ADE: STEPS TOWARD A DISTRIBUTED DEVELOPMENT AND RUNTIME ENVIRONMENT FOR COMPLEX ROBOTIC AGENT ARCHITECTURES

In this paper we present the agent architecture development environment (ADE), intended for the design, implementation, and testing of distributed robotic agent architectures. ADE is unique among robotic architecture development environments in that it is based on a universal agent architecture framework called APOC, which allows it to implement architectures in any design methodology, and in that it uses an underlying multi-agent system to allow for the the distribution of architectural components over multiple host computers. After a short exposition of the theory behind ADE, we present the multi-agent system setup and give an example of using ADE in a multi-robot setting. A general discussion then highlights some of the novel features of ADE and illustrates how ADE can be used for designing, implementing, testing, and running agent architectures.     

Incorporating message weights in UML-based analysis of behavioral dependencies in distributed systems

Behavioral dependency analysis (BDA) and the visualization of dependency information have been identified as a high priority in industrial software systems (in specific, distributed systems). BDA determines the extent to which the functionality of one system entity (e.g., an object or a node) depends on other entities. Among many uses, a BDA is used to perform risk analysis and assessment, load planning, fault tolerance and redundancy provisions in distributed systems. Traditionally, most BDA techniques are based on source code or execution traces of a system. However, as model-driven development is gaining more popularity, there is a need for model-based BDA techniques. To address this need, we proposed in a previous work a metric, referred to as dependency index (DI), for the BDA of distributed objects and nodes based on UML behavioral models (sequence diagrams). However, in our previous BDA work, for simplicity, it was assumed that all messages are equivalent in terms of the dependencies they entail. However, to perform a more realistic BDA on real-world systems, messages must be weighted, e.g., certain messages may be more critical (or important) than others, and thus entail more intensive dependency. To address the above need, we define in this article a family of new BDA metrics, as extensions to our basic DI metric, based on different weighting mechanisms. Through an example application of the proposed metrics, we show that they can be used to predict more realistic dependency information. Furthermore, we derive interesting observations from our dependency analysis that would influence, in practice, practical decisions, which could not have been easily derived without it, e.g., we come up with a suggestion to install more reliable data-transmission network links between two nodes to ensure a reliable communication on links with intensive dependencies.     

Model-driven development of asynchronous message-driven architectures with AsyncAPI

In the Internet-of-Things (IoT) vision, everyday objects evolve into cyber-physical systems. The massive use and deployment of these systems has given place to the Industry 4.0 or Industrial IoT (IIoT). Due to its scalability requirements, IIoT architectures are typically distributed and asynchronous. In this scenario, one of the most widely used paradigms is publish/subscribe, where messages are sent and received based on a set of categories or topics. However, these architectures face interoperability challenges. Consistency in message categories and structure is the key to avoid potential losses of information. Ensuring this consistency requires complex data processing logic both on the publisher and the subscriber sides. In this paper, we present our proposal relying on AsyncAPI to automate the design and implementation of these asynchronous architectures using model-driven techniques for the generation of (part of) message-driven infrastructures. Our proposal offers two different ways of designing the architectures: either graphically, by modeling and annotating the messages that are sent among the different IoT devices, or textually, by implementing an editor compliant with the AsyncAPI specification. We have evaluated our proposal by conducting a set of experiments with 25 subjects with different expertise and background. The experiments show that one-third of the subjects were able to design and implement a working architecture in less than an hour without previous knowledge of our proposal, and an additional one-third estimated that they would only need less than two hours in total.

     

Supporting evolution in a multi-agent cooperative design environment

New architectures for next-generation of computer-aided design environments need to be distributed, evolutive, and cooperative. This paper presents a multi-agent design environment that supports cooperative and evolutionary design by cooperation of a group of agents. Multi-agent system architecture offers a promising framework with its novel approach for dynamically creating and managing agent communities in widely distributed and ever-changing design environments; while the genetic algorithm based approach provides a foundation for supporting evolutionary and innovative design abilities. The computational and information processing processes involved in evolutionary and distributed environment are discussed in this paper.     

基于STD总线工控机的测试系统软件开发平台的研究与设计

测试系统软件开发平台是在 Ｗｉｎ９５和Ｖｉｓｕａｌ Ｂａｓｉｃ ５．０环境下开发的,具有实用、易学,可视化、面向对象的特点。利用平台进行软件开发时,开发人员不需要编程,只须通过简单的人机对话,输入构成测试软件的少量关键信息,平台记录这些信息,自动生成基于ＳＴＤ总线工控机和ＭＳ－ＤＯＳ操作系统的Ｃ语言测试程序。该文概要介绍了平台的研制目标、设计思想、测试软件构成、支撑环境、用户界面和使用的关键技术。     

The design of a JADE-based autonomous workflow management system for collaborative SoC design

Given a fast changing electronics goods marketplace, designers of integrated circuits and components need to be more competitive, efficient, flexible, and use collaborative workflow to reduce time-to-market and a project’s life cycle. In recent years, agent-based workflow management systems (WfMS) have been widely used to monitor and control business design processes. In this paper, intelligent agents are applied to the collaborative system-on-chip (SoC) design environment. The proposed JADE-based autonomous workflow management system (JAWMS) uses a workflow coordination mechanism and an agent integration mechanism to enable the analysis, management and interaction of automated design processes. The workflow coordination mechanism uses five domain specific agents to perform the workflow enactment services and a generic agent to control the system flow logic. The system kernel of JAWMS follows the specifications of the workflow reference model provided by the workflow management coalition (WfMC). The agent integration mechanism supports an agent to interact with other JADE-based agent platforms and to coordinate and monitor workflow coordination messages. All agents are written in the Java language using the JADE platform and work together to perform flexible, adaptive and dynamic design tasks in an autonomous and collaborative way. JAWMS facilitates SoC design and team interaction in a collaborative but distributed product development environment.     

Robust artificial life via artificial programmed death

We propose a novel approach to self-regenerating continuously-operating systems. Such systems provide best-case solutions in security surveillance or decision making centers. We introduce HADES, a self-regenerating system whose agents acknowledge their “citizenship” or faithfulness to the good of the system and are able to monitor their environment. When agents of HADES find irregularity in themselves they first try to repair, and will self-kill if repair fails. When an agent senses that there are persistent malfunctioning agents in its environment, it sends messages to entice them to self-kill. The neighbors then proceed to generate new healthy agents to replace the killed agent. We experiment with HADES on various impairments including the most difficult one of excessive regeneration of irregular aggressive agents. These agents may use all of the system's resources and thus take over the system, reminiscent of biologically grown tumors. We study how irregular growth may occur and then develop protocols of killing these agents to optimize the system's longevity. While some of the inspiration is from the immune system and tumor therapy, we contribute to the field of AI by introducing protocols for system robustness via the notion of active citizenship and the fundamental property of programmed death.     

联动“五感”产品设计风格

现今的产品设计已经突破了单纯的靠外型或功能吸引消费者的时代,转而进入了一个五感(视觉、听觉、触觉、嗅觉、味觉)联动的年代。优秀的产品往往给人以多重感受的惊喜。文章以人的五感作为切入点,从五感交织性、相互影响性为视角,简述了视觉思维、产品信息在头脑的构建过程以及全身遍布的大脑(感觉的联动性)。进而分析了联动五感的产品设计原则的形成原因、起作用过程、以及应用价值。     

Distributed computing using autonomous objects

Most existing distributed systems are structured as statically compiled processes communicating with each other via messages. The system's intelligence is embodied in the processes, while the messages contain simple, passive pieces of information. This is referred to as the communicating objects paradigm. In the autonomous objects paradigm, a message has its own identity and behavior. It decides at runtime where it wants to propagate and what tasks to perform there; the nodes become simply generic interpreters that enable messages to navigate and compute. In this scenario, an application's intelligence is embodied in and carried by messages as they propagate through the network. The autonomous objects paradigm is more flexible than the communicating objects paradigm because it allows developers to change the program's behavior after it has started to run. We based our system, MESSENGERS, on autonomous objects, and intended it for the composition and coordination of concurrent activities in a distributed environment. It combines powerful navigational capabilities found in other autonomous objects based systems with efficient dynamic linking mechanisms supported by some new programming languages, like Java     

Developing an energy-saving and case-based reasoning information agent with Web service and ontology techniques

Web service and ontology techniques are presented herein for supporting an energy-saving and case-based reasoning information agent. The proposed system is the first energy-saving and case-based reasoning information agent with Web service and ontology techniques in a cloud environment; the proposed architecture is also the first multi-agent structure of an energy-saving information system in a practical environment. Not only can it explore related technologies to establish a Web service platform, but it can also study how to construct cloud interactive diagrams to employ Web service techniques for extensively and seamlessly integrating energy-saving and a case-based reasoning information agent on the Internet. The complete in depth system development, display, and corresponding experiments and comparisons show that the research results not only attest to the feasibility of the proposed architecture, but are also highly successful; on average, 40% of the data queries can be answered by the proposed system, and its rate of correct data solutions is around 85.1%, leaving about 60% of the queries for the backend system to take care of, which can effectively alleviate the overloading problem usually associated with a backend server. Finally, the system is put into a practical environment; after 8 months of experiments, the total energy-saving is 22.44%.     

MVC模式在JADE系统开发中的应用

针对由于JADE(Java Agent Development Environment)对带图形界面的代理的支持程度不够,从而造成开发出来的系统结构混乱,维护困难等问题,采用MVC(Model-View-Control)设计模式进行开发,提出了一种新的图形界面Agent开发架构,即采用模型、界面和控制等功能模块相分离的方式来构造系统,以实现对多代理系统开发和维护的简化。该架构除了加强JADE系统对图形界面代理的支持外,新增了对多种消息并行处理的支持;并且结构灵活,易于扩展,可对现有的多代理系统进行少量改造来实现结构调整。     

基于注意力消息共享的多智能体强化学习

通信是非全知环境中多智能体间实现有效合作的重要途径,当智能体数量较多时,通信过程会产生冗余消息。为有效处理通信消息,提出一种基于注意力消息共享的多智能体强化学习算法AMSAC。首先,在智能体间搭建用于有效沟通的消息共享网络,智能体通过消息读取和写入完成信息共享,解决智能体在非全知、任务复杂场景下缺乏沟通的问题;其次,在消息共享网络中,通过注意力消息共享机制对通信消息进行自适应处理,有侧重地处理来自不同智能体的消息,解决较大规模多智能体系统在通信过程中无法有效识别消息并利用的问题;然后,在集中式Critic网络中,使用Native Critic依据时序差分（TD）优势策略梯度更新Actor网络参数,使智能体的动作价值得到有效评判;最后,在执行期间,智能体分布式Actor网络根据自身观测和消息共享网络的信息进行决策。在星际争霸Ⅱ多智能体挑战赛（SMAC）环境中进行实验,结果表明,与朴素Actor?Critic （Native AC）、博弈抽象通信（GA?Comm）等多智能体强化学习方法相比,AMSAC在四个不同场景下的平均胜率提升了4 ~ 32个百分点。AMSAC的注意力消息共享机制为处理多智能体系统中智能体间的通信消息提供了合理方案,在交通枢纽控制和无人机协同领域都具备广泛的应用前景。     

用DCOM对基于多Agent的专家系统进行组件化设计

用面向对象的方法来构造一个基于多Agent的专家系统,在分布式环境下对Agent进行基于DCOM组件化设计,并根据多Agent系统的协作需要,确定了合适的组件线程模型和异步消息传递机制。     

Design optimization for security- and safety-critical distributed real-time applications

In this paper, we are interested in the design of real-time applications with security, safety, timing, and energy requirements. The applications are scheduled with cyclic scheduling, and are mapped on distributed heterogeneous architectures. Cryptographic services are deployed to satisfy security requirements on confidentiality of messages, task replication is used to enhance system reliability, and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling is used for energy efficiency of tasks. It is challenging to address these factors simultaneously, e.g., better security protections need more computing resources and consume more energy, while lower voltages and frequencies may impair schedulability and security, and also lead to reliability degradation. We introduce a vulnerability based method to quantify the security performance of communications on distributed systems. We then focus on determining the appropriate security measures for messages, the voltage and frequency levels for tasks, and the schedule tables such that the security and reliability requirements are satisfied, the application is schedulable, and the energy consumption is minimized. We propose a Tabu Search based metaheuristic to solve this problem. Extensive experiments and a real-life application are conducted to evaluate the proposed techniques.     

A Reliable Communication Protocol for Multiregion Mobile Agent Environments

A mobile agent system is regarded as an attractive technology when developing distributed applications. However, mobility makes it more difficult to trace agents. It is also more complex for agents to communicate with each other in a reliable manner. Therefore, a reliable communication protocol is necessary to control and monitor mobile agents and deliver messages between them. In this paper, a new Reliable Communication Protocol (RCP) is proposed for a multiregion mobile agent computing environment. RCP is implemented on the ODDUGI mobile agent system. Analysis and evaluation show that RCP fulfills the following design goals: reliability, asynchrony, timeliness, location dependency, scalability, and communication cost.     

Multi-Agent-Based Anomaly Intrusion Detection

ABSTRACT

Cyber security has emerged as an established discipline for computer systems and infrastructures with a focus on protecting information stored on those systems from adversaries who want to obtain, damage, corrupt, modify, destroy, or prohibit access to it. Several information security techniques are available to protect information systems against unauthorized use, duplication, modification, destruction, and virus attacks. An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a program that analyzes what happens or has happened during an execution and finds indications that the computer has been misused. In this paper, we have proposed an effective IDS in which a local agent present in every node collects data from its own system and classifies anomaly behaviors using SVM classifier. The local agent uses the mobile agent to gather information from the neighboring node to check its integrity before it allows the system to send data to its neighboring node. The local agent is also capable of removing the local system from network if the system is found to be under attack, thereby providing a global secure environment. Our system identifies successful attacks from the anomaly behaviors.     

Performance evaluation of network processor architectures: combining simulation with analytical estimation

The designs of most systems-on-a-chip (SoC) architectures rely on simulation as a means for performance estimation. Such designs usually start with a parameterizable template architecture, and the design space exploration is restricted to identifying the suitable parameters for all the architectural components. However, in the case of heterogeneous SoC architectures such as network processors the design space exploration also involves a combinatorial aspect––which architectural components are to be chosen, how should they be interconnected, task mapping decisions––thereby increasing the design space. Moreover, in the case of network processor architectures there is also an associated uncertainty in terms of the application scenario and the traffic it will be required to process. As a result, simulation is no longer a feasible option for evaluating such architectures in any automated or semi-automated design space exploration process due to the high simulation times involved. To address this problem, in this paper we hypothesize that the design space exploration for network processors should be separated into multiple stages, each having a different level of abstraction. Further, it would be appropriate to use analytical evaluation frameworks during the initial stages and resort to simulation techniques only when a relatively small set of potential architectures is identified. None of the known performance evaluation methods for network processors have been positioned from this perspective.We show that there are already suitable analytical models for network processor performance evaluation which may be used to support our hypothesis. To this end, we choose a reference system-level model of a network processor architecture and compare its performance evaluation results derived using a known analytical model [Thiele et al., Design space exploration of network processor architectures, in: Proc. 1st Workshop on Network Processors, Cambridge, MA, February 2002; Thiele et al., A framework for evaluating design tradeoffs in packet processing architectures, in: Proc. 39th Design Automation Conference (DAC), New Orleans, USA, ACM Press, 2002] with the results derived by detailed simulation. Based on this comparison, we propose a scheme for the design space exploration of network processor architectures where both analytical performance evaluation techniques and simulation techniques have unique roles to play.     

Mole – Concepts of a mobile agent system

Due to its salient properties, mobile agent technology has received a rapidly growing attention over the last few years. Many developments of mobile agent systems are under way in both academic and industrial environments. In addition, there are already various efforts to standardize mobile agent facilities and architectures. Mole is the first mobile agent system that has been developed in the Java language. The first version was finished in 1995, and since then Mole has been constantly improved. Mole provides a stable environment for the development and usage of mobile agents in the area of distributed applications. In this paper we describe the basic concepts of a mobile agent system, i.e., mobility, communication and security, discuss different implementation techniques, present the decisions made in Mole and give an overview of the system services implemented in Mole.