive effect of using these technologies, the decisions are complex and uncertain in critical conditions when the neonate is preterm or has a low birth weight or malformations. There is a need to automate the high-risk neonate management process by creating real-time and more precise decision support tools.ObjectiveTo create a collaborative and real-time environment to manage neonates with critical conditions at the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) and to overcome high-risk neonate management weaknesses by applying a multi agent based analysis and design methodology as a new solution for NICU management.MethodsThis study was a basic research for medical informatics method development that was carried out in 2017. The requirement analysis was done by reviewing articles on NICU Decision Support Systems. PubMed, Science Direct, and IEEE databases were searched. Only English articles published after 1990 were included; also, a needs assessment was done by reviewing the extracted features and current processes at the NICU environment where the research was conducted. We analyzed the requirements and identified the main system roles (agents) and interactions by a comparative study of existing NICU decision support systems. The Universal Multi Agent Platform (UMAP) was applied to implement a prototype of our multi agent based high-risk neonate management architecture.ResultsLocal environment agents interacted inside a container and each container interacted with external resources, including other NICU systems and consultation centers. In the NICU container, the main identified agents were reception, monitoring, NICU registry, and outcome prediction, which interacted with human agents including nurses and physicians.ConclusionManaging patients at the NICU units requires online data collection, real-time collaboration, and management of many components. Multi agent systems are applied as a well-known solution for management, coordination, modeling, and control of NICU processes. We are currently working on an outcome prediction module using artificial intelligence techniques for neonatal mortality risk prediction. The full implementation of the proposed architecture and evaluation is considered the future work.

Nano-Phytosome: A Developing Platform for Herbal Anti-Cancer Agents in Cancer Therapy.

Cancer is one of the main causes of death in the world. It has not yet been cured in an efficient manner and has remained a major challenge for current chemotherapy. This review summarizes the latest investigations regarding the possible application of phytosome complexes for cancer therapy, their formulation techniques, and mechanism of transportation through phytosome. Nanotechnology opened a pioneer field in cancer therapy by modifying significant properties of drugs and their carriers. Nanotechnology utilizes various nanostructures to transport anti-cancer agents to the site of action. The greater stability of nanophytosomes is due to formation of chemical links between phospholipid molecules and phytoactive agents. Among several new drug delivery systems, phytosomes depict an advanced technology to deliver phytoactive compounds to the target site of action, and at present, several phytosome formulations are in clinical use. Potential anti-cancer properties of phytoconstituents are enhanced by phytosomal formulations.

Extending Half Life of H-Ferritin Nanoparticle by Fusing Albumin Binding Domain for Doxorubicin Encapsulation.

Nanoparticles based on the heavy chain of the human ferritin (HFn) are arousing growing interest in the field of drug delivery due to their exceptional characteristics. However, the unsatisfied plasma half life of HFn substantially limits its application as a delivery platform for antitumor agents. Herein we fused an albumin binding domain (ABD) variant that basically derives from the streptococcal protein G and possesses a long-acting characteristic in serum albumin to the N-terminus of the HFn for the aim of half-life extension. This ABD-HFn construct was highly expressed and fully self-assembled into symmetrical and spherical structure in E. coli bacteria. The purified ABD-HFn showed a similar particle size with wild-type HFn and also exhibited an extremely high binding affinity with human serum albumin. To evaluate the therapeutic potential of this ABD-HFn construct in terms of half-life extension, we encapsulated a model antitumor agent doxorubicin (DOX) into the ABD-HFn. Significantly outstanding loading efficacy of above 60 molecules doxorubicin for each ABD-HFn cage was achieved. The doxorubicin-loaded ABD-HFn nanoparticle was characterized and further compared with the recombinant HFn counterpart. The ABD-HFn/DOX nanoparticle showed dramatically improved stability and comparable cell uptake rate when compared with HFn/DOX counterpart. Pharmacokinetics study in Sprague-Dawley rats showed that ABD-HFn/DOX nanoparticle possessed significantly prolonged plasma half life of ∼17.2 h, exhibiting nearly 19 times longer than that of free doxorubicin and 12 times for HFn/DOX. These optimal results indicated that fusion with ABD will be a promising strategy to extend the half life for protein-based nanoparticles.

Perfluorocarbon-loaded polydopamine nanoparticles as ultrasound contrast agents.

A versatile platform for the development of new ultrasound contrast agents is demonstrated through a one-pot synthesis and fluorination of submicron polydopamine (PDA-F) nanoparticles. The fluorophilicity of these particles allows loading with perfluoropentane (PFP) droplets that display strong and persistent ultrasound contrast in aqueous suspension and ex vivo tissue samples. Contrast under continuous imaging by color Doppler persists for 1 h in 135 nm PDA-F samples, even at maximum clinical imaging power (MI = 1.9). Additionally, use of a Cadence Contrast Pulse Sequence (CPS) results in a non-linear response suitable for imaging at 0.5 mg mL-1. Despite the PFP volatility and the lack of a hollow core, PDA-F particles display minimal signal loss after storage for over a week. The ability to tune size, metal-chelation, and add covalently-bound organic functionality offers myriad possibilities for extending this work to multimodal imaging, targeted delivery, and therapeutic functionality.

N-grams Based Supervised Machine Learning Model for Mobile Agent Platform Protection against Unknown Malicious Mobile Agents

N-grams Based Supervised Machine Learning Model for Mobile Agent Platform Protection against Unknown Malicious Mobile Agents

A hybrid real-time agent platform for fault-tolerant, embedded applications

This paper describes an agent platform based on the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Systems Architecture, which, together with a highly fault tolerant, bio-inspired hardware architecture, aims to increase the reliability of future, low-cost satellites. To achieve the stringent operational requirements imposed by the real-time and resource-constrained environment of a satellite, the Hybrid Agent Real-Time Platform (HARP) distinguishes itself from other platforms in three areas. Firstly, the HARP middleware uses discrete processors, instead of virtual machines or interpreters, as its agent execution environment. This has the advantage of reducing the agency memory footprint and enabling agents to perform real-time tasks. Secondly, the HARP communication stack makes use of ISO-TP over CAN 2.0A as its transfer level protocol, cutting out resource-intensive layers such as HTTP and IIOP. In addition, the communication stack allows real-time CAN traffic to share the network and be given priority over Agent Communication Language messages. Finally, the HARP middleware embeds a peer-to-peer task manager in each agency, allowing systems which are built using the bio-inspired Artificial Stem Cell Architecture and HARP middleware to autonomously reconfigure in the event of failures. The detailed design of the HARP middleware is given, together with details of an implementation of the HARP middleware on a set of prototype satellite hardware. The performance and scaling potential of the middleware, determined through a set of physical experiments, provide evidence of the practical feasibility of the proposed architecture.

Run-time environment for the SARL agent-programming language: the example of the Janus platform

SARL is a general-purpose agent-oriented programming language. This language aims at providing the fundamental abstractions for dealing with concurrency, distribution, interaction, decentralization, reactivity, autonomy and dynamic reconfiguration that are usually considered as essential for implementing agent-based applications. Every programming language specifies an execution model. For SARL, this run-time model is supported by a SARL run-time environment. The goals of this paper are to highlight the key principles for creating a SARL run-time environment, and its concrete implementation into the Janus agent platform.