 |
 |
| Home | Search | Help |
|
Conference and Workshop Papers of Viviana MascardiThe downloadable publications on this web site are presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the owner of the copyright. Monitoring and Diagnosing Railway Signalling with Logic-Based Distributed Agents.V. Mascardi, D. Briola, M. Martelli, R. Caccia, C. Milani In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Computational Intelligence in Security for Information Systems, CISIS'08, E. Corchado, R. Zunino eds., Advances in Soft Computing Series, Springer-Verlag, 2008. This paper describes an ongoing project that involves DISI, the Computer Science Department of Genova University, and Ansaldo Segnalamento Ferroviario, the Italian leader in design and construction of signalling and automation systems for railway lines. We are implementing a multiagent system that monitors processes running in a railway signalling plant, detects functioning anomalies, provides diagnoses for explaining them, and early notifies problems to the Command and Control System Assistance. Due to the intrinsic rule-based nature of monitoring and diagnostic agents, we have adopted a logic-based language for implementing them.
Reasoning about Hand-Drawn Sketches: An Approach Based on Intelligent Software Agents.G. Casella, V. Deufemia, V. Mascardi, M. Martelli, G. Tortora In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Visual Information Systems, VISUAL'08, LNCS, Springer-Verlag, 2008.
DCaseLP: a Prototyping Environment for Multi-Language Agent Systems.V. Mascardi, M. Martelli, I. Gungui In Proceedings of the First Workshop on LAnguages, methodologies and Development tools for multi-agent systemS, LADS'007 Post-proceedings, M. Dastani, A. El Fallah Seghrouchni, J. Leite, P. Torroni eds., pages 139-155, LNCS 5118, Springer-Verlag, 2008.
This paper describes DCaseLP, a multi-language prototyping environment for Multi-Agent Systems. DCaseLP provides tools, languages, and
methodological suggestions for engineering a MAS prototype from the late requirement analysis to the prototype implementation and testing. Full support for
validating the MAS model by running the prototype in the JADE platform is
offered. DCaseLP and its ancestor, CaseLP, have been employed to develop
many applications in collaboration with Italian companies, thus demonstrating
the feasibility of the proposed approach.
Enhancing Communication inside Multi-Agent Systems - An Approach based on Alignment via Upper Ontologies.V. Mascardi, P. Rosso, V. Cordì In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Agents, Web-Services, and Ontologies -- Integrated Methodologies, MALLOW-AWESOME'007, M. Baldoni, C. Baroglio, V. Mascardi, eds., pagg. 92-107, 2007. This paper deals with a theoretical issue related to multi-agent system development and deployment, namely the need of a mechanism for aligning on- tologies owned by agents, in order to allow them to communicate in a profitable way. Our approach exploits upper ontologies, i.e., ontologies which describe very general concepts that are the same across all domains, as a "lingua franca" among agents. This approach may overcome some problems that arise in various real sce- narios, such as the impossibility for (or the lack of will of) an agent to disclose its own entire ontology to another agent, despite the need to communicate with it. In this paper we propose a comparison of seven existing upper ontologies, and an algorithm for aligning any two (or more) ontologies by exploiting an upper ontology as a bridge.
A Comparison of Upper OntologiesV. Mascardi, V. Cordì, P. Rosso In Proceedings of WOA, Workshop dagli Oggetti agli Agenti, M. Baldoni, A. Boccalatte, F. De Paoli, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, eds., Seneca Edizioni (Italy), pp. 55-64, 2007. Upper Ontologies are quickly becoming a key technology for integrating heterogeneous knowledge coming from different sources. In fact, they may be exploited as a "lingua franca" by intelligent software agents in all those scenarios where it is impossible (or there is no will) for an agent to disclose its own entire ontology to other agent, despite the need to communicate with it. This paper represents the very preliminary step towards the exploitation of Upper Ontologies as bridges for allowing intelligent software agents to align heterogeneous ontologies in an automatic way, where we analyse the most up-to-date state-of-the-art. In this paper we analyse 7 Upper Ontologies, namely BFO, Cyc, DOLCE, GFO, PROTON, Sowa's ontology, and SUMO, according to a set of standard software engineering criteria, and we synthesise our analysis in form of a comparative table. A summary of some existing comparisons drawn among subsets of the 7 Upper Ontologies that we deal with in this document, is also provided.
A Multi-Agent System for Hand-drawn Diagram Recognition.G. Casella, V. Deufemia, V. Mascardi. In Proceedings of the Nineth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR 2007, IEEE Computer Society, 2007. In this paper we present AgentSketch, an agent-based system for on-line recognition of hand-drawn diagrams. Agents are used for managing the activity of symbol recognizers and for providing efficient interpretations of the sketch to the user thanks to the use of contextual information for ambiguity resolution. The system can be applied to a variety of domains by providing recognizers of the symbols in that domain. A first experimental evaluation has been performed on the domain of UML use case diagrams to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
An Agent-Based and Context-Oriented Approach to Symbol Recognition in Diagrammatic Drawings.G. Casella, V. Deufemia, V. Mascardi. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, IWFHR 2006, G. Lorette ed., INRIA, 2006.
In the last two decades, one new technology, that of
agent-based systems, and one emerging research
discipline, that of on-line recognition of hand-drawn
diagrams, have gained wide attention and consensus.
Since the application of the agent technology to
disciplines where, traditionally, more standard
approaches are adopted, usually leads to valuable and
interesting results, we propose an agent-based system for
on-line recognition of hand-drawn diagrams. In our
system, agents are used 1) to manage the activity of
parsers implemented according to the grammar
formalism of Sketch Grammars, 2) to coordinate
themselves in order to provide efficient and precise
interpretations of the sketch to the user, and 3) to solve
ambiguities by exploiting contextual information.
Intelligent Agents that Reason about Web Services: a Logic Programming Approach.V. Mascardi, G. Casella. In Proceedings of the ICLP'06 Workshop Workshop on Applications of Logic Programming in the Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services, ALPSWS2006, A. Polleres, S. Decker, G. Gupta e J. de Bruijn eds., CEUR, pagg. 55-70, 2006.
The paper proposes to factor three leading edge technologies, namely
Web Services, Intelligent Agents, and Computational Logic, for implementing
logic-based agents that reason about interaction protocols specified using stan-
dard languages for Web Services.
A working multiagent system prototype, where agents implemented in Prolog
reason about protocols expressed in WS-BPEL, has been developed.
An Agent-Based Framework for Context-Driven Interpretation of Symbols in Diagrammatic Sketches.G. Casella, G. Costagliola, V. Deufemia, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, VL/HCC 2006, IEEE Computer Society, pagg. 73-80, 2006. Parsing hand-drawn diagrams is a definitely complex recognition problem. The input drawings are often intrinsically ambiguous, and require context to be interpreted in a correct way. Many existing sketch recognition systems avoid this problem by recognizing single segments or simple geometric shapes in a stroke. However, for a recognition system to be effective and precise, context must be exploited, and both the simplifications on the sketch features, and the constraints under which recognition may take place, must be reduced to the minimum. In this paper we present an agent-based framework for context-driven interpretation of symbols in diagrammatic sketches that heavily exploits contextual information for ambiguity resolution. Agents manage the activity of low-level hand-drawn symbol recognizers, that may be heterogeneous for better adapting to the characteristics of each symbol to be recognized, and coordinate themselves in order to exchange contextual information, thus leading to an efficient and precise interpretation of sketches.
Meta-modeling communication and interaction inside MAS's with ontologies.V. Cordì, V. Mascardi. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Formal Ontologies for Communicating Agents, part of ESSLLI 2006, European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information, FOCA 2006, R. Ferrario, N. Guarino, L. Prévot eds., 2006.
The need of a unifying meta-model for Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) in
general, and for the interaction and communication aspects involved in MASs in particular, has rapidly grown in the last three years, as demonstrated by many recent
papers and events.
The main idea behind meta-modeling is that different Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies and tools may turn out to be useful for engineering different aspects of the MAS, but no single methodology is good for everything. Taking
advantage of reusable "components" - or "fragments" - of existing AOSE methodologies, and integrating them according to a common meta-model, is becoming a widely
accepted approach.
This paper describes the communication and interaction portion of a "MAS meta-model ontology", developed taking six different AOSE methodologies and related
meta-models into account. The ontology, designed following well-established criteria and implemented using the tool Protégé, is aimed at helping the MAS designer in
finding the right method fragment to do the right thing, by answering queries such as
"What is a communicative act, and which methodologies use it?", "What is a message
according to the methodology XYZ?", "Which AOSE methodologies take Agent Interaction Protocols into account?".
CooWS: Adaptive BDI Agents meet Service-Oriented Programming - Extended VersionL. Bozzo, V. Mascardi, D. Ancona, P. Busetta. In Proceedings of the Third European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS'05), M. P. Gleizes, G. A. Kaminka, A. Nowe', S. Ossowski, K. Tuyls, K. Verbeeck eds., Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van Belie voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten Publisher, page 473, 2005 Mainstream research in Web Services is currently looking at two main aspects, namely formally describing interactions among services, and finding and combining services. Much work made in the intelligent agents area is being applied to these issues. In this paper, we investigate the application of agent research to Web Services from a different perspective, that is, procedural learning. The final objective is to enable an adaptive system (an agent in our terminology) to discover or being fed with knowledge concerning how to solve a specific set of problems in a specific software or physical environment. Our work is a very preliminary step into the issue, with the main objective of assessing how current Web Services technology can support a component, described in terms of beliefs, desires and intentions, dynamically adapting its behaviour to new environments.
BDI^ATL: An Alternating-time BDI Logic for Multiagent SystemsR. Montagna, G. Delzanno, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi. In Proceedings of the Third European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS'05), M. P. Gleizes, G. A. Kaminka, A. Nowe', S. Ossowski, K. Tuyls, K. Verbeeck eds., Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van Belie voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten Publisher, pages 214-223, 2005 Many logics for modelling beliefs, desires and intentions of agents, such as Rao and Georgeff's BDI logic and Wooldridge's LORA, are based on temporal logics like CTL/CTL* (Computational Tree Logic) in which the structure of time is branching in the future and linear in the past. Recently, many attempts have been made to define logics for BDI agents by using extensions of CTL. In this paper, we discuss BDIATL that is obtained by substituting ATL* (Alternating-Time Temporal Logic) to CTL* in Rao and Georgeff's logic. One of the main advantages of our approach is that in BDI^ATL we can express new commitment strategies that are more realistic than those proposed by Rao and Georgeff (and that could not be defined in their logic), since they take collaboration among agents into account. In particular, in this paper we discuss three variants of Rao and Georgeff's "open minded" commitment: "independent open minded", "optimistic open minded", and "pessimistic open minded", whose definition exploits the new features that ATL* adds to CTL*.
A Semantic Information Retrieval Advertisement and Policy Based System for a P2P NetworkG. Guerrini, V. Mascardi, M. Mesiti. In Proceedings of DBISP2P, 2005, to appear in the LNCS serie In this paper we propose a semantic based P2P system that incorporates peer sharing policies, which allow a peer to state, for each of the concepts it deals with, the conditions under which it is available to process requests related to that concept. The semantic routing approach, based on advertisements and peer behavior in answering previous requests, takes also into account sharing policies.
CooWS: Adaptive BDI Agents meet Service-Oriented ProgrammingL. Bozzo, V. Mascardi, D. Ancona, P. Busetta. In Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2005, Volume 2, P. Isaias and M. B. Nunes eds. IADIS Press, ISBN 972-8924-02-X, pagg. 205-209, 2005 Mainstream research in Web Services is currently looking at two main aspects, namely formally describing interactions among services, and finding and combining services. Much work made in the intelligent agents area is being applied to these issues. In this paper, we investigate the application of agent research to Web Services from a different perspective, that is, procedural learning. The final objective is to enable an adaptive system (an agent in our terminology) to discover or being fed with knowledge concerning how to solve a specific set of problems in a specific software or physical environment. Our work is a preliminary step into the issue, with the main objective of assessing how current Web Services technology can support a component, described in terms of beliefs, desires and intentions, dynamically adapting its behaviour to new environments.
The Word zipped version of this paper is available at A Customizable Semantic-Based P2P SystemM. Mesiti, V. Mascardi, G. Guerrini. In Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2005, Volume 1, P. Isaias and M. B. Nunes eds. IADIS Press, ISBN 972-8924-02-X, pagg. 403-410, 2005 Important requirements are nowadays arising in systems for the retrieval of XML documents in P2P networks. Among them we face the problems of service customization and heterogeneity of document structures. Peer willingness to answer queries may be conditioned by a number of factors such as the time the request is received, the characteristics of the peer submitting the query, and the current workload of the peer receiving the query. Thus, appropriate policies should be specified for restricting peer availability to answer queries. Moreover, peers might exploit different structures for representing the same kind of information. Thus, an ontology establishing the mapping among different representations of the same concept is required. In this paper we present a system for the retrieval of XML documents distributed among peers on a hybrid P2P network. Peers are organized in groups and each group contains both a common ontology for representing the documents the group deals with and policies which specify the group and individual peer availability to answer queries.
Languages for Programming BDI-style Agents: an OverviewV. Mascardi, D. Demergasso, D. Ancona. In Proceedings of WOA 2005, F. Corradini, F. De Paoli, E. Merelli and A. Omicini eds. Pitagora Editrice Bologna, ISBN 88-371-1590-3, pagg. 9-15, 2005 The notion of an intelligent agent as an entity which appears to be the subject of mental attitudes like beliefs, desires and intentions (hence, the BDI acronym) is well known and accepted by many researchers. Besides the definition of various BDI logics, many languages and integrated environments for programming BDI-style agents have been proposed since the early nineties. In this reasoned bibliography, nine languages and implemented systems, namely PRS, dMARS, JACK, JAM, Jadex, AgentSpeak(L), 3APL, Dribble, and Coo-BDI, are discussed and compared. References to other systems and languages based on the BDI model are also provided, as well as pointers to surveys dealing with related topics.
An Ontology-Based Similarity between Sets of ConceptsV. Cordì, P. Lombardi, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi. In Proceedings of WOA 2005, F. Corradini, F. De Paoli, E. Merelli and A. Omicini eds. Pitagora Editrice Bologna, ISBN 88-371-1590-3, pagg. 16-21, 2005 To help sharing knowledge in those contexts where documents and services are annotated with semantic information, such as the Semantic Web, defining and implementing the similarity between sets of concepts belonging to a common ontology may prove very useful. In fact, if both the required and the provided pieces of information (be they textual documents, services, images, or whatever) are annotated with sets of concepts taken from a reference ontology O, the evaluation of how good a piece of information P is, w.r.t. the required one R, may be based on the similarity between the two sets of concepts that describe P and R. One of the first applications of the agent technology, aimed at "reducing work and information overload", was that of retrieving and filtering information in an automatic way. Thus, the possibility to calculate the semantic distance between two sets of concepts finds a natural application in the agent field, in particular for improving those agents that act as "digital butlers" for their human owners, by exploring the Semantic Web and looking for useful documents and/or services. Unfortunately, the metrics for calculating the semantic distance between two sets of concepts that can be found in the literature, are often very simple and do not meet some requirements that, up to us, make the metric closer to the common sense reasoning. For this reason, we have designed and implemented two new algorithms for computing the similarity between sets of concepts belonging to the same ontology.
Designing and Implementing Electronic Auctions in a Multiagent System EnvironmentD. Roggero, F. Patrone, V. Mascardi. In Proceedings of WOA 2005, F. Corradini, F. De Paoli, E. Merelli and A. Omicini eds. Pitagora Editrice Bologna, ISBN 88-371-1590-3, pagg. 157-163, 2005 Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce is gaining a wide consensus both from the academia and from the industry, since it provides the right abstractions, models and tools to face the challenges that electronic commerce raises. According to C. Sierra, e-commerce can be described as organization + mechanism + trust, where mechanism is concerned with the rules that govern the interaction among agents in such a way that certain properties can be guaranteed. This paper describes the design and implementation of a library of customizable agents for simulating auction mechanisms. The purpose of the library is to provide a support to the correct engineering of mechanisms in the e-commerce setting, by providing a flexible tool for the quick prototyping of realistic auctions to the auctions' developers. The auction mechanisms that are included in our library respect the Revenue Equivalence Theorem, one of the most important theorems of the formal theory of auctions.
Personalization, verification and conformance for logic-based communicating agentsM. Baldoni, C. Baroglio, A. Martelli, V. Mascardi, V. Patti, C. Schifanella, L. Torasso. In Proceedings of WOA 2005, F. Corradini, F. De Paoli, E. Merelli and A. Omicini eds. Pitagora Editrice Bologna, ISBN 88-371-1590-3, pagg. 177-183, 2005 This paper is an overview of the work that we have carried on in the last two years in the context of the MASSiVE project. The main research lines have concerned personalization of the interaction with web services, personalization of courseware, web services interoperability, and integrated environments for agent oriented software engineering. All of them can be seen as applications of different reasoning techniques to a declarative specification of interaction. A declarative specification makes the study of properties easy and allows a fast prototyping of applications. In particular, we applied reasoning about actions and change to the personalized selection and composition of web services and to the construction of courseware that satisfies the user's needs and goals. This kind of reasoning has also been integrated in the DCaseLP MAS prototyping environment. Declarative specifications have also been helpful to face the problem of proving policy conformance in a way that guarantees web service interoperability. Finally, the adoption of process languages for web services for expressing the procedural behavior of adaptive BDI-style agents have been explored.
Integrating tuProlog into DCaseLP to Engineer Heterogeneous Agent SystemsI. Gungui, V. Mascardi. In Proceedings of the Italian Conference on Computational Logic (CILC-2004), E. Panegai and G. Rossi eds., Quaderno del Dipartimento di Matematica, vol. 390, University of Parma, 2004 This paper discusses the integration of a Prolog implementation, tuProlog, into the DCaseLP environment for building prototypes of multi-agent systems (MASs). DCaseLP aims at providing the MAS developer with a plethora of specification and implementation languages in order to allow him/her to adopt the best language for each view of the system under specification/implementation. The integration of tuProlog into DCaseLP represents a step forward in this direction and allows the re-use of tools and mechanisms previously developed for the DCaseLP predecessor, CaseLP.
Checking the Completeness of Ontologies: A Case Study from the Semantic WebV. Cordi`, V. Mascardi. In Proceedings of the Italian Conference on Computational Logic (CILC-2004), E. Panegai and G. Rossi eds., Quaderno del Dipartimento di Matematica, vol. 390, University of Parma, 2004 The paper discusses a formal framework for proving correctness and completeness of ontologies during its life-cycle. We have adopted our framework for the development of a case study drawn from the Semantic Web. In particular we have developed an ontology for content-based retrieval of XML documents in Peer-to-peer networks.
Reasoning about agents' interaction protocols inside DCaseLPM. Baldoni, C. Baroglio, I. Gungui, A. Martelli, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, V. Patti, C. Schifanella. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies, DALT'04, J. Leite, A. Omicini, P. Torroni, P. Yolum editors, pagg. 250-265, 2004 Engineering systems of heterogeneous agents is a difficult task; one of the ways for achieving the successful industrial deployment of agent technology is the development of engineering tools that support the developer in all the steps of design and implementation. In this work we focus on the problem of supporting the design of agent interaction protocols by carrying out a methodological integration of the MAS prototyping environment DCaseLP with the agent programming language DyLOG for reasoning about action and change.
Developing an Ontology for the Retrieval of XML Documents: A Comparative Evaluation of Existing MethodologiesV. Cordi`, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, L. Sterling. In Proceedings of Agent-Oriented Information Systems, AOIS'04, P. Giorgini and M. Winikoff editors, pagg. 73-87, 2004.
The paper discusses a framework for evaluating and comparing methodologies for ontology development and its application to the evaluation of three existing methodologies. The framework is characterised by a domain-independent step and by an application-driven step. It has been adopted to analyse and compare three methodologies, the Ontology Development 101 methodology, the Unified Methodology, and EXPLODE, in respect to the analysis, design, verification and implementation of an ontology for content-based retrieval of XML documents.
Coo-AgentSpeak: Cooperation in AgentSpeak through Plan ExchangeD. Ancona, V. Mascardi, J. Hubner and R. Bordini. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2004, N. R. Jennings, C. Sierra, L. Sonenberg and M. Tambe editors, ACM Press, pagg. 698-705, 2004. This paper brings together two recent contributions to the area of declarative agent-oriented programming, made feasible in practice by the recent introduction of an interpreter for a BDI programming language. The work on Coo-BDI has proposed an approach to plan exchange which applies to BDI agents in general. The other contribution is the introduction of special illocutionary forces for plan exchange between AgentSpeak agents. This has been implemented in Jason, an interpreter for an extended version of AgentSpeak(L). Jason also provides mechanisms that allow the specification of plan permissions, which are important in the cooperation context. This paper shows how elaborate plan exchange can take place between AgentSpeak agents implemented with Jason. It also discusses an application in which plan sharing is essential.
A Multimedia, Multichannel and Personalized News ProviderM. Delato, A. Martelli, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, A. Verri In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Multimedia Interactive Protocols and Systems, MIPS 2003, G. Ventre and R. Canonico editors, Springer-Verlag, pages 388--399, 2003.LNCS 2899 The amount of news delivered by newspapers, television news broadcasts and web sites is increasing every day. Users looking for interesting news spend a lot of time in retrieving and filtering the right news from this massive amount of available information. For this reason, delivering highly personalized news is becoming more and more important for information providers which want to add value to their services. If the personalized news comes along with video, images and sound besides the basic text description and if it can be delivered to a large number of different hardware devices the added value is definitely increased. In this paper we discuss the architecture and preliminary development of a multimedia, multichannel and personalized news provider built on top of an existing prototypical system, ClickNews. The main contribution of our work lies in the analysis and experiments carried out to understand how well-established and emerging technologies can be integrated to boost news providers.
From UML Diagrams to Jess Rules: Integrating OO and Rule-Based Languages to Specify, Implement and Execute AgentsM. Martelli, V. Mascardi. In Proceedings of the 8th APPIA-GULP-PRODE Joint Conference on Declarative Programming (AGP'03), F. Buccafurri editor, pages 275-286, 2003 The paper discusses the D-CaseLP multi-agent system (MAS) prototyping environment and the software engineering aspects that it helps to face. The target implementation language of agents developed using D-CaseLP is Jess, a language inspired by the CLIPS expert system shell allowing to supply knowledge in the form of declarative rules. The choice of a declarative implementation language is motivated by the recently growing interest in this technology as a vehicle for modeling agent rationality, explicitly representing the agent's knowledge, verifying system properties, enhancing knowledge sharing and communication. The MAS developer can directly implement agents using Jess, or she/he can take advantage of the D-CaseLP automatic translation process from UML into Jess. The last choice allows to exploit well established use-case driven and object-oriented methods for capturing the MAS requirements and specify some MAS issues (interaction protocols followed by agents, MAS architecture, agent types and instances) in a graphical way. Jess agents, being defined by hand or obtained as the output of the automatic translation process, are finally integrated into the JADE platform and executed.
From Requirement Specification to Prototype Execution: a Combination of a Multiview Use-Case Driven Method and Agent-Oriented TechniquesE. Astesiano, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, G. Reggio. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE), San Francisco Bay, USA, J. Debenham and K. Zhang editors, The Knowledge System Institute, 2003, 578-585 In this paper we discuss how to combine a multiview use-case driven method for the requirement specification of a system with an agent-oriented method for developing a working prototype. The rationale behind this combination is to cover the complete software development cycle, while the two methods it originates from only cover a part of it. The prototype execution allows to obtain useful feedbacks on the coherence of the UML artifacts produced during the requirement specification phase.
Customizing AOSE Methodologies by Reusing AOSE FeaturesT. Juan, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, L. Sterling. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'03), Melbourne, Australia, J. S. Rosenschein, T. Sandholm, M. Wooldridge and M. Yokoo editors, ACM Press, 2003, pages 113-120 Future large-scale software development projects will require engineering support for a diverse range of software quality attributes, such as privacy and openness. It is not feasible to create one monolithic methodology to support all possible quality attributes. Instead, we expect AOSE methodologies to be created and reused in a modular way. A modular approach enables developers to build custom project-specific methodologies from AOSE features in the same way applications are built from reusable off-the-shelf components. In this paper, we provide a conceptual framework for creating and reusing modular methodologies. This conceptual framework is based on the concept of an AOSE feature, which performs one or more development activities, such as analysis, and addresses one or more quality attributes, such as privacy. An AOSE feature encapsulates software engineering techniques, models, supporting CASE tools and development knowledge such as design patterns. We illustrate the applicability of our approach by modularizing four existing methodologies, Prometheus, ROADMAP, CaseLP and the conventional OO approach, into AOSE features.
Coo-BDI: Extending the BDI Model with CooperativityD. Ancona, V. Mascardi. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies, DALT'03, Revised Selected and Invited Papers. J. Leite, A. Omicini, L. Sterling and P. Torroni editors, Springer-Verlag, LNAI 2990, pagg. 109-134, 2004 We define Coo-BDI, an extension of the BDI architecture with the notion of cooperativity. Agents can cooperate by exchanging and sharing plans in a quite flexible way. As a main result Coo-BDI promotes adaptivity and sharing of resources; as a by-product, it provides a better support for dealing with agents which do not possess their own procedural knowledge for processing a given event.
Logic-Based Languages to Model and Program Intelligent AgentsM. Martelli, V. Mascardi, L. Sterling. In Proceedings of Appia-Gulp-Prode 2002: Joint Conference on Declarative Programming, Madrid, Spain. J. J. Moreno-Navarro and J. M. Carballo, editors, pages 105-122, 2002 Research on tools for modeling and specifying intelligent agents, namely computer systems situated in some environment and capable of flexible autonomous actions, is very lively. Due to the complexity of intelligent agents, the way they are modeled, specified and verified should greatly benefit by the adoption of formal methods. Logic-based languages can be a useful tool for engineering the development of a multi-agent system (MAS). This paper discusses six logic-based languages which have been used to model and specify agents, namely ConGolog, Agent-0, the IMPACT agent programming language, DyLog, Cuncurrent Metatem and Ehhf. To show their main features and to practically exemplify how they can be used, a common running example is provided. Besides this, a set of desirable features that languages should exhibit to prove useful in engineering a MAS have been identified. A comparison of the six languages with respect to the support given to these features is provided, as well as final considerations on the usefulness of logic-based languages for "agent oriented software engineering".
Specifica, Implementazione ed Esecuzione di un Prototipo di Sistema Multi-Agente in D-CaseLPR. Albertoni, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, S. Miglia. In Proceedings of WOA 2002, Milano, Italy. F. De Paoli, S. Manzoni and A. Poggi, editors. Pitagora editrice 2002. Una tecnologia giovane come quella ad agenti viene tipicamente impiegata in contesti con un alto contenuto innovativo dove l'informazione di cui gli agenti necessitano per svolgere i propri compiti e` distribuita tra i vari componenti del sistema e richiede la attuazione di sofisticati protocolli di coordinazione e cooperazione per essere condivisa. Per sviluppare sistemi con queste caratteristiche, i cui requisiti possono essere all'inizio instabili o poco chiari, strumenti e metodologie che supportino la prototipazione rapida si rivelano estremamente utili.
A Multi-Agent Approach to Vehicle Monitoring in MotorwayE. Appiani, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi. Presented in the Poster session of the 2nd European Workshop on Advanced Video-based Surveillance Systems, AVBS 2001, London, UK. This paper describes CaseLP, a prototyping environment for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), and its adoption for the development of a distributed industrial application. CaseLP employs architecture definition, communication, logic and procedural languages to model a MAS from the top-level architecture down to procedural behavior of each agent's instance. The executable specification which is obtained can be employed as a rapid prototype which helps in taking quick decisions on the best possible implementation solutions. Such capabilities have been applied to a distributed application of Elsag company, in order to assess the best policies for data communication and database allocation before the concrete implementation. The application consists in remote traffic control and surveillance over service areas on an Italian motorway, employing automatic detection and car plate reading at monitored gates. CaseLP allowed to predict data communication performance statistics under different policies of database allocation.
Specification of Heterogeneous Agent ArchitecturesS. Marini, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, F. Zini. In Intelligent Agents VII: Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages. Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop, ATAL 2000. Boston, MA, USA. C. Castelfranchi and Y. Lesperance, editors. Springer-Verlag 2001, pages 275-289, LNAI 1986 Agent-based software applications need to incorporate agents having heterogeneous architectures in order for each agent to optimally perform its task. HEMASL is a simple meta-language used to specify intelligent agents and multi-agent systems when different and heterogeneous agent architectures must be used. HEMASL specifications are based on an agent model that abstracts several existing agent architectures. The paper describes some of the features of the language, presents examples of its use and outlines its operational semantics. We argue that adding HEMASL to CaseLP, a specification and prototyping environment for MAS, can enhance its flexibility and usability.
HEMASL: A Flexible Language to Specify Heterogeneous AgentsS. Marini, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, F. Zini. In Proceedings of WOA 2000, Dagli Oggetti agli Agenti. Parma, Italy. A. Corradi, A. Omicini and A. Poggi, editors. Pitagora editrice 2000, pages 76-81 In the realization of agent-based applications the developer generally needs to use heterogeneous agent architectures, so that each application component can optimally perform its task. Languages that easily model the heterogeneity of agents' architectures are very useful in the early stages of the application development. This paper presents HEMASL, a simple meta-language used to specify heterogeneous agent architectures, and sketches how HEMASL should be implemented in an object-oriented commercial programming language as Java. Moreover, the paper briefly discusses the benefits of adding HEMASL to CaseLP, a LP-based specification and prototyping environment for multi-agent systems, in order to enhance its flexibility and usability.
Mixin-based modules for logic programmingD. Ancona, V. Mascardi. In Proceedings of AGP 2000, La Habana, Cuba. 2000. In this paper we show how it is possible to define a rather rich language of mixin modules suitable for combining together large logic programs without changing the underlying logic. The type and reduction rules for the language are presented in a somehow informal way, whereas more emphasis is given to the usefulness of the constructs from the programming point of view and to the comparison with other proposals for modular logic programming found in the literature.
Prototyping Freight Trains Traffic Management Using Multi-Agent SystemsA. Cuppari, P. L. Guida, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, F. Zini. In Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Information, Intelligence and Systems, Washington, DC. IEEE Computer Society, 1999. Applications dealing with railway traffic management have been usually modeled adopting classical technologies such as Operations Research and Constraint Programming. These technologies are suitable to model static situations where the information is complete, but they lack to cope with the dynamics and uncertainty of freight trains traffic management. The paper presents a new approach to the problem based on the Multi-Agent System technology. CaseLP, a logic programming based environment for MAS prototyping, has been adopted to face a real case-study: the management of freight trains traffic along the railway line between the Italian stations of Milano and La Spezia. The research, conducted within the framework of the EuROPE-TRIS Project, has successfully demonstrated the advantages of the MAS approach to this field of application.
An Agent-Based Prototype for Freight Trains Traffic ManagementA. Cuppari, P. L. Guida, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, F. Zini. In P. G. Larsen, editor, Proc. of FMERail Workshop 5 (a satellite workshop of FM'99), Toulouse, France. Springer-Verlag 1999. The increasing amount of train traffic highlights the necessity of automated tools for decision support, mainly when the availability of tracks is known on a day-by-day basis and no long-term schedules can be made. The paper describes the use of CaseLP, a logic programming based environment for developing multi-agent system prototypes, to face the management of freight trains traffic between the Italian stations of Milano and La Spezia. This real case-study, developed within the framework of the EuROPE-TRIS Project, has been chosen for evaluating the benefits of prototyping and testing a decision support system following an agent-based approach. The choice of a logic programming paradigm as the basis for the prototyping environment is motivated and compared with other existing solutions.
A Logic Programming Framework for Component-Based Software PrototypingM. Martelli, V. Mascardi, F. Zini. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Component-based Software Development in Computational Logic (COCL'99) (a satellite workshop of PLI 99), Paris, France. A. Brogi and P. Hill, editors. 1999. The paper presents CaseLP, a logic-based prototyping environment for specifying and verifying complex distributed applications. CaseLP provides a set of languages for modeling intelligent and interacting components (agents) at different levels of abstraction. It also furnishes tools for integrating legacy software into a prototype. The possibility of integrating, into the same executable prototype, agents which are only specified as well as already developed components can prove extremely useful in the engineering process of complex applications. In fact, the reusability of existing components can be verified before the application has been implemented and the developer can be more confident on the correctness of the new components specification, if it has been executed and tested by means of an interaction with the existing components. Besides the aspects of integration and reuse, CaseLP also faces another fundamental issue of nowadays applications, namely distribution. The components which constitute the prototype are logically distributed. The features of the network (latency and reliability of the communication channels between agents) can be set by the prototype developer, thus allowing a realistic simulation of a physically distributed application.
Specification and Simulation of Multi-Agent Systems in CaseLPM. Martelli, V. Mascardi, F. Zini. In Proceedings of Appia-Gulp-Prode'99: Joint Conference on Declarative Programming, L'Aquila, Italy. M. C. Meo and M. Vilares-Ferro, editors. pages 13-28. 1999. Nowadays software applications are characterized by a great complexity. It arises from the need of reusing existing components and properly integrating them. The distribution of the involved entities and their heterogeneity makes it very useful the adoption of the agent-oriented technology. The paper presents the state-of-the-art of CaseLP, an experimental logic-based prototyping environment for multi-agent systems. CaseLP provides a prototyping method and a set of tools and languages which support the prototype realization. At the system specification level, an architectural description language can be adopted to describe the prototype in terms of agents classes, instances, their provided and required services and their communication links. At the agent specification level, a rule-based, not executable language can be used to easily define reactive and proactive agents. An executable, linear logic language can define more sophisticated agents and the system in which they operate. At the implementation level, new primitives are defined to extend the target prolog-like language. Finally, simulation tools are integrated within CaseLP to visualize the prototype execution and to collect statistics on it.
Combining Logical Agents with Rapid Prototyping for Engineering Distributed ApplicationsP. Dart, E. Kazmierczak, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, L. Sterling, V.S. Subrahmanian, F. Zini. In Proc. of 9th International Conference of Software Technology and Engineering (STEP'99), Pittsburgh, PA. IEEE Computer Society. 1999. The realization of new distributed and heterogeneous software applications is a challenge that software engineers have to face. Logic Programming and Multi-Agent Systems can play a very effective role in the rapid prototyping of new software products. The paper proposes a general approach to the prototyping of complex and distributed applications modelled as Multi--Agent Systems and outlines the autonomous research experiences of different research groups from which the proposal originates. All the experiences have Logic Programming as the common foundation and deal with different aspects of the problem: integration of heterogeneous data and reasoning systems, animation of formal specifications and development of agent based software. The final goal is joining the diverse experiences into a unique open framework.
Agent-Oriented and Constraint Technologies for Distributed transaction ManagementV. Mascardi, E. Merelli. In Proceedings of the Third International ICSC Symposia on Intelligent Industrial Automation (IIA`99) and Soft Computing (SOCO`99), Genova, Italy. R. Parenti and F. Masulli, editors. Pages 222-228. 1999. Multi-agent systems provide an ideal level of abstraction for facing complex applications where heterogeneous entities need to interact with each other and with legacy software. In Distributed Database Management Systems (DDBMSs) different databases need to be accessed and a continuous interaction between the database managers is required for completing a transaction. For these reasons, the application is suitable for being modeled using multi-agent system technology. The paper shows how to build a prototype of DDBMS using the tool CaseLP for the specification of the application's components, and adopting Constraint Logic Programming techniques for concurrency control and deadlock avoidance.
Multi-Agent Systems Development as a Software Engineering EnterpriseM. Bozzano, G. Delzanno, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, F. Zini. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL'99), San Antonio, Texas. G. Gupta, editor. pages 46-60. Springer-Verlag 1999. LNCS 1551. Multi-Agent Systems provide an ideal level of abstraction for modelling complex applications where distributed and heterogeneous entities need to cooperate to achieve a common goal, or to concur for the control of shared resources. This paper proposes a declarative framework for developing multi-agent systems. A formal approach based on Logic Programming is proposed for the specification, implementation and testing of software prototypes. Specification of the PRS agent architecture is given as an example of application of our framework.
Towards Multi-Agent Software PrototypingM. Martelli, V. Mascardi, F. Zini. In Proc. of The Third International Conference and Exhibition on The Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM'98), London, UK. H. S. Nwana and D. T. Ndumu editors. The Practical Application Company Ltd. Pages 331-354. 1998. Integration and reusing of different kinds of information and software tools is a pressing necessity that more and more complex applications have to cope with. This fact and the distributed nature of many applications made it very appealing to use multi-agent technology. However, agent-based software still lacks well founded development methodologies, thus rapid prototyping and executable specifications could be very important for the realization of these applications. We present CaseLP, a specification framework for agent-based complex applications founded on Logic Programming. Many of the desirable features of an ideal system have already been implemented in CaseLP which, as a first prototype, has already been proven very useful in the case of some real applications. The paper outlines the general features of the system, describes some aspects of the implementation and presents two case studies that is, real-world applications that have been specified using CaseLP.
CaseLP: a Complex Application Specification Environment based on Logic ProgrammingM. Martelli, V. Mascardi, F. Zini. In Proc. of the Post Conference Workshop on Logic Programming and Multi-Agents (a satellite workshop of ICLP'97), Leuven, Belgium. pages 35-50. 1997 More and more complex applications need to cope with the integration of different kinds of information, the reuse of existing software, the integration of well established tools and systems (such as databases). This and the distributed nature of many applications made it very appealing to use multi-agent technology. Rapid prototyping and executable specifications could be very important for the development of these applications and Logic Programming can prove itself extremely appropriate for this task. The paper presents CaseLP, a specification environment for Multi-Agent Systems based on Logic Programming. Many of the desirable properties and features of an ideal system have already been implemented in CaseLP, which, as a first prototype, has already been proven very useful in the case of some real applications. The paper outlines the general features of the system, describes some aspects of the implementation and presents two applications that have been specified with CaseLP.
Applying Logic Programming to the Specification of Complex ApplicationsM. Martelli, V. Mascardi, F. Zini. In Proc. of Appia-Gulp-Prode'97: Joint Conference on Declarative Programming, Grado, Italy. M. Falaschi, M. Navarro and A. Policriti editors. pages 491-499. 1997. In this paper we show how multi-theory meta-logic programming techniques can be applied to the realization of multi-agent systems which solve real-world complex problems, in which the integration of heterogeneous software environments could be necessary. We have defined a language named ACLPL (i.e., Agent Constraint Logic Programming Language) implemented in the constraint logic programming language Eclipse and extending standard (constraint) logic programming. ACLPL provides an environment in which the global knowledge is partitioned into theories (i.e., agents) and also primitives for communication among agents, updating of an agent's knowledge base and simulation of the execution of a multi-agent system. Our final aim is to realize a specification tool for multi-agents systems using logic programming techniques as well as software engineering ones. At the moment, the approach we use to obtain an executable specification is simple: we identify the set of agents the application needs and give a high-level informal description of the interactions among agents, then we implement each agent by means of a different logical theory, translating the static specification (given by a transition function describing the behaviour of the agent) into ACLPL. Finally we execute the obtained system, to test the implementation choices. As a demonstration of our approach we present a planner for goods transportation: four kinds of agents, Client, Agency, Distributor and Transporter interact to plan the delivery of goods from a place to another.
 Back to Viviana's publications page
Please send suggestions and comments to: Viviana Mascardi mascardi@disi.unige.it Last Updated: March, 2008 |
The pdf version of this paper is available
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
