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An Essay on Belief and Acceptance

Role-based approaches are emerging technologies in information system design and implementation. Roles have been acknowledged and applied in many fields for many years. Considering their increasing importance and applications in the development of various information systems, this paper intends to: 1) survey the literature relevant to role mechanisms and role-based systems in different fields and point out their motivations and contributions; 2) classify roles in such different contexts as modeling, designing, management, and collaboration; 3) identify the commonalities and differences among roles in different fields; and 4) point out the challenges, benefits, and future research areas of role-based systems.

Roles in Information Systems: A Survey

A method to automatically process social media data includes capturing captured data, describing actions and/or context relating a user across multiple social media systems. The captured data is stored within a database. One or more interfaces are provided in order to provide access to the stored captured data. A rules database is configured to store multiple social media rules (e.g., behaviors) that may be associated with a user. A behavior engine is configured to perform autonomous activities, on behalf of a user with respect to multiple social media platforms, based on the social medial rules and/or the captured data.

Automated agent for social media systems

Distributed management of complex large-scale infrastructures, such as power distribution systems, is challenging. Sustainability of these systems can be achieved by enabling stabilisation in global resource utilisation. This paper proposes the Energy Plan Overlay Self-stabilisation system (EPOS), for this purpose. EPOS is an agent-based approach that performs self-stabilisation over a tree overlay, as an instance of a hierarchical virtual organisation. The global goal of stabilisation emerges through local knowledge, local decisions and local interactions among software agents organised in a tree. Two fitness functions are proposed to stabilise global resource utilisation. The first proactively keeps deviations minimised and the second reactively reverses deviations. Extensive experimentation reveals that EPOS outperforms a system that utilises resources in a greedy manner. Finally, this paper also investigates and evaluates factors that influence the effectiveness of EPOS.

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Local agent-based self-stabilisation in global resource utilisation

This paper presents the process-oriented aspects of a formal and visual agent-based business process modeling language. The language is of use for (networks of) organizations that elect or envisage multi-agent systems for the support of collaborative business processes. The paper argues that the design of a collaborative business process should start with a proper understanding of the work practice of the agents in the business domain under consideration. The language introduces a novel diagram to represent the wide range of (cross-enterprise) business interactions as a hierarchy of role-based interactions (including their ordering relations) in a tree structure. The behaviors owned by the agents playing the roles in the tree are specified in separate process diagrams. A collaborative business process studied in the context of a case study at a Dutch gas transport company is used to exemplify the modeling approach. Explicit (agent-based) process models can and should be verified using formal methods. In the business process community, design-time verification of a process design is considered vital in order to ensure the correctness and termination of a collaborative business process. The proposed modeling approach is enhanced with a design-time verification method. The direction taken in this research is to combine the interaction tree and the associated agent behaviors into a verifiable hierarchical colored Petri net in order to take advantage of its well-defined (execution) semantics and proven (computerized) verification techniques. The verification method presented in this paper consists of three steps: (1) the translation of the agent-based process design to a hierarchical colored Petri net, (2) the identification of process design errors, and (3) the correction and rollback of process design errors to the agent-based model. The translation technique has been implemented in a software tool that outputs the hierarchical colored Petri net in a format that can be loaded in the widely used CPN Tools software package. Verification results are discussed for the case study model.

Towards agent-based modelling and verification of collaborative business processes : An approach centred on interactions and behaviours

This work proposes a method for allocating temporally interdependent tasks to homogeneous or heterogeneous cooperative agents in dynamic large-scale networks. This method views searching, task allocation and scheduling as an integrated problem that has to be efficiently solved in such networks. Solving the general problem optimally in a decentralized way is very hard and can only be solved by a centralized method, be approximated by means of heuristics, or by relaxations of the original problem. Our method facilitates effective searching through the dynamic assignment of gateway roles to agents and the exploitation of routing indices. In combination to searching, it exploits distributed constraint satisfaction techniques and dynamic re-organization of agent teams to efficiently handle the allocation of complex tasks with interdependent subtasks.

Overlay networks for task allocation and coordination in dynamic large-scale networks of cooperative agents

Roles have been used both as an intuitive concept in order to analyze multi-agent systems and as a formal structure in order to implement coherent and robust teams. The extensive use of roles in implemented systems evidences their importance in multiagent systems design and implementation. In this paper we emphasize the importance of roles for multiagent systems to act in complex domains, identify some of their properties and we review work done concerning specification and exploitation of roles in agent-oriented system engineering methodologies and in multi-agent systems that are deployed in dynamic and unpredictable domains.

Importance and Properties of Roles in MAS Organization: A review of methodologies and systems

For groups of agents to act collaboratively, they need to recognize the need for collaboration, decide on the method to be followed for achieving goal states, assign responsibilities to subgroups and individuals, and so on, until responsibilities that can be fulfilled by individuals are reached. Aiming to support collaborative activity of humans within organized settings, this paper introduces a set of constructs for specifying organizational structures and introduces an explicit representation of individual and collaborative responsibilities within organizations. We conjecture that group members create common awareness towards recognizing the need for collaboration by forming group acceptances. Acceptances are formed by means of shared practices and beliefs of individual agents. The paper introduces state recognition recipes that drive group members within organizations to form acceptances, and thoroughly explains the exploitation of these recipes in conjunction to state achievement recipes for achieving goal states and fulfilling responsibilities collaboratively.

Agent-enhanced collaborative activity in organized settings

Cooperative activity involves collaboration and communication. Through the stages of collaboration, agents may play different roles either for performing domain tasks, or for forming decisions concerning the collaborative activity itself. Collaboration and communication can be enhanced if dependencies between agents' intentions are captured. Role-specification is expected to be a vital factor towards this goal. This is evidenced by roles' importance in many implemented systems. Agents' coordination, plan monitoring and re-planning in these systems rely on contextual information and agents' roles. However, there is not an implemented generic agent architecture that realizes the importance of roles for flexible cooperative activity. This paper shows how the ICagent development framework has been evolved to support cooperative activity through representing and reasoning about multi-role recipes.

Roles in Collaborative Activity

Roles have been used both as an intuitive concept in order to analyze multi-agent systems and model inter-agent social activity as well as a formal structure in order to implement coherent and robust teams. The extensive use of roles in implemented systems evidences their importance in multi-agent systems design and implementation. In this paper we emphasize the importance of roles for multi-agent systems to act in complex domains, identify some of their properties and we review work done concerning specification and exploitation of roles in agent-oriented system engineering methodologies, in formal models about agent social activity, and in multi-agent systems that are deployed in dynamic and unpredictable domains.

Ioannis Partsakoulakis

Papers

Overlay networks for task allocation and coordination in dynamic large-scale networks of cooperative agents

Importance and Properties of Roles in MAS Organization: A review of methodologies and systems

Agent-enhanced collaborative activity in organized settings

Roles in Collaborative Activity

Roles in Mas