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 different 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.

Efficient verification of MASs with projections

The field of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE), which has evolved during the last two decades, attempts at introducing artificial intelligence concepts into the practice of software engineering. Despite considerable progress, it seems that the challenges the field encountered at its early days still hold. In particular, the adoption of AOSE principles in the academia, and even more so in the industry, is limited. This chapter aims to specify what AOSE is, to determine the related research areas, to examine historical perspectives of AOSE evolution, and to analyze its progress and point out challenges and future research directions.

https://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783642544316-c2.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-1471416-p176583397

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering: Revisiting the State of the Art

Open systems are characterized by a diversity of heterogeneous and autonomous agents that act according to private goals, and with a behavior that is hard to predict. They can be regulated through organizations similar to human organizations, which regulate the agents' behavior space and describe the expected behavior of the agents. Agents need to be able to reason about the regulations, so that they can act within the expected boundaries and work towards the objectives of the organization. In this paper, we propose the AORTA1 architecture for making agents organization-aware. It is designed such that it provides organizational reasoning capabilities to agents implemented in existing agent programming languages without being tied to a specific organizational model. We show how it can be integrated in the Jason agent programming language, and discuss how the agents can coordinate their organizational tasks using AORTA.

/pdf/the-aorta-architecture-integrating-organizational-reasoning-1mesprzlz3.pdf

The AORTA Architecture: Integrating Organizational Reasoning in Jason

The variety of smart devices and their communication models increase the development complexity of embedded software for IoT. Thus, the development of these systems becomes more error-prone, complex, and costly. To tackle this problem, in this study, a model-driven approach is proposed for the development of RIOT-OS based IoT systems. To this end, a meta-model is designed for RIOT-OS. Based on this meta-model, a Domain-specific Modeling Language (DSML) is developed to graphically represent the domain models. To gain more functionality for the language, domain rules are defined as constraints. Also, system codes are generated partially from the instance models. In this way, the development is supported by code synthesis and the number of bugs is reduced. Finally, a smart irrigation system and a smart lighting system are implemented to evaluate the proposed DSML. The results show that about 83.5% of the final code is generated automatically on average.

Platform-specific Modeling for RIOT based IoT Systems

A coordination model of pervasive service ecosystems

The continuous integration of software-intensive systems together with the ever-increasing computing power offer a breeding ground for intelligent agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) more than ever before Over the past two decades, a wide variety of languages, models, techniques and methodologies have been proposed to engineer agents and MAS Despite this substantial body of knowledge and expertise, the systematic engineering of large-scale and open MAS still poses many challenges Researchers and engineers still face fundamental questions regarding theories, architectures, languages, processes, and platforms for designing, implementing, running, maintaining, and evolving MAS This paper reports on the results of the 6th International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2018, 14th-15th of July, 2018, Stockholm, Sweden), where participants discussed the issues above focusing on the state of affairs and the road ahead for researchers and engineers in this area

/pdf/engineering-multi-agent-systems-state-of-affairs-and-the-d0k4q0irth.pdf

Engineering Multi-Agent Systems: State of Affairs and the Road Ahead

This work presents an agent-based model of radicalization growth based on social theories. The model aims at improving the understanding of the influence of social links on radicalism spread. The model consists of two main entities, a Network Model and an Agent Model. The Network Model updates the agent relationships based on proximity and homophily; it simulates information diffusion and updates the agents’ beliefs. The model has been evaluated and implemented in Python with the agent-based social simulator Soil. In addition, it has been evaluated through sensitivity analysis.

Tasio Méndez

Papers

Engineering Multi-Agent Systems: State of Affairs and the Road Ahead

Analyzing Radicalism Spread Using Agent-Based Social Simulation