An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems.

Abstract The continued great dependency on fossil fuels entails increasing SO2 emissions to the atmosphere, with damaging consequences to both the local environment and the global climate. Thus, during the last years, the tightening of emission control policies has fostered the research over more efficient and sustainable removal technologies. The aim of this review is to present, as extensive as feasible, the origin and development of flue gas desulfurization (FGD) technology, especially of the wet type, using alkaline agents. From the early findings of the harmful effects of SO2 to the gradual establishment of the current legislations worldwide, the deployment of FGD technology has been supported on understanding the mechanism of reaction and the nature of the desulfurization process, giving place to several configurations. A special analysis was made to the limestone/lime method as well as to the magnesium-based process, highlighting the main features and advances. The use of alternative absorbents is also presented along with a comprehensive analysis on the parameters and control variables affecting the process as well as on the management of residues and solid wastes.

Wet flue gas desulfurization using alkaline agents

The purpose of this paper is to describe the current state of the research field of business process architecture (BPA) and its design methodologies.,A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted using meta- and content-based perspectives.,From over 6,000 candidate studies, 89 were selected. A fifth of these primary works corresponded to BPA design methodologies. Though the BPA research field remains in an early stage of development, it bears promising growth potential. Regarding BPA design methodologies, the following aspects susceptible for further research were detected: identification and modeling of business process relationships; specification of inputs; standardization of models, notations and tool support; consideration of managerial concerns; integration of knowledge from other areas; and validation of methodological and product quality aspects.,The main limitation of the work lies in not being fully reproducible due to the fixed number of data sources and their digital nature, together with subjective decisions in work selection, data extraction and data analysis.,To the best of the authors’ knowledge no study has yet analyzed the BPA research field by means of an SLR. This study will benefit practitioners and research groups working on this topic by allowing them to get a rigorous overview of the BPA research field with an emphasis on available BPA design methodologies, and become aware of research gaps within the BPA field to position further research.

Business process architecture design methodologies – a literature review

Enhancing the efficiency of zero valent iron by electrolysis: Performance and reaction mechanism.

A novel approach for scalability and performance enhancement in JADE

Intelligent agent technology has evolved rapidly over the past few years along with the growing number of agent applications in various domains. However, very little work has been dedicated to define quality metrics for the design of an agent-based system. Previous efforts mostly focus on adopting classical metrics such as coupling and cohesion to measure quality of an agent design. We argue that the time has come to work towards a set of software quality metrics that are specific to the distinct characteristics of agent-based systems. In this paper, we propose a method to measure the reactivity of an agent design which provides indications of how the agent system responds to changes in the environment in a timely fashion. The proposed metric is part of the framework which facilitates the restructuring of an Belief-Desire-Intention agent program to improve its reactivity. Our framework was developed into a prototype tool which is integrated with Jason, a well-known agent-oriented programming platform.

Improving the Reactivity of BDI Agent Programs

The booming of intelligent agent technology over past few decades brings a surging number of agent applications in various areas. There also have a large number of designs as well as programming languages been introduced in the literature in the agent oriented area. However, very little work has been dedicated to define quality measures for the development of an agent-based system. Previous efforts mostly focus on adopting classical measures such as using coupling (degree of program dependency) and cohesion (degree of function relationship in single module) to measure the quality of agent programs. I maintain that its time to work on a set of software quality measures that are specific to the distinct characteristics of agent-based systems. In this thesis, two methods are purposed to measure the reactivity of agent systems, which provide indications on how agent systems respond to changes in their environment in a timely fashion. A prototype tool is developed integrated with Jason, a well-known agent-oriented programming platform, to calculate reactivity of each agent in agent system based on their plan libraries, and conducted several experiments to demonstrate the reliability of reactivity measure. In addition, an agent behavioural profile is introduced which is an overview of relationships of actions in agent plan library. Based on agent behavioural profile, definitions of agent behavioral profile identity, entailment as well as preservation were proposed, which ensure original agent’s behaviours could be preserved while performing reactivity enhancement.

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Measuring the reactivity of intelligent agent programs

This paper addresses the problem of managing business process changes at the design level within a complex business process repository. We argue that a formal process eco-systems view can provide a particular useful solution to the problem in which their inter-process relationships can be properly described. Our intent is to build a modular infrastructure to support change management in process eco-systems by leveraging a change propagation approach that would maintain the inter-process relationships. This permits us to propagate the changes, made on a particular process, to the rest of the processes for maintaining the relationship equilibrium of such eco-system. Our experimental evaluation suggests that the propagation of change can be efficiently achieved, which suggests that the real source of complexity stems from the redesign of individual models.

Design Maintenance in Process Eco-Systems

Design maintenance in process eco-systems

The advent of conference mobile call demands the security communication between end users. However, currently there is no efficient secure end-to-end protocol exists for conference mobile call. This slows down the steps of conference communication. In this paper a secure end-to-end protocol for remote conference is designed base on previous experts work, which is one-to-one end-to-end protocol. In addition, security analysis from perspectives of confidentiality, authenticity, anonymity, freshness as well as preventing from denial of service (DoS) attack on the protocol is made. At the end, the efficiency of this protocol is discussed.

http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10800&context=infopapers

Tiancheng Zhang

Papers

Improving the Reactivity of BDI Agent Programs

Measuring the reactivity of intelligent agent programs

Design Maintenance in Process Eco-Systems

Design maintenance in process eco-systems

A secure end-to-end protocol for conference mobile call