On agents and grids: Creating the fabric for a new generation of distributed intelligent systems

The semantic grid is the result of semantic web and grid researchers building bridges in recognition of the shared vision and research agenda of both fields. This paper builds on prior experiences with both agents and grids to illustrate the benefits of bringing agents into the mix. Because semantic grids represent and reason about knowledge declaratively, additional capabilities typical of agents are then possible including learning, planning, self-repair, memory organization, meta-reasoning, and task-level coordination. These capabilities would turn semantic grids into cognitive grids. Only a convergence of these technologies will provide the ingredients to create the fabric for a new generation of distributed intelligent systems.     

语义网格：语义Web与网格计算的融合

本文对近几年Web服务、语义Web及网格计算等一些新兴的技术进行了简要的回顾，并对它们的背景、特点及相互关系进行了分析，在这基础上，介绍了一种新的网格发展趋势——语义网格，对它的背景、目标、体系结构及其知识层进行了详细描述并简要总结了当前语义网格的研完现状。     

Crash failure detection in asynchronous agent communication languages

Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) have been developed to provide a way for agents to communicate with each other supporting cooperation in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). In the past few years many ACLs have been proposed for MAS and new standards are emerging such as the ACL developed by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA). Despite these efforts, an important issue in the research on ACLs is still open and concerns how these languages should deal with failures of agents in asynchronous MAS. The Fault Tolerant Agent Communication Language ( - ) presented in this paper addresses this issue dealing with crash failures of agents. - provides high-level communication primitives which support a fault-tolerant anonymous interaction protocol designed for open MAS. We present a formal semantics for - and a formal specification of the underlying agent architecture. This formal framework allows us to prove that the ACL satisfies a set of well defined knowledge-level programming requirements. To illustrate the language features we show how - can be effectively used to write high-level executable specifications of fault tolerant protocols, such as the Contract Net one.     

A replicated information system to enable dynamic collaborations in the Grid

The main advantage of Grid computing over other distributed computing paradigms is its capability to coordinate the access to data and resources in a virtual multi‐institutional environment. To this end, the information system plays a decisive role in selecting the services that meet the applications' needs. This paper presents an information system for the Grid that provides transparent and scalable group communication services to standard Grid applications, with the objective of supporting dynamic collaborations that could help address problems that involve only some participants of a virtual organization. In particular, it enables more flexible delivery mechanisms, which allows applications to select the appropriate services before sending their data to the information system. This significantly enhances the protection of data from unauthorized access, and avoids the transmission of unnecessary messages over the network. The proposed information system is based on the use of XML technologies and replication. It introduces several new advanced features that are not currently supported as a whole by any Grid middleware, such as: several entry points to the information, persistent capabilities, support for advanced queries based on XQuery, and support for the industrial standard WS‐Policy. The information system has been stress tested under realistic workloads in a Grid infrastructure with 50 sites. Scalability has been evaluated in up to 1000 messages that can be up to 10KB in size each, updated with a frequency of 5min. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Requirements and languages for the semantic representation of manufacturing systems

In the last years, attention has been devoted to the development of ontologies, which are ICT conceptual models allowing a formal and shared representation of a particular domain of discourse, and to the use of these representations in a variety of contexts, among which also the industrial engineering can be counted. Within the industrial engineering field, the manufacturing domain has not yet seen a wide application of ontologies. This paper firstly shows the use of ontologies for the semantic annotation of a Web Service-based architecture for the control of manufacturing systems; and then contributes to the research field of manufacturing domain ontologies by proposing a thorough literature review and analysis of the available languages supporting such objective. The paper collects the main requirements that semantic languages must meet to be used in the manufacturing domain with the outlined purpose. In fact, the available semantic languages are several and characterized by different features: the paper identifies the most proper ones for the manufacturing domain representation thanks to their analysis against the main requirements. Lastly, the paper shows how the discussed topics are deployed in a real industrial example.     

Industrial application integration using the unification approach to agent-enabled semantic SOA

Within the enterprise, information infrastructure as the mean to bring together different software applications is the key component to enable cooperation and information and knowledge exchange in an open-distributed environment. The paper addresses the issues of industrial application integration in business processes using agent-enabled service-oriented architectures (SOA). In this paper, we show that agent-enabled SOA can play an important role for service integration. Our framework combines Web services (WS) and intelligent agent technologies orchestrated by a business process management system. This framework looks for unification of agent and WS service models, is grounded in a semantic SOA of an agent platform and is supported by the Component Agent Platform Over .NET Framework agent platform tools. We describe the architecture and illustrate the approach by an industrial application scenario from petroleum wells’ drilling.     

From keywords to semantic queries—Incremental query construction on the semantic web

Constructing semantic queries is a demanding task for human users, as it requires mastering a query language as well as the schema which has been used for storing the data. In this paper, we describe QUICK, a novel system for helping users to construct semantic queries in a given domain. QUICK combines the convenience of keyword search with the expressivity of semantic queries. Users start with a keyword query and then are guided through a process of incremental refinement steps to specify the query intention. We describe the overall design of QUICK, present the core algorithms to enable efficient query construction, and finally demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through an experimental study.     

An autonomous service‐platform to support distributed ontology‐based context‐aware agents

The use of semantic technology has recently witnessed a huge increase. One of the areas in which this technology is being used increasingly more often is that of context‐aware agents. However, the use of ontologies in general and reasoning in particular can rapidly become resource intensive. Certainly if the data set, called the A‐Box, used by these agents grows considerably over time. Moreover, in order to create context‐aware applications, taking into account a wide range of different data sets and context parameters, agents have to be provided to expose that data. The collaboration between the agents in the system is necessary to correlate the information and augment the intelligence and added value of the context‐aware agents. Therefore, there is a need to have a distributed approach by means of a service‐platform, where the different agents in a context‐aware environment can collaborate. The main focus of this article is on the research on the design of a service‐platform for semantic ontology‐based context‐aware collaboration. The platform architecture to allow the collaboration and scheduling, together with the associated algorithms, will be presented. The engineering and implementation details will be highlighted. By means of detailed UML sequence diagrams, we will present the workflow and collaboration between the different modules in the platform. Additionally, supporting developments, such as the meta‐ontology and our ontology generator, OTAGen, will be presented. Furthermore, we will detail how the platform can operate in an autonomous way, taking into account the changing context of the agents in the platform.     

An intelligent information infrastructure to support the streamlining of integrated logistics workflow

Abstract: In today's competitive environment, rapid advances in economic globalization and information technology have forced many organizations to anticipate and respond to increasing volatility and competitive pressures. Numerous researches have focused on developing techniques on the analysis, design and management of whole logistics chains in particular in the domain of data mining, data analysis and data classification. While the data mining techniques and computational intelligence techniques are good independently for solving specific tasks, they can be synergized through the formation of an integrated and unified model, which can take advantage of the goods and offset the flaws of the two techniques. In this paper, an intelligent information infrastructure, which is characterized by its ability to encompass a rich collection of knowledge representation formalisms for dealing with a logistics information flow problem, is presented. Such intelligent information infrastructure includes a two‐step strategy that embraces the combination of online analytical processing and neural networks to support knowledge discovery. In addition, extensible markup language is used to support the overall infrastructure, in order to facilitate the seamless data interchange within an enterprise.     

基于Portlet框架面向服务的网格Portal实现

随着网格应用的不断发展,对资源的要求也越来越多,如何有效地利用协调资源的问题越来越突出。Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA)提出了网格服务的概念,把资源都当作是服务来看待。该文在网格Portal的实现中,采用了这种面向服务的思想,从Portal的层面上实现了Grid Service,向用户提供了一个有效利用网格资源的手段。而通过基于Portlet的框架,可以让用户定置自己的网格应用。     

基于MAS机器人协作机制的研究与应用

本文是在通过分析IR-SDS智能机器人系统平台的基础上实现基于MAS理论的多机器人协作机制,并且在分析合同网和熟人协作机制的基础上,提出了实时响应较好的合同网能力协作机制。通过在IR-SDS上进行实验,并分析实验结果证明了该协作机制的实时性和优越性。     

Using semantic components to search for domain-specific documents: An evaluation from the system perspective and the user perspective

We seek to leverage an expert user's knowledge about how information is organized in a domain and how information is presented in typical documents within a particular domain-specific collection, to effectively and efficiently meet the expert's targeted information needs. We have developed the semantic components model to describe important semantic content within documents. The semantic components model for a given collection (based on a general understanding of the type of information needs expected) consists of a set of document classes, where each class has an associated set of semantic components. Each semantic component instance consists of segments of text about a particular aspect of the main topic of the document and may not correspond to structural elements in the document. The semantic components model represents document content in a manner that is complementary to full text and keyword indexing. This paper describes how the semantic components model can be used to improve an information retrieval system. We present experimental evidence from a large interactive searching study that compared the use of semantic components in a system with full text and keyword indexing, where we extended the query language to allow users to search using semantic components, to a base system that did not have semantic components. We evaluate the systems from a system perspective, where semantic components were shown to improve document ranking for precision-oriented searches, and from a user perspective. We also evaluate the systems from a session-based perspective, evaluating not only the results of individual queries but also the results of multiple queries during a single interactive query session.     

Designing a semantic bliki system to support different types of knowledge and adaptive learning

Though blogs and wikis have been used to support knowledge management and e-learning, existing blogs and wikis cannot support different types of knowledge and adaptive learning. A case in point, types of knowledge vary greatly in category and viewpoints. Additionally, adaptive learning is crucial to improving one’s learning performance. This study aims to design a semantic bliki system to tackle such issues. To support various types of knowledge, this study has developed a new social software called “bliki” that combines the advantages of blogs and wikis. This bliki system also applies Semantic Web technology to organize an ontology and a variety of knowledge types. To aid adaptive learning, a function called “Book” is provided to enable learners to arrange personalized learning goals and paths. The learning contents and their sequences and difficulty levels can be specified according to learners’ metacognitive knowledge and collaborative activities. An experiment is conducted to evaluate this system and the experimental results show that this system is able to comprehend various types of knowledge and to improve learners’ learning performance.     

对智能多Agent系统的关键技术研究

文章主要对智能多Agent系统涉及的关键技术进行研究,描述了分布式人工智能与Agent的概念,详细阐述了Agent系统的模型、工作过程、特性、分类和结构,讨论了多Agent之间的通信模式、类型、机制和语言,以及Agent协作与协调方式等。     

A fully abstract model for the exchange of information in multi-agent systems

In this paper,¹ we present a semantic theory for the exchange of information in multi-agent systems. We consider the multi-agent programming language agent communication programming language, which integrates the paradigms of concurrent constraint programming and communicating sequential processes ( ). The constraint programming techniques are used to represent and process information, whereas the synchronous communication mechanism from is generalised to enable the exchange of information. The semantics of the language, which is based on a generalisation of traditional failure semantics, is shown to be fully abstract with respect to observing of each terminating computation its final global store of information.     

An optimal cooperation in a team of agents subject to partial information

The objective of this work is to design a controller for a team of agents to accomplish cohesive motion with consensus on an agreed upon trajectory in both leaderless and modified leader–follower structures. The agent's dynamical model is considered to be governed by a general linear representation instead of a point-mass model which is commonly used in the literature. A semi-decentralised optimal control strategy is designed based on minimisation of individual cost functions over a finite horizon using local information. Decentralisation is achieved through incorporating interaction terms in the team members model. Minimisation of our proposed cost function results in a modified version of the consensus algorithm. Corresponding to the leader–follower structure, the utilisation of a corrective feedback from followers to the leader provides potential advantages in terms of improving robustness of the team to faults in individual agents. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and capabilities of our proposed method in achieving user predefined requirements and specifications.     

An ontology-based framework to support intelligent data analysis of sensor measurements

In the past years, the large availability of sensed data highlighted the need of computer-aided systems that perform intelligent data analysis (IDA) over the obtained data streams. Temporal abstractions (TAs) are key to interpret the principle encoded within the data, but their usefulness depends on an efficient management of domain knowledge. In this article, an ontology-based framework for IDA is presented. It is based on a knowledge model composed by two existing ontologies (Semantic Sensor Network ontology (SSN), SWRL Temporal Ontology (SWRLTO)) and a new developed one: the Temporal Abstractions Ontology (TAO). SSN conceptualizes sensor measurements, thus enabling a full integration with semantic sensor web (SSW) technologies. SWRLTO provides temporal modeling and reasoning. TAO has been designed to capture the semantic of TAs. These ontologies have been aligned through DOLCE Ultra-Lite (DUL) upper ontology, boosting the integration with other domains. The resulting knowledge model has a modular design that facilitates the integration, exchange and reuse of its constitutive parts. The framework is sketched in a chemical plant case study. It is shown how complex temporal patterns that combine several variables and representation schemes can be used to infer process states and/or conditions.