Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In 1991, Technical Committee 65 (TC65) of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) approved a New Work Item (NWI) for the development of an international standard for the use of software objects known as Function Blocks (FBs) in distributed Industrial-Process Measurement and Control Systems (dIPMCS). The need for this new standard resulted out of several studies and research programs that have been started or conducted in the late eighties and early nineties of the last century. IEC 61499 got finally standardized in January 2005. Before that, since 2000, it was available in the form of a so-called Public Available Specification (PAS). Although IEC 61499 has been available for so long, up to now most published work on it has been academic or resulted only in prototypical test cases. Most activities around the IEC 61499 standard have been in standardization of the execution environment and definition of semantics. Some current research is in pursuing design and coding tools. This paper gives and overview about the past and present activities and implementations related to IEC 61499 and discusses the potential of this new standard for future application scenarios.

Integrated Circuits (ICs) development fuels the whole semiconductor industry with ever complex designs. They are created in the microcosms of design teams, embedded in a demanding environment made up of customers, research, manufacturing, marketing and accounting. Best productivity wins in the market place, and therefore it is key to optimise the work that is left when the small deterministic part of it has been done. In this talk we will outline boundary conditions and external influences as well as specific characteristics of this world, and emphasise the particular challenges of automotive microelectronics. We will show how far our classic approaches regarding modelling and analysis go and highlight the potential for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), to finally gain a common understanding and work out the prospective links.

This paper puts forward a novel concept: . Intelligent agents emphasize action and decision-making, which is strongly reflected in the results of agent research. However, real-world applications require much more than decision-making and the intelligent being addresses a crucial part of this: reflecting reality into the agent world. Importantly, reflecting some part of reality offers significant benefits for software developers. Indeed, properly designed intelligent beings inherit the coherency and consistency of the corresponding reality. This allows the development of systems with unprecedented complexity and size. This paper discusses the novel concept and its implications for software development. Importantly, the intelligent agents themselves may be considered as part of the corresponding reality, resulting in short-term forecasting services.

Increasing complexity and scales of computing systems bring growing demands on their designers and administrators. These issues have been explored from different viewpoints. While the multi-agent system researchers focus on the coordination and theoretic properties of distributed system, the researchers from the field of autonomic computing focus on the deployment of self-adapting systems in real domains. This contribution tries to bring together both domains and presents the multi-agent reflection from the autonomic computing point of view.

We show that proposed architecture of reflective agent covers all the characteristics of an autonomic computing system and furthermore, we describe some properties of reflective agents that can further extend the autonomic computing system, especially its self-optimizing abilities. All the characteristics of autonomic computing system are demonstrated on three use cases, where the reflective agents have been deployed, together with the results of experiments.

To come to a deal, a bargaining process can sometimes take a long time. An auction may be a faster, but existing auction models cannot cope with situations where money is not an issue, or where it is difficult to express the utility of all participants in a monetary domain.

We propose a modified Vickrey auction based only on preferences over the possible bids. This approach also allows for situations where a bid is not just a price or some fixed set of attributes, but can be any possible offer. We prove that in this flexible, generalized setting, the Vickrey mechanism is still incentive compatible and results in a Pareto-efficient solution.

Services provide a universal basis for the integration of business processes that are distributed among entities, both within an organization and across organizational borders. Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) include service composition, management and monitoring, billing and security. This paper presents a model-driven approach to design interoperable holonic multiagent systems in a SOA. Thereby, we mainly concentrate on providing a foundation for how to define the composition of services in holonic multiagent systems and discuss how this integragtion could be done in a MDD manner.

Holonic Multi-Agent organisations are particular pyramidal organisations where agents of a layer (having the same coordinator) are able to communicate and to negotiate directly between them. In order to benefit from control allowed by the hierarchical structure of a holonic organisation and from dynamic roles, we propose a holonic multi-agent organisation inspired from working mechanisms of the complex human organisations. We have implemented this architecture by offering a role management capacity to a hierarchical multi-agent platform.

An Electronic Institution is a computational framework that provides a set of services supporting the lifecycle of Virtual Organizations. In a virtual organization, different business partners cooperate in order to achieve a common goal (the established contract), being the coordination of the corresponding inter-organizational workflow an important issue. This paper describes an inter-organizational workflow management architecture, based in multi-agent systems principles, aiming to orchestrate the contract execution and to obtain feedback from the shop floor level. Aiming to validate its correctness and applicability, a special focus is devoted to its implementation, using the JADE agent development framework, and its operation under different scenarios.

Vehicle routing problems with time windows are NP-hard problems. Additional difficulties are introduced by dynamic client requests and crisis situations. One of the techniques used in order to solve such problems are evolutionary algorithms. In this paper a co-evolutionary algorithm with spatial population structure is presented. The system is verified with the use of dynamic vehicle routing problems with time windows and crisis situations.

The paper presents a new security architecture for MAS, which supports anonymity of agent owners. The architecture is composed of two main elements: Module I: Untraceability Protocol Infrastructure and Module II: Additional Untraceability Support. Module I is based on the recently proposed untraceability protocol for MAS and it forms the core of the anonymity architecture, which can be supported by the elements of the second module. This part of architecture was implemented and provided to MAS users. Module II instead, is defined in abstract way, through high-level description of its components.