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Journal papers
Chapters in books
International and national conferences and workshops
Technical reports
Journal papers: download area
E. Vallés Balaguer, P. Rosso, A. Locoro and V. Mascardi
Polibits Journal, To appear.
In this paper we present preliminary work dealing
with opinion analysis carried out thanks to an innovative approach
based on ontology matching. The aim of this work is to allow two
enterprises to share and merge the results of opinion analyses on their
own products and services.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
V. Mascardi, A. Locoro, P. Rosso
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, vol. 22, no. 5, pp. 609-623, May 2010, doi:10.1109/TKDE.2009.154
Online pre-print version: http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/TKDE.2009.154
"Ontology matching" is the process of finding correspondences between entities belonging to different ontologies. This paper describes a set of algorithms that exploit upper ontologies as semantic bridges in the ontology matching process and presents a systematic analysis of the relationships among features of matched ontologies (number of simple and composite concepts, stems, concepts at the top level, common English suffixes and prefixes, ontology depth), matching algorithms, used upper ontologies, and experiment results. This analysis allowed us to state under which circumstances the exploitation of upper ontologies gives significant advantages with respect to traditional approaches that do no use them. We run experiments with SUMO-OWL (a restricted version of SUMO), OpenCyc and DOLCE. The experiments demonstrate that when our "structural matching method via upper ontology" uses an upper ontology large enough (OpenCyc, SUMO-OWL), the recall is significantly improved while preserving the precision obtained without upper ontologies. Instead, our "non structural matching method" via OpenCyc and SUMO-OWL improves the precision and maintains the recall. The "mixed method" that combines the results of structural alignment without using upper ontologies and structural alignment via upper ontologies improves the recall and maintains the F-measure independently of the used upper ontology.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
D. Briola, V. Mascardi and M. Martelli
Journal of Information Assurance and Security, Volume 4, Issue 2 (2009), pp. 106-116, Dynamic Publishers Inc., USA
Online version: http://www.mirlabs.org/jias/vol4-issue2.html
This paper describes the results of two joint academy-industry projects that involve the Computer Science Department of
Genoa University, Italy, and Ansaldo-STS, the Italian leader in
design and construction of railway signalling and automation
systems.
The MAS developed as part of the MAD Agents ("Monitoring and
Diagnostic Agents") project monitors the behaviour of a set of
processes running on an Ansaldo-STS server, whereas the goal of
the MAS developed in the FYPA ("Find Your Path, Agents") project
is to find a feasible allocation of resources to agents over time that
emerges as the result of a sequence of local negotiation steps.
Both MASs have been developed in collaboration with scientists
and engineers from Ansaldo-STS and have been widely tested on
real data provided by the company.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
G. Casella, V. Deufemia, V. Mascardi, G. Costagliola, M. Martelli
Journal of Visual Language and Computing (2007), doi:10.1016/j.jvlc.2007.04.002
Recognizing hand-sketched symbols is a definitely complex 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 sketched symbol interpretation 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. We also
present AgentSketch, a multi-domain sketch recognition system implemented according to the
proposed framework. A first experimental evaluation has been performed on the domain of UML
Use Case Diagrams to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
G. Casella V. ,Mascardi
Int. J. of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, Inderscience Publishers, Vol. 1, No.3/4, pp. 396-434, 2007.
This paper describes West2East, a computer-aided Agent-Oriented
Software Engineering (AOSE) toolkit aimed at supporting the implementation
of Multiagent Systems (MASs). West2East exploits languages for Web
Services (WSs) for sharing Agent Interaction Protocols (AIPs), modelled
using AUML, across the web, and Computational Logic to reason about them.
In particular, West2East offers libraries for the translation of AIPs represented
in AUML into 1) a textual notation proposed by Winikoff; 2) an XML notation
proposed by ourselves; 3) a couple of WS-BPEL and WSDL documents; and
4) a Prolog term. It also offers 5) a mechanism for allowing agents that read
a published AIP to reason about it before engaging in a dialogue with its
publisher, and 6) libraries for the automatic generation of an executable
program compliant with the original interaction protocol.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
V. Mascardi, M. Martelli, L. Sterling
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming Journal (TPLP), 4(4),
Cambridge University Press, pagg. 429 -- 494, 2004.
Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is the research field aiming at finding
abstractions, languages, methodologies and toolkits for modeling,
verifying, validating and prototyping complex applications conceptualized as
Multi-Agent Systems (MASs). A very lively research area
studies how formal methods can be used for AOSE; the
ARPEGGIO open framework belongs to this area and
aims at developing an open framework where logic-based formal specification languages
and logic-based executable languages can be integrated to provide the means for specifying
and prototyping a
MAS choosing the most suitable language for each feature to model and
implement. This paper presents a detailed survey of
six logic-based executable agent specification
languages that have been chosen for their possibility to be integrated in the
ARPEGGIO framework: ConGolog, Agent-0, the IMPACT agent programming language, DyLog,
Cuncurrent Metatem and Ehhf. For each executable language, the logic foundations
are described and an example of use is shown. A comparison
of the six languages and a survey of similar approaches complete the paper, together
with considerations on the advantages of using logic-based languages in MAS modeling and
prototyping.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/TPLP03.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (TPLP 2004)
T. Eiter, V. Mascardi
AI Communications 15(4), pages 169-197, 2002
In the last years, dozens of environments for modeling, testing and
finally implementing multi-agent systems have been
developed. Unfortunately, no standard criteria for understanding what
kind of application profile a particular development environment is
good for have been individuated yet, and the question "How should I
choose an existing environment which best suits the features and
requirements of my application?" is still difficult to answer. This
paper addresses this question, and aims at helping the multi-agent
system developer to solve this problem. It provides a set of criteria
for evaluating development environments, and then applies these
criteria to five selected tools and multi-agent systems prototypes.
Furthermore, some application-driven guidelines are described to help
identifying the features of a suitable environment for developing an
implementation of the given application. The features we identify can
be used to find the right development framework among the frameworks
we evaluate for doing the right application.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/AIComms02.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (AIComms 2002)
Chapers in books: download area
Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Viviana Mascardi, Andrea Omicini, Paolo Torroni
In A. Dovier and E. Pontelli, editors, Twenty-five Years of Logic Programming in Italy, volume 6125 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, chapter 8, pages 204-230. Springer, 2010.
This chapter tackles the relation between declarative languages and
multi-agent systems by following the dictates of the five Ws (and one H) that
characterize investigations. The aim is to present this research field, which has
a long-term tradition, and discuss about its future. The first question to answer
is "What? What are declarative agents and multi-agent systems?". Therefore,
we will introduce the history of declarative agent systems up to the state of the
art by answering the question "When? When did research on them begin?". We
will, then, move to the question "Where? Where can it take place?": in which
kind of real applications and for which kind of problems declarative agents and
MAS have already proven useful? Connected to where is "Why? Why should
it happen?". We will discuss the benefits of adopting the abstractions offered
by declarative approaches for developing communication, interaction, cooperation
mechanisms.We will compare with other technologies, mainly service-based
and object-oriented ones. "Who? Who can be involved?": in order to exploit this
kind of technology what sort of background does a specialist have to acquire?
We address this question by looking at the Italian landscape of Computer Science
research and education. Finally, with the question "How? How can it happen?"
we will shortly report some examples of existing declarative languages and
frameworks for the specification, verification, implementation and prototyping of
agents and MAS.
The pdf of this paper is available here:
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/BBMOT_25YLP.pdf
T. Eiter, V. Mascardi and V. S. Subrahmanian
Computational Logic: Logic Programming and Beyond -
Essays in Honour of Robert A. Kowalski, Part I.
A.C. Kakas and F. Sadri, editors, Springer-Verlag 2002, pages 586-625,
LNAI 2407.
The use of agents in today's Internet world is expanding rapidly.
Yet, agent developers proceed largely under the optimistic assumption
that agents will be error-free. Errors may arise in agents for numerous
reasons - agents may share a workspace with other agents or humans
and updates made by these other entities may cause an agent to face a
situation that it was not explicitly programmed to deal with. Likewise,
errors in coding agents may lead to inconsistent situations where it
is unclear how the agent should act. In this paper, we define
an agent execution model that allows agents to continuing acting
"reasonably" even when some errors of the above types occur. More importantly,
in our framework, agents take "repair" actions automatically when
confronted with such situations, but while taking such repair actions,
they can often continue to engage in work and/or interactions with other
agents that are unaffected by repairs.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/LNAI2407.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (LNAI2407 2002)
M. Bozzano, G. Delzanno, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi and F. Zini
In The Logic Programming Paradigm: a 25-Year Perspective. K. R. Apt,
V. W. Marek, M. Truszczynsky and D. S. Warren editors, pages 5-32,
Springer-Verlag, 1999.
The paper presents an ongoing research project that uses Logic Programming,
Linear Logic Programming, and their related techniques for
executable specifications and rapid prototyping of Multi-Agent Systems. The MAS
paradigm is an extremely rich one and we believe that Logic Programming
will play a very effective role in this area, both as a tool for
developing real
applications and as a semantically well founded language for
basing program analysis and proof of properties on.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/LPparadigm.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (LPparadigm 1999)
International and national conferences and workshops: download area
M. Bozzano, A. Locoro, M. Martelli, V. Mascardi
In Atti del 25-esimo Convegno Italiano di Logica Computazionale, CILC 2010, Rende, Italy. W. Faber and N. Leone editors. CEUR Volume 598.
Online version: http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-598/paper07.pdf
Le Istituzioni Virtuali sono un formalismo estremamente potente per
descrivere relazioni sociali tra agenti autonomi, ma sono di difficile uso per
non-esperti di tali tecnologie. In questo articolo descriviamo un estrattore semiautomatico
di ruoli e relazioni tra concetti (e quindi, indirettamente, tra ruoli) a
partire da testi scritti. Tale strumento potrà essere utilizzato dagli esperti del
dominio per creare Istituzioni Virtuali, senza essere esposti alla complessità del
linguaggio con il quale l'Istituzione Virtuale viene descritta.
 The pdf version of this paper is available
here
A. Locoro, V. Mascardi, A-M. Scapolla
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART), Valencia, 22-24 January 2010, Spain
Trialogical Learning refers to those forms of learning where learners are collaboratively developing, transforming, or creating shared objects of activity in a systematic fashion. In order to be really productive, systems supporting Trialogical Learning must rely on intelligent services to let knowledge co-evolve with social
practices, in an automatic or semi-automatic way, according to the users' emerging needs and practical innovations. These requirements raise problems related to knowledge evolution, content retrieval and classification,
dynamic suggestion of relationships among knowledge objects. In this paper, we propose to exploit Natural Language Processing and Ontology Matching techniques for facing the problems above. The Knowledge
Practice Environment of the KP-Lab project has been used as a test bed for demonstrating the feasibility of
our approach.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
A. Bogdanovych, L. Papaleo, M. Ancona, V. Mascardi, G. Quercini, S. Simoff, A. Cohen, A. Traverso
In Proceedings of the Workshop On Intelligent Cultural Heritage (Satellite workshop of the
AI*IA 2009: International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence), Reggio Emilia, Italy, 12 December 2009.
This work outlines the research activities carried out by our
groups in the direction of the implementation of a tool for sharing natural and cultural heritage on the web. The tool will serve as a support
to teachers and people involved in scientific and cultural activities (for
example, archaeologists, historians, geologists, directors of museums and
of exhibitions) for making historical, naturalistic, artistic content available in a game-like but scientifically well founded way based on Virtual
Institutions and intelligent software agents. Our approach is illustrated
on the example of the city of Uruk, which is believed to be the first city
on Earth, where the culture of ancient Sumerians is preserved in terms
of the natural environment, human behaviour and architecture.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
V. Mascardi, A. Locoro, F. Larosa
In Atti del 24-esimo Convegno Italiano di Logica Computazionale, CILC 2009, Ferrara, Italy.
Online version: http://www.ing.unife.it/eventi/cilc09/accepted.shtml
Providing efficient ontology matching algorithms is one of the means
for pursuing semantic interoperability. In this paper we discuss an algorithm that
exploits natural language processing techniques for matching ontologies and that
post-processes the obtained alignment in order to find semantic inconsistencies.
The algorithm has been entirely implemented in Prolog, whose usefulness was
mainly evident in the post-processing phase. A careful analysis of the recent state-of-the art witnesses the originality of our matching algorithm which is based on
the "Adapted Lesk Algorithm" for word sense disambiguation. The experiments
we carried out, although in their early stages, are encouraging.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
A. Stalla, V. Mascardi, M. Martelli
In Atti del 24-esimo Convegno Italiano di Logica Computazionale, CILC 2009, Ferrara, Italy.
Online version: http://www.ing.unife.it/eventi/cilc09/accepted.shtml
Many years of teaching demonstrated that one of the hardest concepts for students facing Prolog is the construction of the SLD tree. For this reason one student and the teachers of the Artificial Intelligence Course held at the Computer Science Department, University of Genova, developed PrettyProlog: an interpreter for a subset of Prolog, written in Java, born for didactic use. PrettyProlog features a GUI which allows the user to visualize the inner functioning of the interpreter, namely the construction of stack and SLD tree, and can be used to implement and graphically trace sophisticated programs involving cut, negation as failure, meta-programming.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
D. Briola, V. Mascardi, M. Martelli, R. Caccia, C. Milani
In Atti del Workshop Dagli Oggetti agli Agenti, WOA'09, F. Bergenti ed., Seneca Edizioni, 2009.
Online version: http://cmt.math.unipr.it/woa09/agenda.html
This paper describes the theoretic issues and the design of an implemented Multiagent System developed by DISI, the Computer Science Department of the University of Genova, and Ansaldo-STS,
the Italian leader in design and construction of signalling and automation systems for conventional and high speed railway lines.
The problem discussed in this paper is a multiagent resource allocation problem where resources are modeled as nodes in a directed,
non-planar graph that agents must traverse from one start point to
one end point.
The goal of the multiagent system is to find a feasible allocation
of resources to agents over time that emerges as the result of a sequence of local negotiation steps.
The multiagent system has been implemented using JADE and exploits the JADE Web Services Integration Gateway to access legacy
applications developed by Ansaldo-STS. It has already been tested
on real data and will be integrated into one of Ansaldo-STS's core
business applications in a few months.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
A. Locoro, V. Mascardi
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development (KEOD), part of IC3K - The International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, Madeira, 6-8 October, 2009, Portugal
In an ideal world, an ontology matching algorithm should return all the correct correspondences (it should be
complete) and should return no wrong correspondences (it should be correct). In the real world, no implemented ontology matching algorithm is both correct and complete. For this reason, repairing wrong correspondences in an ontology alignment is a very pressing need to obtain more accurate alignments. This paper
discusses an automatic correspondence repair method that exploits both upper ontologies to provide informative context to concepts c in o and c' in o' belonging to an alignment a, and a context-based word sense
disambiguation algorithm to assign c and c their correct meaning. This meaning is used to decide whether
c and c are related, and to either keep or discard the correspondence (c, c') belonging to a, namely, to repair a. The
experiments carried on are presented and the obtained results are provided. The advantages of the approach
we propose are confirmed by a total average gain of 11,5% in precision for the alignments repaired against a
2% total average error.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
D. Ancona, V. Mascardi
In Proceedings of the MALLOW-AWESOME 2009 workshop, Turin, 7-10 September, 2009, Italy. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Volume 494.
Online version: http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-494/
This paper discusses an application of intelligent software agents and ontologies to solve the problem of
semi-automatic porting of Java programs.
We have designed a system for aiding users to adapt Java code in a type- and meaning-safe way, when an application has to migrate to new libraries which are not fully compatible with the legacy ones.
To achieve this, we propose an approach based on an integration of the two type-theoretic notions of subtyping and type isomorphism with ontology matching. While the former notions are needed to ensure flexible adaptation in the presence of type-safety, the latter supports the user to preserve the meaning of names that appear in the program to be adapted.
Intelligent agents control the different components of the system and interact with other agents in order to provide the final user with the semi-automatic porting service he/she required.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
D. Briola, A. Locoro, V. Mascardi
In Atti del Workshop Dagli Oggetti agli Agenti, WOA'08, M. Baldoni, M. Cossentino, F. De
Paoli, V. Seidita eds., Seneca Edizioni, 2008.
In 2001, FIPA delivered a specification suggesting that each MAS should integrate an ``Ontology Agent'' (OA) offering services for ontology management. These services should include ontology discovery, maintenance, matching, as well as translation of expressions between different ontologies or content languages.
Currently, no FIPA-compliant OA exists that implements all of them. One of the reasons is that providing a service for ontology matching is not an easy task, and coping with translation between ontologies and/or content languages may be even harder.
In this paper we survey the state of the art in the area, and we describe our prototypical implementation of an OA for Jade able to match ontologies. Besides ``standard'' ontology matching algorithms, our OA offers a ``matching via upper ontologies'' method that, as we showed in a recent technical report, improves the precision of the matching w.r.t. the use of traditional techniques.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
D. Briola, V. Mascardi, M. Martelli, G. Arecco, R. Caccia, C. Milani
In Atti del Workshop Dagli Oggetti agli Agenti, WOA'08, M. Baldoni, M. Cossentino, F. De Paoli, V. Seidita eds., Seneca Edizioni, 2008.
This paper describes the outcomes of a project that involved DISI, the Computer Science Department of Genoa University, and
Ansaldo Segnalamento Ferroviario, the Italian leader in design and construction of signalling and automation systems for conventional and high speed railway lines.
The result of the project, started in February 2008 and ended in September 2008, is an implemented MAS prototype that monitors processes running in a railway signalling plant, detects functioning anomalies, and provides support to the early notification of problems to the Command and Control System Assistance.
The MAS has been implemented using DCaseLP, a multi-language prototyping environment developed at DISI, that provides libraries for integrating TuProlog agents into Jade.
Due to the intrinsic rule-based nature of monitoring agents, Prolog has been proved extremely suitable for their implementation.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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.
Sketching is a powerful means to represent objects and reason on them. In this paper we describe an integrated environment, conceived as a multi agent system, that brings together sketch recognition
functionalities and decision support facilities. In this environment, intelligent agents are exploited both for managing the process of recognition
of the sketched objects, and for supporting users in solving decisional
problems. We explain our approach and its potential by means of a running example taken from the domain of building's safety.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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.
Key words: Multi-Agent System, Multi-Language, Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, Rapid Prototyping.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
V. 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.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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.
Keywords: Sketch understanding, agent-based systems,
diagram recognition, visual language parsing.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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.
Keywords. Intelligent Agent, Web Service, Agent-Interaction Protocol, Prolog
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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?".
Keywords. Ontological Analysis of Interaction and Communication, Agent-Oriented
Software Engineering, MAS Meta-model
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
L. 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.
The pdf zipped version of this paper is available at
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/coows4eumas.zip
Bibtex Entry (EUMAS 2005 a)
R. 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*.
The pdf version of this paper is available at
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/delzanno-montagna-martelli-mascardi-final.pdf
Bibtex Entry (EUMAS 2005 b)
G. 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.
The pdf version of this paper is available at
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/mesiti.pdf
Bibtex Entry (DBISP2P 2005)
L. 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
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/135-final.zip
Bibtex Entry (ICWI 2005 a)
M. 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.
The pdf version of this paper is available at
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/ICWI-05-final.pdf
Bibtex Entry (ICWI 2005 b)
V. 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.
The pdf version of this paper is available at
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/ancona-demergasso-mascardi-WOA05-final.pdf
Bibtex Entry (WOA 2005 a)
V. 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.
The pdf version of this paper is available at
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/MetricheOntologieFinal.pdf
Bibtex Entry (WOA 2005 b)
D. 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.
The pdf version of this paper is available at
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/roggero-patrone-mascardi-WOA05_FP.pdf
Bibtex Entry (WOA 2005 c)
M. 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.
The pdf version of this paper is available at
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/WOA05-massive-final.pdf
Bibtex Entry (WOA 2005 d)
I. 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.
The compressed pdf version of this paper is available at
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/CILC-ivana-viviana.pdf.gz
Bibtex Entry (CILC 2004 a)
V. 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.
The compressed pdf version of this paper is available at
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/cordi-mascardi-CILC04-CRC.pdf.gz
Bibtex Entry (CILC 2004 b)
M. 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.
The compressed pdf version of this paper is available at
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/DALT04-post-proc.pdf.gz
Bibtex Entry (DALT 04)
V. 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.
The compressed pdf version of this paper is available at
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/revised.pdf.gz
Bibtex Entry (AOIS 2004)
D. 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.
The compressed pdf version of this paper is available at
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/CooAS-cape.pdf.gz
Bibtex Entry (AAMAS 2004)
M. 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.
The compressed pdf version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/MIPS03.pdf.gz
Bibtex Entry (MIPS 2003)
M. 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.
The compressed pdf version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/AGP03.pdf.gz
Bibtex Entry (AGP 2003)
E. 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.
 The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/SEKE03.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (SEKE 2003)
T. 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.
The compressed pdf version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/AAMASC03.pdf.gz
Bibtex Entry (AAMAS 2003)
D. 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.
The compressed pdf version of this paper is available in
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Bibtex Entry (DALT 2003)
M. 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".
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
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Bibtex Entry (AGP 2002)
R. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
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Bibtex Entry (WOA 2002)
E. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/AVBS01.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (AVBS 2001)
S. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/ATAL00.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (ATAL 2000)
S. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/WOA00.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (WOA 2000)
D. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/AGP00.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (AGP 2000)
A. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/IICIIS99.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (IICIIS 1999)
A. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/FMRAIL99.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (FMRAIL 1999)
M. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/COCL99.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (COCL 1999)
M. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/AGP99.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (AGP 1999)
P. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/STEP99.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (STEP 1999)
V. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/IIA99.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (IIA 1999)
M. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/PADL99.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (PADL 1999)
M. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/PAAM98.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (PAAM 1998)
M. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/ICLP97.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (ICLP 1997)
M. 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.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/AGP97.ps.gz
Bibtex Entry (AGP 1997)
Technical reports: download area
M. Baldoni, C. Baroglio, F. Bergenti, A. Boccalatte, E. Marengo,
M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, L. Padovani, V. Patti, A. Ricci, G. Rossi,
and A. Santi. Technical Report RT 128/2010, Dipartimento di Informatica,
Università degli Studi di Torino, June 2010
This is a position paper reporting the motivations, the starting
point and the guidelines that characterise the MERCURIO project
proposal, submitted to MIUR PRIN 20096. The aim is to develop formal
models of interactions and of the related support infrastructures, that
overcome the limits of the current approaches by explicitly representing
not only the agents but also the computational environment in terms of
rules, conventions, resources, tools, and services that are functional to
the coordination and cooperation of the agents. The models will enable
the verification of interaction properties of MAS from the global point of
view of the system as well as from the point of view of the single agents,
due to the introduction a novel social semantic of interaction based on
commitments and on an explicit account of the regulative rules.
The PDF version of this paper is available here:
http://www.di.unito.it/~argo/papers/RT128-2010.pdf
How to cite this paper:
M. Baldoni, C. Baroglio, F. Bergenti, A. Boccalatte, E. Marengo,
M. Martelli, V. Mascardi, L. Padovani, V. Patti, A. Ricci, G. Rossi,
and A. Santi. MERCURIO: An Interaction-oriented Framework
for Designing, Verifying and Programming Multi-Agent Systems.
Technical Report RT 128/2010, Dipartimento di Informatica,
Università degli Studi di Torino, June 2010.
Bibtex:
@TECHREPORT{
BBBetal-RT128-2010-TIPO_TR,
author = {Baldoni, M. AND Baroglio, C. AND Bergenti, F. AND
Boccalatte, A. AND Marengo, E. AND Martelli, M. AND
Mascardi, V. AND Padovani, L. AND Patti, V. AND
Ricci, A. AND Rossi, G. AND Santi, A.},
title = {{MERCURIO: An Interaction-oriented Framework for Designing,
Verifying and Programming Multi-Agent Systems}},
institution = {Dipartimento di Informatica, Universit\`a degli Studi di Torino},
year = {2010},
number = {RT 128/2010},
month = {June},
pdf = {http://www.di.unito.it/\~{}argo/papers/RT128-2010.pdf}
}
with G. Casella
The Web Services (WS) technology is currently gaining a
wider and wider consensus. The features that characterise
WSs, namely heterogeneity, distribution, openness, highly
dynamic interactions, are some among the key characteristics
of another emerging technology, that of intelligent
agents and Multi-Agent Systems (MASs).
In this paper we discuss the relationships between WSs
and intelligent agents and we propose our point of view,
namely that agents provide both the coordination framework
and the engineering metaphor that can be exploited
for realising complex applications based on the WSs infrastructure.
Based on our claim, we suggest to use an agentoriented
extension of UML 2.0 named AUML to model
agent interaction protocols, and a business protocol execution
language for WSs named WS-BPEL, to publish the
specification of these protocols on the Web. To demonstrate
the feasibility of our approach, we have designed and implemented
a tool that automatically creates WS-BPEL and
WSDL specifications of interaction protocols starting from
AUML visual diagrams.
The PDF version of this paper is available in
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/DISI-TR-06-01.pdf
with I. Gungui and M. Martelli
This paper describes DCaseLP, a multilingual environment for modelling
and prototyping Multi-Agent Systems (MASs). DCaseLP provides an Agent-Oriented
Software Engineering (AOSE) methodology which guides the MAS developer
from the late requirement analysis stage to the prototype validation stage
and offers a set of languages and tools both for modelling agents, and for developing
a prototype of the MAS in a semi-automatic way. Full support for validating the
MAS model by running the prototype in a JADE platform is offered. DCaseLP
has been used to develop an e-commerce application, thus demonstrating the advantages
of rapid prototyping in AOSE.
The PDF version of this paper is available in
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/tech-rep-05-20.pdf
with M. Martelli and F. Zini
This paper describes CaseLP, a logic-based environment
for modelling and prototyping Multi-Agent Systems (MASs).
CaseLP provides an Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE)
methodology which guides the MAS developer from the late requirement analysis
stage to the prototype validation stage.
CaseLP also offers a set of languages and tools both for modelling agents
that are
characterised by heterogeneous architectures, and for developing
a prototype of the MAS in a semi-automatic way. Full support
for validating the MAS model by running
the prototype is offered, while limited aid for the formal
verification of the MAS properties is supplied.
CaseLP has been used to develop real applications
in collaboration with industrial partners, thus demonstrating the advantages of
rapid prototyping in AOSE.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available in
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/caselp-paper-submitted.ps.gz
Real-world applications are usually characterized by heterogeneous
distributed
entities that interact following complex coordination protocols
and that dynamically and autonomously modify their strategies
during this interaction;
these systems are extremely difficult to model and implement, and
traditional software engineering tools and techniques are often
insufficient to cope with this complexity.
For this reason a new software engineering paradigm, the
Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) has joined, over the
past ten years, more traditional approaches.
AOSE analyzes and designs
systems based on the key abstraction of the agent, an autonomous
entity situated in some environment, able to perceive the environment
itself and to react to changes occurring in it, able to take the
initiative when appropriate and capable of communication with
other agents in the system.
Different approaches have been studied to engineer multi-agent
systems (MAS), comprising
structured but non-mathematical methodologies as well as logic-based
ones. ARPEGGIO, an ongoing software engineering
international project
involving logic programming groups from USA, Australia and Italy,
is designing a logic-based prototyping environment for
engineering this kind of complex applications using
mainly (but not only) logic-based languages.
The focus of this thesis is thus on multi-agent system development
environments which use logic-based approaches to specification and
implementation. Our contribution is three-fold:
1. We have described many informal and
formal approaches to AOSE, with particular attention to the
last ones. We have analyzed different kinds of logics and, for
each of them, we have provided the description and an example of use of one
agent specification languages based on it.
2. We have analyzed some existing MAS Development Kits (MASDKs)
to understand which
engineering approach, if any, is more commonly adopted and which could
be the desiderata for a more powerful environment as
ARPEGGIO aims to become. We have compared
and drawn a taxonomy of five MASDKs and we have
provided rules of thumb to chose the right MASDK to do the right thing.
3. Finally, we have designed the extension of two logic-based MASDKs,
IMPACT and CaseLP, with new capabilities.
IMPACT has been extended to deal with errors
(IMPACT error-tolerant agents), and CaseLP has been extended to become a
multi-language distributed environment which could integrate,
in the future, the IMPACT specification language,
thus taking a first concrete step towards ARPEGGIO's development.
The compressed postscript version of this report is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Tesi/mythesis.ps.gz (1180320 Bytes).
The uncompressed pdf version of this report is available through anonymous ftp
at ftp.disi.unige.it, in
/pub/person/MascardiV/Tesi/mythesis.pdf (1712836 Bytes).
Bibtex Entry (MascardiPhdThesis 2002)
The wide availability of topographic data
in digital form has increased interest in terrain
modelling and has caused a rapid evolution of
Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Research in this
field ranges from the early phase of data acquisition
to the more complex task of the analytical extraction
of landforms from a Digital Terrain Model (DTM). One of
the most important issues when working with terrain
models is how to extract information on the most
significative features of the modelled terrain. The aim
of this survey is to offer an outline of algorithms
which have been developed for characterizing and
extracting surface-specific features from terrain
models. Since the algorithm vary according to the
model, the survey has been organized as follows:
Section 2 introduces the two terrain models we have
taken under consideration, namely regular square grids
(RSGs) and triangulated irregular networks (TINs) and briefly
sketches the contour line model. Section 3 presents some of the most important algorithms for extracting information from an RSG, and Section 4 describes some approaches for extracting features from a TIN. Section 5 concludes the survey with some final considerations.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available in
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/graphics98.ps.gz
This document deals with techniques used to reduce the
number of nullmessages in a distributed discrete--event
simulation. Nullmessages are used to avoid deadlocks
which can occurr when simulating physical systems
(networks) consisting of one or more physical
processes. In the brute--force simplest algorithm [10]
the number of nullmessages is very high. Reducing the
nullmessages number assures improvements to the
simulation performance, and many different solutions
have been proposed for this purpose. The document is
composed by a survey where these different solutions
are presented followed by a comparison between them. A
first section introducing the distributed
discrete--event simulation general issues makes the
document as more self-contained as possible.
The compressed postscript version of this paper is available in
http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/simulation98.ps.gz
Please send suggestions and comments to:
Viviana Mascardi mascardi@disi.unige.it
Last Updated: June, 2010
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