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Journal papers
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Journal papers: download area
CooL-AgentSpeak: Endowing AgentSpeak-DL agents with plan exchange and ontology services
Viviana Mascardi, Davide Ancona, Matteo Barbieri, Rafael H. Bordini, Alessandro Ricci
Web Intelligence and Agent Systems 12(1): 83-107 (2014).
In this paper we present CooL-AgentSpeak, an extension of AgentSpeak-DL with plan exchange and ontology services. In CooL-AgentSpeak, the search for an ontologically relevant plan is no longer limited to the agent's local plan library but is carried out in the other agents' libraries too, according to a cooperation strategy, and it is not based solely on unification and on the subsumption relation between concepts, but also on ontology matching. Belief querying and updating also take advantage of ontological reasoning and matching.
The pdf version of this paper is available here
A Holonic Multi-Agent System for Sketch, Image and Text Interpretation in the Rock Art Domain
Viviana Mascardi, Daniela Briola, Angela Locoro, Daniele Grignani, Vincenzo Deufemia, Luca Paolino, Nicoletta Bianchi, Henry de Lumley, Damiano Malafronte, Alessandro Ricciarelli
International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information and Control, 2014 (volume, issue, pages still to be communicated).
This paper presents the architecture of a holonic multi-agent system for rock art interpretation and discusses the results achieved within the "Indiana MAS" project. We show how the AgentSketch and the ImageRec holons belonging to the Indiana MAS, able to cope with hand drawn sketches and images respectively, have been tested in the domain of Mount Bego's prehistoric rock art (southern French Alps), and how the Manent agent-based framework for the seamless integration of Digital Libraries has been plugged into Indiana MAS to provide text classification, as well as multilingual access to structured repositories. The way Indiana MAS holons cooperate in order to provide correct interpretations of ambiguous shapes is discussed by means of an example based on hypotheses recently advanced by archaeologists.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Attribute Global Types for Dynamic Checking of Protocols in Logic-based Multiagent Systems (technical communications)
V. Mascardi and D. Ancona
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming Journal, On-line Supplement, 2013.
This paper introduces Attribute Global Types, an extension inspired by Attribute Grammars to a formalism we have recently proposed for specifying and dynamically verifying multi-party agent interaction protocols. Global types equipped with attributes are more expressive, since they allow parametric specifications of protocols, but despite their expressive power, they can be still effectively used for dynamic checking of protocols: Attribute Global Types can be easily represented as Prolog terms, and a mechanism for verifying that a sequence of messages complies to an Attribute Global Type has been designed and implemented in Prolog. This logic-based representation and implementation allow us to integrate a monitor agent implementing a run-time verification mechanism of protocol compliance into any logic-based agent oriented programming language that supports the basic Prolog built-ins.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Some Applications of Computational Logic to the Development of Intelligent Systems and Verification Methods
V. Mascardi, G. Delzanno, and M. Martelli.
Rivista della Associazione Italiana Intelligenza Artificiale. IOS Press. 2011
Computational Logic plays a very relevant role in engineering complex systems. It can be used to specify systems at different levels of abstraction. The specifications are executable, thus providing a working prototype for free. Thanks to its well-founded semantics it can be used to reason about the correctness of the specifications, a fundamental aspect when safety critical applications are developed. Researchers working in the Logic Programming Group at DISI, a Genova University Department, have applied methods and tools of Computational Logic for modelling, prototyping, and verifying complex systems. These three research lines are largely overlapping: the complex systems we take into account are often multiagent systems, for which we propose modelling languages as well as prototyping environments and verification techniques. In this paper we describe activities that, in the last decade, we carried out along these research lines.
The pdf version of this paper is available here
Análisis de opiniones con ontologías (Opinion mining with ontologies)
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
Automatic Ontology Matching Via Upper Ontologies: A Systematic Evaluation
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
Intelligent Agents that Monitor, Diagnose and Solve Problems: Two Success Stories of Industry-University Collaboration
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
An agent-based framework for sketched symbol interpretation
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
West2East: exploiting WEb Service Technologies to Engineer Agent-based SofTware
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
Logic-Based Specification Languages for Intelligent Software Agents
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)Comparing Environments for Developing Software Agents
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
1000 Years of Coo-BDI
V. Mascardi and D. Ancona
In DALT 2011 workshop post-proceedings, ``Best of DALT'' retrospective section. C. Sakama, S. Sardina, W. Vasconcelos and M. Winikoff, editors, Springer-Verlag. LNCS serie. To appear in 2012.
The idea of extending the BDI architecture with cooperativity started shaping in 2003 when two independent proposals to support cooperation in a BDI setting were presented at DALT. One proposal, Coo-BDI, extended the BDI architecture by allowing agents to cooperate by exchanging and sharing plans in a quite flexible way; the other extended the BDI operational semantics for introducing speech-act based communication, including primitives for plan exchange. Besides allowing a natural and seamless integration with speech-act based communication for BDI languages, the intuitions behind Coo-BDI have proved to be promising and attractive enough to give rise to new investigations. In this retrospective review we discuss papers that were influenced by Coo-BDI and we outline other potential developments for future research.
The pdf of this paper is available here: http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/1000YearsCooBDI.pdf
MANENT: An Infrastructure for Integrating, Structuring and Searching Digital Libraries
A. Locoro, D. Grignani, and V. Mascardi
In Learning Structure and Schemas from Documents. M. Biba and F. Xhafa, editors, Springer-Verlag. Studies in Computational Intelligence serie, volume 375, pages 315-342, 2011.
Digital Libraries represent the commitment of research communities to preserve authoritative and well structured sources of knowledge, and to share archival organisations, methods and resources thanks to systems relying on standard metadata formats. This chapter describes some natural language processing techniques exploited for automatically extracting structural information about documents stored in Digital Libraries, based on the exposed metadata. The most prominent results achieved in this area are surveyed and discussed. As an example of infrastructure for integrating, structuring and searching Digital Libraries based on natural language processing and semantic web techniques, we discuss the MANENT system. MANENT is a working prototype offering services of Digital Library content management and record classification and retrieval. It is hosted on a server at the CS Department of Genova University and, starting from 2011, it will become publicly available. 475,000 records drawn from 138 repositories that all over the world expose OAI-PMH services have been downloaded, stored, and part of them has been already automatically classified by MANENT.
The pdf of this paper is available here: http://www.disi.unige.it/person/MascardiV/Download/MANENT.pdf
Agents, Multi-Agent Systems and Declarative Programming: What, When, Where, Why, Who, How?
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
Error-Tolerant Agents
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)Logic Programming & Multi-Agent Systems: a Synergic Combination for Applications and Semantics
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
Efficient Verification of MASs with Projections
D. Ancona, D. Briola, A. El Fallah Seghrouchni, V. Mascardi, and P. Taillibert
In F. Dalpiaz, J. Dix, B. van Riemsdijk, editors, Second International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2014), Selected and Revised Papers, LNCS, 2015 (to appear).
Constrained global types are a powerful means to represent agent interaction protocols. In our recent research we used them to represent complex protocols in a very compact way, and we exploited them to dynamically verify actual agents' interactions with respect to diffeerent protocols in both Jason and JADE. The main drawback of our previous approach is the full centralization of the monitoring activity, which is delegated to a unique monitor agent in charge of verifying that the messages exchanged among all the agents are compliant with the protocol. This approach works well for MASs with few agents, but could become unsuitable in communication-intensive and highly-distributed MASs where hundreds of agents should be monitored. In this paper we define an algorithm for projecting a constrained global type onto a set of agents Ags, by restricting it to the interactions involving agents in Ags, so that the outcome of the algorithm is another constrained global type where interactions involve only agents in Ags. The projection mechanism is the first step towards distributing the monitoring activity, making it safer and more efficient: the compliance of a MAS to a protocol could be dynamically verified by suitably partitioning the agents of the MAS into small sets of agents, and by assigning to each partition Ags a local monitor agent which checks all interactions involving Ags against the projected constrained global type. Although the projection of well formed constrained global types can be always performed, the resulting projected protocol does not always model all the constraints as the original one. We describe a generate and test algorithm that provides hints on the correctness of the protocol distribution, leaving for further investigation the formal characterization of which protocols can be distributed onto which agents' subsets.
The pdf version of this paper is available here
Ontology-Driven Processing and Management of Digital Rock Art Objects in IndianaMAS
D. Briola, V. Deufemia, V. Mascardi, L. Paolino, and N Bianchi
In 5th International Euro-Mediterranean Conference (EuroMed 2014), Proceedings, LNCS, 2014 (to appear).
This paper presents the Indiana Ontology for modeling the knowledge about Mount Bego's rock art and its exploitation in the IndianaMAS project. Although many projects use ontologies for semantic processing of cultural heritage digital objects, we are not aware of such ontologies in the rock art domain. Also, the Indiana Ontology is fully and seamlessly integrated with the IndianaMAS framework components, namely the intelligent software agents and the Digital Library used to classify and store multimedia and multilingual objects, thus making the IndianaMAS framework a good representative of an advanced and innovative information management system for the cultural heritage domain.
The pdf version of this paper is available here
Distributed Runtime Verification of JADE Multiagent Systems
D. Briola, V. Mascardi, and D. Ancona
In D. Camacho, L. Braubach, S. Venticinque, and C. Badica, editors, 8th International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing, IDC'2014, volume 570 of Studies in Computational Intelligence, pages 81–91. Springer, 2014.
Verifying that agent interactions in a multiagent system (MAS) are compliant to a given global protocol is of paramount importance for most systems, and is mandatory for safety-critical applications. Runtime verification requires a proper formalism to express such a protocol, a possibly non intrusive mechanism for capturing agent interactions, and a method for verifying that captured interactions are compliant to the global protocol. Projecting the global protocol onto agents' subsets can improve efficiency and fault tolerance by allowing the distribution of the verification mechanism. Since many real MASs are based on JADE, a well known open source platform for MAS development, we implemented a monitor agent that achieves all the goals above using the "Attribute Global Types" (AGT) formalism for representing protocols. Using our JADE monitor we were able to verify FYPA, an extremely complex industrial MAS currently used by Ansaldo STS for allocating platforms and tracks to trains inside Italian stations, besides the Alternating Bit and the Iterated Contract Net protocols which are well known in the distributed systems and MAS communities. Depending on the monitored MAS, the performances of our monitor are either comparable or slightly worse than those of the JADE Sniffer because of the logging of the verification activities. Reducing the log files dimension, re-implementing the monitor in a way independent from the JADE Sniffer, and heavily exploiting projections are the three directions we are pursuing for improving the monitor's performances, still keeping all its features.
The pdf version of this paper is available here
PetroAdvisor: A Volunteer-based Information System for Collecting and Rating Petroglyph Data
V. Deufemia, L. Paolino, G. Polese, V. Mascardi, H. de Lumley
In 20th International Conference on Distributed Multimedia Systems (DMS'2014), Proceedings, 2014, http://ksiresearchorg.ipage.com/seke/dms14paper/paper58.pdf
In this paper we exploit a volunteer-based information paradigm for archaeological aims. In particular, we present PetroAdvisor, a system supporting several fundamental activities to digitally preserve petroglyph sites. The system also uses a rewarding strategy in order to stimulate people participation to the project, so that those entering useful information gain free archaeological data, tips on excursions and tours, opinions and rating from previous tourists, and so forth. User provided information typically consists of petroglyph pictures, descriptions, and several useful meta-data, such as geo-referenced information, petroglyph con- tours, and so forth, empowering the work of the archaeologists, and enabling them to tackle technology shortfalls.
The pdf version of this paper is available here
On the Expressiveness of Attribute Global Types: The Formalization of a Real Multiagent System Protocol
Viviana Mascardi, Daniela Briola, Davide Ancona
In AI*IA 2013, Proceedings, Springer Verlag LNCS, pages 300-311
Attribute global types are a formalism for specifying and dynamically verifying multi-party agents interaction protocols. They allow the multiagent system designer to easily express synchronization constraints among protocol branches and global constraints on sub-sequences of the allowed protocol traces. FYPA (Find Your Path, Agent!) is a multiagent system implemented in Jade currently being used by Ansaldo STS for allocating platforms and tracks to trains inside Italian stations. Since information on the station topology and on the current resource allocation is fully distributed, FYPA involves complex negotiation among agents to find a solution in quasi-real time. In this paper we describe the FYPA protocol using both AUML and attribute global types, showing that the second formalism is more concise than the first, besides being unambiguous and amenable for formal reasoning. Thanks to the Prolog implementation of the transition function defining the attribute global type semantic, we are able to generate a large number of protocol traces, and to manually inspect a subset of them to empirically validate that the protocol's formalization is correct. The integration of the Prolog verification mechanism into a Jade monitoring agent extending the Sniffer Agent is under way and will be used to verify the compliance of the actual conversation with the protocol. Keywords: multiagent systems, attribute global types, negotiation, dynamic verification of protocol compliance.
The pdf version of this paper is available here
Exploiting MAS-Based Simulation to Improve the Indian Railways' Efficiency
Supriyo Ghosh, Animesh Dutta, Viviana Mascardi, Daniela Briola
In MATES 2013, Proceedings, Springer Verlag LNCS, pages 278-291
Despite being one of the world's largest railways networks, with a daily transportation of over 25 million passengers and 2.8 million tons of freight, the Indian Railways perform their signaling, traffic management and trains scheduling activities in a completely manual way. The lack of automation causes not only significant delays, but also frequent collisions where passengers die or remain seriously injured. This paper describes how we modeled the Indian Railways system as a MAS and the results of the simulations run using NetLogo on real data retrieved from the Indian Railways dataset. The simulated system is -- under some assumptions -- collision-free and, thanks to the integration of the MAX-SUM algorithm, minimizes the individual train delay.
The pdf version of this paper is available here
Constrained Global Types for Dynamic Checking of Protocol Conformance in Multi-Agent Systems
D. Ancona, M. Barbieri, and V. Mascardi
In SAC 2013, Proceedings, ACM, pages 1377-1379, 2013.
Global types are behavioral types for specifying and verifying multiparty interactions between distributed components, inspired by the process algebra approach. In this paper we extend the formalism of global types in multi-agent systems resulted from our previous work with a mechanism for easily expressing constrained shuffle of message sequences; accordingly, we extend the semantics to include the newly introduced feature, and show the expressive power of these "constrained global types".
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
MUSE: MUltilinguality and SEmantics for the Citizens of the World
M. Bozzano, D. Briola, D. Leone, A. Locoro, L. Marasso, V. Mascardi
In Proceedings of Intelligent Distributed Computing (IDC) 2012, published in Studies in Computational Intelligence Volume 446, 2013, pp 97-102
This paper discusses some of the challenges raised by multilinguality in the Public Administration field and shows how the MUSE system addresses them by combining speech to text, text to speech, and machine translation techniques, utilizing domain ontologies throughout a complex system designed as a Multi-Agent System and deployed by exploiting resources in the Cloud. The design of MUSE is finished and its implementation and unit testing are under way. On completion of these two stages, MUSE will be experimented in the Registry Office of Genoa Municipality which is supporting this activity by providing the authors with data, advice on the domain, and the opportunity to test MUSE on the field. The final purpose of this work is to make MUSE's services available to all the foreign citizens interacting with Genoa Municipality's Registry Office. The two languages currently supported are Spanish and Italian. Due to the high modularity of MUSE's architecture, a limited effort will be required to add other languages in the future, if the on site experimentation will be successful.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Global Types for Dynamic Checking of Protocol Conformance of Multi-Agent Systems (Extended Abstract)
D. Ancona, M. Barbieri, and V. Mascardi
In P. Massazza, editor, ICTCS 2012, Proceedings, pages 39-43, 2012.
Multi-agent systems (MASs) have been proved to be an industrial-strength technology for integrating and coordinating heterogeneous systems. However, due to their intrinsically distributed nature, testing MASs is a difficult task. In recent work [1] we have tackled the problem of runtime verification of the conformance of a MAS implementation to a specified protocol by exploiting global session types on top of the Jason agent oriented programming language [2]. Global session types [3,6,4] (or session types, for short) are behavioral types designed for specifying in a compact way multiparty interactions between distributed components, and verifying their correctness. Session types can be naturally represented as cyclic Prolog terms (that is, regular terms), and their interpretation can be given by a transition function, that can be suitably implemented with a Prolog predicate. With such a predicate, a Jason monitor agent can be automatically implemented to dynamically check that the message exchange between the agents of a system conforms to a specified protocol. In this paper we continue our research in two directions: on the one hand, we investigate the theoretical foundations of our framework; on the other we extend it by introducing a new concatenation operator that allows a significant enhancement of the expressive power of our session types. As two significant examples, we show how two non trivial protocols can be compactly represented in our framework: a ping-pong protocol, and an alternating bit protocol, in the version proposed by Denielou and Yoshida [5]. Both protocols cannot be specified easily (if at all) by other session type frameworks, while in our approach they can be expressed by two deterministic types (in a sense made precise in the sequel) that can be effectively employed for dynamic checking of the conformance of the system to the protocol.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
The Indiana MAS Project: Goals and Preliminary Results
V. Mascardi, D. Briola, A. Locoro, M. Martelli, M. Ancona, V. Deufemia, L. Paolino, G. Tortora, R. Francese, G. Polese
CEUR Workshop Proceedings Volume 892, 2012, 8p 13th Workshop on Objects and Agents, WOA 2012; Milan; Italy; 17 September 2012 through 19 September 2012
The Indiana MAS project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research "Futuro in Ricerca 2010" program, aims at providing a framework for the digital protection and conservation of rock art natural and cultural heritage sites, by storing, organizing and presenting information about them in such a way to encourage scientific research and to raise the interest and sensibility towards them from the common people. The project involves two research units, namely Genova (Dipartimento di Informatica, Bioingegneria, Robotica e Ingegneria dei Sistemi) and Salerno (Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica), for a period of 36 months, starting from March 8th, 2012. The technologies adopted in the project range from agents to ontologies, as requested by the complex nature of the platform, where each module is devoted to a specific task: sketch and symbol recognition, semantic interpretation of complex visual scenes, multi-language text understanding, storing, classification and indexing of multimedia and heterogeneous digital objects. All of them should cooperate and coordinate in order to enable higher level components to reason on them and to detect relationships among different digital objects, hence providing new hypothesis based on such relationships.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Automatic Generation of Self-Monitoring MASs from Multiparty Global Session Types in Jason
D. Ancona, S. Drossopoulou, and V. Mascardi
In M. Baldoni, L. Dennis, V. Mascardi, W. Vasconcelos, editors, Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies X, Springer, LNCS 7784, pages 76-95, 2013.
Global session types are behavioral types designed for specifying in a compact way multiparty interactions between distributed components, and verifying their correctness. We take advantage of the fact that global session types can be naturally represented as cyclic Prolog terms - which are directly supported by the Jason implementation of AgentSpeak - to allow simple automatic generation of self-monitoring MASs: given a global session type specifying an interaction protocol, and the implementation of a MAS where agents are expected to be compliant with it, we define a procedure for automatically deriving a self-monitoring MAS. Such a generated MAS ensures that agents conform to the protocol at run-time, by adding a monitor agent that checks that the ongoing conversation is correct w.r.t. the global session type. The feasibility of the approach has been experimented in Jason for a non-trivial example involving recursive global session types with alternative choice and fork type constructors. Although the main aim of this work is the development of a unit testing framework for MASs, the proposed approach can be also extended to implement a framework supporting self-recovering MASs.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Semantic Web and Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies: Current and Future Trends (Position Paper)
V. Mascardi, J. Hendler, and L. Papaleo
In M. Baldoni, L. Dennis, V. Mascardi, W. Vasconcelos, editors, Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies X, Springer, LNCS 7784, pages 197-202, 2013.
One of the first discussions about a Web enriched with semantics and its relationships with artificial intelligence (and hence, with intelligent agents) dates back to 1998 [4], but it was only ten years ago that the idea of a Semantic Web on top of which agent-based computing would have allowed computer programs to interact with non-local web-based resources, became familiar to a wide audience of scientists [5, 10]. The integration of Semantic Web concepts as first class entities inside agent languages, technologies, and engineering methodologies has different levels of maturity: many AOSE methodologies, organizational models and MAS architectures seamlessly integrate them (for example, [20], [19], and the FIPA "Ontology Service Specification", www.fipa.org/specs/fipa00086/, respectively), but few languages do. In this position paper we review the state of the art in the integration of semantic web concepts in declarative agent languages and technologies and outline what we expect to be the future trends of this research topic.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Investigative Analysis across Documents and Drawings: Visual Analytics for Archaeologists
V. Deufemia, L. Paolino, G. Tortora, V. Mascardi, M. Ancona, M. Martelli, A. Traverso, N. Bianchi, H. de Lumley
Proceedings of AVI 2012.
With the invention and rapid improvement of data-capturing devices, such as satellite imagery and digital cameras, the information that archaeologists must manage in their everyday's activities has rapidly grown in complexity and amount. In this work we present Indiana Finder, an interactive visualization system that supports archaeologists in the examination of large repositories of documents and drawings. In particular, the system provides visual analytic support for investigative analysis such as the interpretation of new archaeological findings, the detection of interpretation anomalies, and the discovery of new insights. We illustrate the potential of Indiana Finder in the context of the digital protection and conservation of rock art natural and cultural heritage sites. In this domain, Indiana Finder provides an integrated environment that archaeologists can exploit to investigate, discover, and learn from textual documents, pictures, and drawings related to rock carvings. This goal is accomplished through novel visualization methods including visual similarity ring charts that may help archaeologists in the hard task of dating a symbol in a rock engraving based on its shape and on the surrounding symbols.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Rock Art Interpretation within Indiana MAS
Mascardi, V., Deufemia, V., Malafronte, D., Ricciarelli, A., Bianchi, N. de Lumley, H.
In Jezic, G. and Nguyen, N. T. (editors), Proceedings of 6th International KES Conference on Agents and Multi-agent Systems - Technologies and Applications. Springer-Verlag.
This paper presents the first results achieved within the Indiana MAS project funded by Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research, MIUR. We discuss how the AgentSketch holon belonging to the Indiana MAS has been extended to cope with images, besides hand drawn sketches, and has been tested in the domain of Mount Bego's prehistoric rock art (southern French Alps). The way Indiana MAS holons cooperate in order to provide correct interpretations of ambiguous shapes is discussed by means of an example based on hypotheses recently advanced by archaeologists.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Ontology-based documentation extraction for semi-automatic migration of Java code
Davide Ancona, Viviana Mascardi, Ombretta Pavarino
27th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2012), ACM, pp. 1137-1143, 2012
Migrating libraries is not a trivial task, even under the simplest assumption of a downward compatible upgrade. We propose a novel approach to partially relieve programmers from this task, based on the simple observation that class, method and field names and comments contained in a Java library should be a good approximation of its semantics, and that code migration requires knowing the semantic similarities between the two libraries. Following this assumption, we borrow the main concepts and notions from the Semantic Web, and show how (1) an ontology can be automatically generated from the relevant information extracted from the code of the library; (2) semantic similarities between two different libraries can be found by running a particular ontology matching (a.k.a. on- tology alignment) algorithm on the two ontologies extracted from the libraries. The main advantages of the approach are that ontology extraction can be fully automated, without adding ad-hoc code annotations, and that results and tools produced by the Semantic Web research community can be directly re-used for our purposes. Experiments carried out even with simple and efficient freely available matchers show that our approach is promising, even though it would benefit from the use of more advanced ontology matchers possibly integrated with a component for checking type compatibility of the computed alignments.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
BOwL: Exploiting Boolean Operators and Lesk Algorithm for Linking Ontologies
Viviana Mascardi, Angela Locoro
27th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2012), ACM, pp. 398-400, 2012
BOwL applies word sense disambiguation techniques for tagging ontology entities with WordNet words. Boolean operators that appear in names of ontology entities are interpreted based on their semantics and are used during the ontology matching stage accordingly. Experimental results are shown, demonstrating the feasibility of the approach.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Evolving and Validating Annotations in Web-based Collaborative Environments through Ontology Matching
Angela Locoro, Viviana Mascardi, Anna Marina Scapolla
27th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2012), ACM, pp. 725-727, 2012
The research presented in this paper describes an automated approach for extracting concepts from annotated shared contents within a collaborative web environment, and matching them with domain ontologies. Feedback on the domain ontology suitability for the environment purposes is provided as a result of the automatic matching between the domain ontology and the free tags that users of the system employ. This approach will enable annotations and domain ontologies to evolve coherently with the real use of any social web environment. Experiments carried out on the Knowledge Practice Environment of the EU-funded project KP-Lab demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
CooL-AgentSpeak: Enhancing AgentSpeak-DL Agents with Plan Exchange and Ontology Services
Viviana Mascardi, Davide Ancona, Rafael H. Bordini, Alessandro Ricci
In Olivier Boissier, Jeffrey Bradshaw, Longbing Cao, Klaus Fischer, Mohand-Said Hacid (Eds.): Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, IAT 2011, IEEE Computer Society, pag. 109-116, 2011
Abstract—In this paper we present CooL-AgentSpeak, an extension of AgentSpeak-DL with plan exchange and ontology services. In CooL-AgentSpeak, the search for a plan is no longer limited to the agent's local plan library but is carried out in the other agents' libraries too, according to a cooperation strategy, and it is not based solely on unification and on the subsumption relation between concepts, but also on ontology matching. Belief querying and updating take advantage of ontological reasoning and matching as well.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
When you Doubt, Abstain: from Misclassification to Epochè in Automatic Text Categorisation
Angela Locoro, Daniele Grignani, Viviana Mascardi
In Jomi Fred Hubner, Jean-Marc Petit, Einoshin Suzuki (Eds.): Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Workshops, WI-IAT 2011. IEEE Computer Society, pag. 209-212, 2011
This paper describes how natural language processing and ontologies are exploited for automatic text categorisation. The approach introduced is part of the MANENT system, an infrastructure for integrating, structuring and searching Digital Libraries. The procedure of structural information extraction, and of the automatic classification of the records according to natural language understanding and the WordNet Domains taxonomy is discussed. A comparison between two versions of the classification algorithm is conducted and the improvements of the new approach are articulated. In particular, using semantic connections between words refines the classification results while reducing misclassification to non classification.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Agents and Ontologies for Understanding and Preserving the Rock Art of Mount Bego
Laura Papaleo, Gianluca Quercini, Viviana Mascardi, Massimo Ancona, A. Traverso, H. de Lumley
In Joaquim Filipe, Ana L. N. Fred (Eds.): ICAART 2011 - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, Volume 2 - Agents pag. 288-295, 2011
This paper describes the joint effort of computer scientists, archaeologists, and historians for designing a multi-agent system that exploits ontologies for the semantic description of the Mount Bego petroglyphs, thus moving a step forward their preservation. Most components of the MAS have already been developed and tested, and their integration is under way.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Hive-BDI: Extending Jason with Shared Beliefs and Stigmergy
Matteo Barbieri and Viviana Mascardi
In Joaquim Filipe, Ana L. N. Fred (Eds.): ICAART 2011 - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, Volume 2 - Agents pag. 479-482, 2011
The classic BDI model focuses on the internal functioning of a single-agent architecture. Neither shared beliefs nor spontaneous and indirect coordination via the environment are supported. We describe Hive-BDI, an extension of the Jason BDI-style language with shared beliefs implemented via the logic-based coordination language ReSpecT and with stigmergy obtained via digital pheromones. A case study where robots roaming an unknown environment collaborate for creating a map demonstrates the feasibility of our approach.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Statistical Language Identification of Short Texts
Fela Winkelmolen and Viviana Mascardi
In Joaquim Filipe, Ana L. N. Fred (Eds.): ICAART 2011 - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, Volume 1 - Artificial Intelligence, SciTePress, pag. 498-503, 2011
Although correctly identifying the language of short texts should prove useful in a large number of applications, few satisfactory attemps are reported in the literature. In this paper we describe a Naive Bayes Classifier that performs well on very short texts, as well as the corpus that we created from movie subtitles for training it. Both the corpus and the algorithm are available under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Multi Agent Resource Allocation: a Comparison of Five Negotiation Protocols
D. Briola and V. Mascardi
In Giancarlo Fortino, Alfredo Garro, Luigi Palopoli, Wilma Russo, Giandomenico Spezzano (Eds.): Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Objects and Agents, 2011. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 741 CEUR-WS.org, pagg 95-104, 2011
This paper describes five systems that exploit negotiation strategies to solve multiagent resource allocation problems. A deep comparison is drawn among them according to different criteria that involve general features of the systems; adherence to widely accepted agent definitions; domain, purpose, and approach; analysis, design and implementation of the negotiation protocol. Considerations on how extending one of the analyzed systems in order to move a concrete step towards the realization of an integrated platform for developing negotiation protocols are also provided in the conclusions.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Design and Implementation of a NetLogo Interface for the Stand-Alone FYPA System
D. Briola and V. Mascardi
In Giancarlo Fortino, Alfredo Garro, Luigi Palopoli, Wilma Russo, Giandomenico Spezzano (Eds.): Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Objects and Agents, 2011. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 741 CEUR-WS.org, pagg 41-50, 2011
FYPA (Find Your Path, Agent!) is a multiagent system currently used by Ansaldo STS for off-line daily computation of paths of trains inside stations. Its exploitation for on-line replanning in case of unavailability of resources is envisaged in the very near future, since the system's performances demonstrated to be suitable for real time usage. In this paper we present StandaFYPA, the stand-alone version of FYPA that we developed for running batteries of tests on our own, without needing to access existing Ansaldo applications. StandaFYPA is equipped with a graphical interface implemented in NetLogo for off-line visualization, that we describe here in details.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Managing Unavailabilities in a Dynamic Scenario Following an Agent-Based Approach
A. Locoro, V. Mascardi, F. Mortara, R. Sanna
In Giancarlo Fortino, Alfredo Garro, Luigi Palopoli, Wilma Russo, Giandomenico Spezzano (Eds.): Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Objects and Agents, 2011. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 741 CEUR-WS.org, pagg 58-67, 2011
The correct management of resources that can become unavailable over time and the efficient (in terms of both cost and time) re-allocation of the services they provided before becoming unavailable, is an open problem that arises in a wide range of application domains. Despite to some differences, many scenarios spanning very different domains, from logistics to industrial automation, from telecommunication to water systems, may be considered as instances of a more general situation, and the actions to take in order to solve the unavailability problem follow similar patterns. In this paper we discuss the implementation of a multiagent system for solving unavailability problems in an artificial - although realistic - scenario which takes inspiration from to the electricity power network domain.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
PrettyCLP: a Light Java Implementation for Teaching CLP
Alessio Stalla, Davide Zanucco, Agostino Dovier, and Viviana Mascardi
26th Italian Conference on Computational Logic, Proceedings of the 26th Italian Conference on Computational Logic, CEUR Volume 810, http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-810/
Recursion is nowadays taught to students since their rst programming days in order to embed it deeply in their brains. However, students' first impact on Prolog programs execution sometimes weakens their faith in recursive programming thus invalidating our initial efforts. The selection and computation rules implemented by all Prolog systems, although clearly explained in textbooks, are hard to be interiorized by students also due to the poor system debugging primitives. Problems increase in Constraint Logic Programming when unification is replaced by constraint simplification in a suitable constraint domain. In this paper, we extend PrettyProlog, a light-weight Prolog interpreter written in Java capable of system primitives for SLD tree visualization, to deal with Constraint Logic Programming over Finite Domains. The user, in particular, can select the propagation strategies (e.g. arc consistency vs bound consistency) and can view the (usually hidden) details of the constraint propagation stage.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
An Interaction-oriented Agent Framework for Open Environments
Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Federico Bergenti, Elisa Marengo, Viviana Mascardi, Viviana Patti, Alessandro Ricci, Andrea Santi
In Roberto Pirrone, Filippo Sorbello (Eds.): AI*IA 2011: Artificial Intelligence Around Man and Beyond - XIIth International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6934 Springer 2011, ISBN 978-3-642-23953-3: pag 68-79, 2011
The Alps of southeastern France, better known as the Valley of Marvels, hide an impressive collection of engravings, mostly visible on the rocks around Mount Bego, which are irreplaceable witnesses of what life of the people who created them looked like. This calls for immediate action on promoting the awareness of this cultural treasure, which is hardly accessible by interested common men, as well as on helping domain experts to analyze these engravings and share their understanding and theories about them with other experts and with the mass. In this position paper, we propose technologies and partially achieved results for preserving in digital form all kinds of available data about the region. The technology will allow domain experts to: (i) organize and structure data into an existing collaborative tool set, (2) process them, (3) make assumptions about the way of life of the ancient people based on them, and (4) make the results of such activities available in form of 3D Virtual Worlds.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Virtual Institutions for Preserving and Simulating the Culture of Mount Bego's Ancient People
M. Ancona, V. Mascardi, G. Quercini, A. Bogdanovych, H. de Lumley, L. Papaleo, S. Simoff, A. Traverso
VAST10: The 11th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Intelligent Cultural Heritage - Short and Project Papers. Short and Project Papers:5-8.
The Alps of southeastern France, better known as the Valley of Marvels, hide an impressive collection of engravings, mostly visible on the rocks around Mount Bego, which are irreplaceable witnesses of what life of the people who created them looked like. This calls for immediate action on promoting the awareness of this cultural treasure, which is hardly accessible by interested common men, as well as on helping domain experts to analyze these engravings and share their understanding and theories about them with other experts and with the mass. In this position paper, we propose technologies and partially achieved results for preserving in digital form all kinds of available data about the region. The technology will allow domain experts to: (i) organize and structure data into an existing collaborative tool set, (2) process them, (3) make assumptions about the way of life of the ancient people based on them, and (4) make the results of such activities available in form of 3D Virtual Worlds.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
Specification, simulation and verification of negotiation protocols in a unified agent-based framework (Extended Abstract)
Daniela Briola, Maurizio Martelli, Viviana Mascardi
ICTCS 2010, 12th Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science, 2010
In this paper, we describe a framework for specifying, simulating and verifying negotiation protocols following an agent-based approach. Most of the components of this framework have already been implemented and tested, whereas verification facilities using temporal logic, which are the most innovative aspect of this proposal, are being designed at the time of writing.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
MERCURIO: An Interaction-oriented Framework for Designing, Verifying and Programming Multi-Agent Systems (Position Paper)
Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Federico Bergenti, Antonio Boccalatte, Elisa Marengo, Maurizio Martelli, Viviana Mascardi, Luca Padovani, Viviana Patti, Alessandro Ricci, Gianfranco Rossi, Andrea Santi
Andrea Omicini, Mirko Viroli (Eds.): Proceedings of the 11th WOA 2010 Workshop, Dagli Oggetti Agli Agenti, 2010. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 621 CEUR-WS.org 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 2009. 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 of 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
Trattamento del Linguaggio Naturale Tramite Prolog: un Approccio Promettente per Generare Istituzioni Virtuali da Testi Scritti
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
NLP and Ontology Matching: A Successful Combination for Trialogical Learning
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
Integrating Agents and Virtual Institutions for Sharing Cultural Heritage on the Web
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
Exploiting Prolog and NLP Techniques for Matching Ontologies and for Repairing Correspondences
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
PrettyProlog: A Java Interpreter and Visualizer of Prolog Programs
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
Dynamic Resource Allocation in a MAS: A Case Study from the Industry
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 Correspondence Repair Algorithm Based On Word Sense Disambiguation And Upper Ontologies
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
Exploiting Agents and Ontologies for Type- and Meaning-Safe Adaptation of Java Programs
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
Ontology Agents in FIPA-compliant Platforms: a Survey and a New Proposal
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
A Prolog-Based MAS for Railway Signalling Monitoring: Implementation and Experiments
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
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.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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.
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
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.
Key words: Multi-Agent System, Multi-Language, Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, Rapid Prototyping.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
A Comparison of Upper Ontologies
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
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.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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.
Keywords: Sketch understanding, agent-based systems,
diagram recognition, visual language parsing.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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.
Keywords. Intelligent Agent, Web Service, Agent-Interaction Protocol, Prolog
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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.
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
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?".
Keywords. Ontological Analysis of Interaction and Communication, Agent-Oriented
Software Engineering, MAS Meta-model
The pdf version of this paper is available
here
CooWS: Adaptive BDI Agents meet Service-Oriented Programming - Extended Version
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
BDI^ATL: An Alternating-time BDI Logic for Multiagent Systems
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
A Semantic Information Retrieval Advertisement and Policy Based System for a P2P Network
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
CooWS: Adaptive BDI Agents meet Service-Oriented Programming
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
A Customizable Semantic-Based P2P System
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
Languages for Programming BDI-style Agents: an Overview
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
An Ontology-Based Similarity between Sets of Concepts
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
Designing and Implementing Electronic Auctions in a Multiagent System Environment
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
Personalization, verification and conformance for logic-based communicating agents
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
Integrating tuProlog into DCaseLP to Engineer Heterogeneous Agent Systems
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
Checking the Completeness of Ontologies: A Case Study from the Semantic Web
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
Reasoning about agents' interaction protocols inside DCaseLP
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
Developing an Ontology for the Retrieval of XML Documents: A Comparative Evaluation of Existing Methodologies
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
Coo-AgentSpeak: Cooperation in AgentSpeak through Plan Exchange
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
A Multimedia, Multichannel and Personalized News Provider
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
From UML Diagrams to Jess Rules: Integrating OO and Rule-Based Languages to Specify, Implement and Execute Agents
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
From Requirement Specification to Prototype Execution: a Combination of a Multiview Use-Case Driven Method and Agent-Oriented Techniques
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
Customizing AOSE Methodologies by Reusing AOSE Features
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
Coo-BDI: Extending the BDI Model with Cooperativity
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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Logic-Based Languages to Model and Program Intelligent Agents
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".
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Specifica, Implementazione ed Esecuzione di un Prototipo di Sistema Multi-Agente in D-CaseLP
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.
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A Multi-Agent Approach to Vehicle Monitoring in Motorway
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.
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Specification of Heterogeneous Agent Architectures
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.
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HEMASL: A Flexible Language to Specify Heterogeneous Agents
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.
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Mixin-based modules for logic programming
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.
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Prototyping Freight Trains Traffic Management Using Multi-Agent Systems
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.
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An Agent-Based Prototype for Freight Trains Traffic Management
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.
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/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/FMRAIL99.ps.gz
A Logic Programming Framework for Component-Based Software Prototyping
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.
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/pub/person/MascardiV/Papers/COCL99.ps.gz
Specification and Simulation of Multi-Agent Systems in CaseLP
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.
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Combining Logical Agents with Rapid Prototyping for Engineering Distributed Applications
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.
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Agent-Oriented and Constraint Technologies for Distributed transaction Management
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.
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Multi-Agent Systems Development as a Software Engineering Enterprise
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.
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Towards Multi-Agent Software Prototyping
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.
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CaseLP: a Complex Application Specification Environment based on Logic Programming
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.
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Applying Logic Programming to the Specification of Complex Applications
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.
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Technical reports: download area
MERCURIO: An Interaction-oriented Framework for Designing, Verifying and Programming Multi-Agent Systems
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}
}
From AUML to WS-BPEL
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
DCaseLP: a Prototyping Environment for Multilingual Agent Systems
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
CaseLP: a Prototyping Environment for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems
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
Logic-Based Specification Environments for Multi-Agent Systems
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
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/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).
Extraction of Significant Terrain Features from RSG and TIN: A Survey
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
The Reduction of the Number of Nullmessages in Conservative LP-Simulation Engines
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 viviana.mascardi@unige.it
Last Updated: April, 2013