Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

We are concerned with forms of interaction in which multiple users, with differing agendas and interests, may realise opportunities for useful synchronisation of their activities. We present a framework in which intelligent software agents act as semi-autonomous intermediaries among nomadic users. Agents capture and process information about situations (specifically about the environment, users and their activities) in order to jointly find and negotiate opportunities for coordinating the activities of their respective users. The interaction is structured using a negotiation protocol that exploits a hierarchical representation of tasks and goals.

This paper proposes a formal approach, based on stepwise refinements, for specifying and designing multi-agent applications. This approach provides a specification language which integrates temporal logic in the Z notation allowing, in this way, to cover static, behavioural, as well as dynamic aspects of multi-agent systems. Moreover, it proposes a methodology giving a set of hints and principles which help and guide the design process. Indeed, this methodology enables the user to develop step by step, in an incremental way, an implementation starting from an abstract requirements (goal) specification. Finally, we illustrate our approach by developing an agent based solution for the pursuit problem .

This paper presents an approach to developing and managing self-organizing distributed computing systems. The approach is used to construct an application as a dynamic federation of mobile components that can migrate from computer to computer while the application is being executed. It also enables each component to explicitly define its own migration policy as the migration of other components. Therefore, a federation of components can be migrated and transformed according to its components’ local policies, including bio-inspired deployment approaches. The approach was implemented as not only a test-bed system for the organization of multi-agents but also a middleware for real distributed systems. This paper describes a prototype implementation of the middleware built on a Java-based mobile agent system and its applications that illustrates the utility and effectiveness of the approach.

Argumentation is a ubiquitous but effective mode of interaction and dialogue in the human society. It has come to be known that argumentation has many implications to interaction among computational agents as well. After observing and discussing the tetralemma, which is said to characterize the Eastern thought, in this paper we propose an argumentation framework with the paraconsistent logic programming based on the tetralemma. It allows us to represent typical eastern modes of truth: $\top, \bot$ which are considered epistemic states of propositions. We introduce various notions for our argumentation framework, such as attack relations in terms of differences as a momentum of argumentation, argument justification, preferential criteria of arguments based on social norms, and so on, in a way proper to the four-valued paraconsistent logic programming. Finally, we provide the fixpoint semantics and dialectical proof theory for the argumentation framework. We illustrate our ideas with various argument examples.

Telework is becoming an important aspect of our social life, and it is raising many new problems for us to solve, such as how to match the most appropriate teleworkers to the most appropriate positions of a project, thus dynamically organizing a project team ( Optimal Project Teaming ) in a huge telework community. The objective in this paper is to propose a concept of a web-based and agent-based support system for project teaming carried out in a huge telework community, and develop a prototypical system based on the concept. We defined a model of project teaming in telework community, and pointed out current problems in web-based job matchmaking. Next, we proposed a concept of agent-based support system for project teaming which consists of an agent-based job matchmaking process and an elaborating process of the result by collaborative agents. The domain-specific heuristics used in the agent-based support process are formalized, and each agent in two processes is designed. Finally, a prototypical system based on the design is demonstrated.

This paper proposes a new method of building information extraction rules for Web documents by exploiting a user interface agent that combines the manual and automatic approaches of rule generation. We adopt the scheme of supervised learning in which the interface agent is designed to get information from the user regarding what to extract from a document and XML-based wrappers are generated according to these inputs. The interface agent is used not only to generate new extraction rules but also to modify and extend existing ones to enhance the precision and the recall measures of Web information extraction systems. We have done a series of experiments to test the system, and the results are very promising.

This paper proposes a method of constructing navigation agents that provide more personalized Web navigation by exploiting domain-specific ontologies. In general, ontology is regarded as the specification of conceptualization that enables formal definitions about things and states by using terms and relationships between them. In our approach, Web pages are converted into concepts by referring to domain-specific ontologies which employ a hierarchical concept structure. This concept mapping makes it easy to handle Web pages, and also provides higher level classification information. The proposed navigation agent eventually recommends the Web documents that are associated with the concept nodes in the upper-levels of the hierarchy by analyzing the current Web page and its outwardly-linked pages.

With the drastic increase of mobile phone usage, infrastructures have been established to better network and connect the users. Consequently, the services through mobile devices, called M-services, are thriving with plausible applications. This work presents building an agent-based system for confirming user appointment through Callback URL, which is using SMS on the mobile phone in order to reduce the rate of failing appointment and the loss from such failures. To avoid the degradation of the system caused by the excessive accesses per try, methods in processing large-scale transactions and preventing obstacles, along with the comparison of the two methods are introduced.