Agent-oriented Software Engineering Research Articles

SUPPORTING AGENT-ORIENTED MODELLING WITH UML

Software engineering relies on the possibility of describing a system at different levels of abstraction. Agent-oriented software engineering introduces a new level of abstraction, that we called agent level, to allow the architect modelling a system in terms of interacting agents. This level of abstraction is not supported by an accepted set of tools and notations yet, even if a number of proposals are available. This paper introduces: (i) An UML-based notation capable of modelling a system at the agent level and (ii) A development framework, called ParADE, exploiting such a notation. The notation we propose is formalized in terms of a UML profile and it supports the realisation of artefacts modelling two basic concepts of the agent level, i.e., the architecture of the multi-agent system and the ontology followed by agents. The choice of formalising our notation in terms of a UML profile allows using it with any off-the-shelf CASE tool. The ParADE framework takes advantage of this choice by providing a code generator capable of producing skeletons of FIPA-compliant agents from XMI files of agent-oriented models. The developer is requested to complete the generated skeletons exploiting the services that ParADE and the underlying agent platform provide.

Multivariate Bayesian regression applied to the problem of network security

AbstractAn Erratum has been published for this article in Journal of Forecasting 23(6): 461 (2004).This paper examines the problem of intrusion in computer systems that causes major breaches or allows unauthorized information manipulation. A new intrusion‐detection system using Bayesian multivariate regression is proposed to predict such unauthorized invasions before they occur and to take further action. We develop and use a multivariate dynamic linear model based on a unique approach leaving the unknown observational variance matrix distribution unspecified. The result is simultaneous forecasting free of the Wishart limitations that is proved faster and more reliable. Our proposed system uses software agent technology. The distributed software agent environment places an agent in each of the computer system workstations. The agent environment creates a user profile for each user. Every user has his or her profile monitored by the agent system and according to our statistical model prediction is possible. Implementation aspects are discussed using real data and an assessment of the model is provided. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Feature-based assembly model for integration in computer-aided assembly

This paper proposes a real good approach for a computer-aided assembly (CAA) system, which makes use of software agent technology and deals with a representation of assembly features. The context of our work is the study of the engineering and manufacturing system based on the assembly features. The system never thinks like an assembly engineer, but makes it possible to support engineers in doing creative methodology, and producing new ideas better than the conventional CAA.

Agent-Based Enhanced Workflow in Manufacturing Information Systems: the MAKE-IT Approach

Manufacturing is one of the main fields of application of software agent technology. In this respect, several current research projects focus on workflow management, with the aim of an integration and coordination among plant and business activities. In section I, the state of the art is presented, relevant to software agents and to the technologies currently adopted in the exploitation of agents in manufacturing information systems. In section II, the possibility of developing real-time agents at the shop floor level is investigated. In section III, the MAKE-IT (Manufacturing Agents in a Knowledgebased Environment driven by Internet Technologies) approach to agent-based enhancedworkflowin manufacturing information system is presented. Finally section IV presents our conclusions.

Agent orientation in software engineering

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is rapidly emerging in response to urgent needs in both software engineering and agent-based computing. While these two disciplines coexisted without remarkable interaction until some years ago, today there is rich and fruitful interaction among them and various approaches are available that bring together techniques, concepts and ideas from both sides. This article offers a guide to the broad body of literature on AOSE. The guide, which is intended to be of value to both researchers and practitioners, is structured according to key issues and key topics that arise when dealing with AOSE: methods and frameworks for requirements engineering, analysis, design, and implementation; languages for programming, communication and coordination and ontology specification; and development tools and platforms.

Increasing the reliability of control systems with agent technology

This paper describes how Software Agents technology can be used to increase the reliability of a control system. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are established as means to exercise supervisory control over an industrial process. Software Agent technology can improve SCADA systems as it allows distribution, which inherently promotes redundancy, and modularity, which promotes versatility.

Software agents and wireless E-commerce

Software agent technology will become a necessity to e-commerce (traditional or wireless) rather than luxury. We propose an agent-based environment, which we call E-Commerce through Wireless Devices (E-CWE), that allows users, stationary or mobile, to submit their requests for services offered by providers. The E-CWE environment consists of a reception platform including a repository of service descriptions. A supervisor-agent is in charge of this repository. Acting on behalf of their users, user-agents are dynamically created in this platform. In the E-CWE environment, security is achieved in two steps: securing service access and securing payment. A prototype of a Travel Planning Agent (TPA) system is proposed to evaluate the performance of the environment.

A Conceptual Model of an Intelligent Catalog Search System

In this article, we review the role of electronic catalogs in developing electronic commerce applications within the context of consumer buying behavior models. These models view the customer buying experience as a stagewise process, starting with need identification and proceeding through product and merchant brokering to negotiation, purchase, and service. Electronic product catalogs can be used in all of the just mentioned stages; however, their most common use is in the product and merchant brokering stages. From a customer's perspective, however, the variety and heterogeneity of electronic catalogs create a major problem in integrating information from various sources. There have been several attempts to overcome this problem using architectures and protocols that enable interoperabilty of electronic catalogs using software-agent technology. The extant architectures and protocols emphasize semantic integration of different catalogs as a mean for achieving interoperability. In this article, we expand previous work on this topic and propose a comprehensive agent-based conceptual model of an intelligent catalog search system (ICSS) [1]. The ICSS incorporates knowledge to analyze, enhance, filter, and synthesize a raw query and replies provided by various types of electronic catalogs and intercatalog brokering systems. The main benefit of the proposed architecture is an increase in the ability of a customer to locate, compare, and evaluate relevant product offerings in a network of heterogeneous electronic product catalogs.

Healthcare applications based on software agents.

Healthcare has been recognised as one of the most important areas for enterprise applications and services. Presently, information technologists and systems engineers all over the world are working towards achieving better efficiency and quality of service in various sectors of healthcare, such as telemedicine, hospital management, patient-care, and treatment. This paper addresses the issue of more effective and efficient handling of doctor-patient relationship. The idea is to use Software Agent technology to extend the patient-doctor relationship beyond the physical and logistical limitation of face-to-face consultations in patient management. Software agents can provide an extension of the doctor by interacting with the patient via a computer and the Internet. The agent is visualised as an anthropomorphic figure to further enhance the patient interaction.

A framework for linking distributed simulations using software agents

The paper presents the basic ideas behind the use of software agent technology for distributed simulation and data assimilation. A software agent is an autonomous computer program that operates on behalf of someone or something. A mobile agent has the ability to migrate during execution from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network, while a stationary agent executes only on the system on which it began execution. To understand the role of agents in distributed simulation, note that simulations often operate on static datasets and data sources. Many simulations would produce more accurate results if they could access dynamically changing data from other sources, such as sensors or even other simulations. From the perspective of one simulation, other simulations are data resources, producing information possibly relevant to the past, present, or future of the system being modeled. Software agents allow dynamic linking between distributed simulations and efficient monitoring of and access to remote data resources. Specifically, they conserve bandwidth, provide custom operations without precompiling or preloading, and adapt to support disconnected operations. The paper describes the development of a software agent based framework for dynamically linking distributed simulations and other remote data resources. The framework called ABELS (Agent-Based Environment for Linking Simulations) allows independently designed simulations to communicate seamlessly with no a priori knowledge of the details of other simulations and data sources. We discuss our architecture and current implementation developed using the D'Agents mobile agent system.

Countermeasures for mobile agent security

Security is an important issue for the widespread deployment of applications based on software agent technology. It is generally agreed that without the proper countermeasures in place, use of agent-based applications will be severely impeded. However, not all applications require the same set of countermeasures, nor can they depend entirely on the agent system to provide them. Instead, countermeasures are applied commensurate with the anticipated threat profile and intended security objectives for the application. While countermeasures typically include any action, device, procedure, technique, or other measure that reduces the vulnerability of or threat to a system, our focus here is specifically on technical mechanisms, as opposed to procedural or non-technical measures. Such countermeasures can be integrated directly into an agent system, or incorporated into the design of an agent to supplement the capabilities of an underlying agent system. This paper gives an overview of the threats associated with software agent systems and their technical countermeasures, including the strengths and weaknesses of the techniques involved. Emphasis is on mobile software agents, since they typically face a more severe set of threats than do static agents and, therefore, demand more rigorous countermeasures.

A Multilingual Virtual Environment for Every-Citizen Learning Communities

Every-citizen learning communities have been intended to provide a virtual environment widely open to large and diverse groups of people who have the will to learn and to share their knowledge with others across the networks. However, the diversity of community members causes language problem in communication and knowledge representation. In this paper, we discuss design issues of the backbone system that enables learning communities really available to every-citizen around the world, by applying software agent technology. We further propose and develop a multilingual virtual environment based on MOO (Multi user dimension Object-Oriented), a so-called text-based social virtual reality, as the backbone for every-citizen learning communities.

Feature-Based Assembly Model for Integration in Computer-Aided Assembly

This paper proposes a good approach for a computer-aided assembly (CAA) system, which makes use of software agent technology and deals with a representation of assembly features. The context of our work is the study of the engineering and manufacturing system based on the assembly features. The system never thinks like an assembly engineer, but makes it possible to support engineers in creative methodology, and producing new ideas better than the conventional CAA.

A methodology for the development of software agent based interoperable telemedicine systems: a tele-electrocardiography perspective.

Telemedicine involves the integration of information, human-machine, and healthcare technologies. Because different modalities of patient care require applications running on heterogeneous computing environment, software interoperability is a major issue in telemedicine. Software agent technology provides a range of promising techniques to solve this problem. This article discusses the development of a methodology for the design of interoperable telemedicine systems (illustrated with a tele-electrocardiography application). Software interoperability between different applications can be modeled at different levels of abstraction such as physical interoperability, data-type interoperability, specification-level interoperability, and semantic interoperability. Software agents address the issue of software interoperability at semantic level. A popular object-oriented software development methodology - unified modeling language (UML) - has been used for this development. This research has demonstrated the feasibility of the development of agent-based interoperable telemedicine systems. More research is needed before widespread deployment of such systems can take place.

Communications Systems Driven by Software Agent Technology

The application of software agent technology to the management of communications' infrastructures is a challenging domain as it requires management on different time scales and has many interacting components. This paper looks at the potential benefits that may be gained from the application of agent technology to communications systems and surveys recent developments. Recent work using distributed network management by adopting co-operating and self-interested agent models of collaboration are described. The paper provides an introduction to the authors' perceptions of agent technology, followed by a discussion of some issues that need to be addressed for agent technology to be of practical use in the communications domain. Following sections describe how agent technology has been used for network management, legacy telecommunications systems, and telecommunications integration. The authors discuss how the emerging standards for agent technology can be used in an applied situation of providing a virtual private network and mobile agent technology used for fully distributed network control.

V-Market: A framework for agent e-commerce systems

Software agent technology is still an emerging technology, and as such, agent based software design is still in its infancy. Software agents have just started to be used in the e-commerce domain, and they are already beginning to create a series of new possibilities for this arena. Agents can be used to automate, as well as to enhance many stages of the traditional consumer-buying behavior process. This paper proposes a software engineering approach to the design of agent mediated e-commerce systems, through the definition of an object-oriented framework. The paper presents the underlying concepts, and the architecture of the environment, showing how it allows developers to customize virtual marketplaces, and to define transaction categories on demand, incorporating many possible products and services that can be traded online.

Agent technology in communications systems: an overview

Telecommunications infrastructures are a natural application domain for the distributed software agent paradigm. The authors clarify the potential application of software agent technology in legacy and future communications systems, and provide an overview of publicly available research on software agents used for communications management. The authors focus on the intelligent agent type of software agent, although the paper also reviews the reasons why mobile agents have made an impact in this domain. The author's objective is to describe some of the intricacies of using the software agent approach for the management of communications systems. The paper is in four main sections. The first section provides a brief introduction to software agent technology. The second section considers general problems of network management and the reasons why software agents may provide a suitable solution. The third section reviews some selected research on agents in a telecommunications management framework. The final section concludes the paper by discussing some of the problems encountered and some future directions for further research.

A perspective on software agents research

This paper sets out, ambitiously, to present a brief reappraisal of software agents research. Evidently, software agent technology has promised much. However, some five years after the word ‘agent’ came into vogue in the popular computing press, it is perhaps time the efforts in this fledgling area are thoroughly evaluated with a view to refocusing future efforts. We do not pretend to have done this in this paper—but we hope we have sown the first seeds towards a thorough first five-year report on the software agents area. The paper contains some strong views not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community.The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors only, and do not necessarily reflect the views of our organisation.

An agent-based framework for building decision support systems

This paper proposes a framework for building decision support systems using software agent technology to support organizations characterized by physically distributed, enterprise-wide, heterogeneous information systems. Intelligent agents have offered tremendous potential in supporting well-defined tasks such as information filtering, data mining and data conversion. However, the use of intelligent agents to support decisions has not been explored and merits serious consideration. This paper proposes a taxonomy of agent characteristics that can be used to help identify agents to support different types of decision tasks. We advocate a goal-directed, behavior-based architecture for building cooperative decision support using agents. We look at the development of agent-based DSS as being a process of putting together a coordinated workflow of collaborating agents that is able to support a problem-solving process. The methodology is illustrated by a selection of intelligent agents to support Crisis Action Procedures in a large organization.

A Knowledge Processing System for Data Service Network Design

The knowledge reuse and fusion/transformation system (KRAFT) is research prototype software for combining and transforming constraint-based knowledge. It is being developed in collaboration with BT by three UK universities — Aberdeen, Cardiff and Liverpool. The KRAFT system is designed to help its users to locate relevant data and constraint knowledge held in distributed heterogeneous data and knowledge bases, convert this knowledge to generate a required composite problem specification, and exploit appropriate constraint solvers in solving the specified problem. The system architecture utilises intelligent software agent technology in the form of wrapper, facilitator and mediator agents for co-operative knowledge processing, and also a shared data model and a shared ontology as the basis for knowledge exchange. This paper describes the application of KRAFT in the design of data service networks for BT. It presents, in turn, an introduction including an overview of the KRAFT system architecture, a description of the BT network design test application scenario, the application of KRAFT to this scenario, conclusions and further work.