Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Environments For Multi Agent Systems Iii, May 8, 2006
This paper describes CArtA gO, a framework for developing artifact-based working environments for... more This paper describes CArtA gO, a framework for developing artifact-based working environments for multiagent systems (MAS). The framework is based on the notion of artifact, as a basic abstraction to model and engineer objects, resources and tools designed to be used and manipulated by agents at run-time to support their working activities, in particular the cooperative ones. CArtA gO enables MAS engineers to design and develop suitable artifacts, and to extend existing agent platforms with the possibility to create artifact-based ...
Proceedings of the 6th International Joint Conference, May 14, 2007
In human society, almost any cooperative working context accounts for different kinds of object, ... more In human society, almost any cooperative working context accounts for different kinds of object, tool, artifacts in general, that humans adopt, share and intelligently exploit so as to support their working activities, in particular social ones. According to theories in human sciences--Activity Theory and Distributed Cognition are two main examples [5, 4]--and to related disciplines in computer science--such as Computer
Coordination between multiple autonomous agents is a major issue for open multi-agent systems. Th... more Coordination between multiple autonomous agents is a major issue for open multi-agent systems. This paper proposes the notion of Behavioural Implicit Communication (BIC) originally devised in human and animal societies as a new and critical coordination mechanism also for artificial agents. BIC is a parasitical form of communication that exploits both some environmental properties and the agents' capacity to interpret their actions. In this paper we abstract from the agents' architecture to focus on the interaction mediated by the environment. Observability of the environment -and in particular of agents' actionsis crucial for implementing BIC-based form of coordination in artificial societies. Accordingly in this paper we introduce an abstract model of environment providing services to enhance observation power of agents, enabling BIC and other form of observation-based coordination. Also, we describe a typology of environments and examples of observation based coordination with and without implicit communication.
The Agent Coordination Context abstraction (ACC) has been recently introduced as a mean to model ... more The Agent Coordination Context abstraction (ACC) has been recently introduced as a mean to model the environment and the agent-environment interaction in the context of Multi-Agent Systems (MASs). In this article we discuss how the ACC notion has been embedded in a MAS infrastructure, in terms of the new runtime structures and services. As a reference, we will take TuCSoN coordination infrastructure, which is extended with the ACC framework to integrate organisation and security support with coordination. * This work has been partially supported by MIUR, project COFIN 2003 (ex 40%) "Fiducia e diritto nella società dell'informazione", and by MIPAF, project SIPEAA "Strumenti Integrati per la Pianificazione Eco-compatibile dell'Azienda Agricola".
Proceedings of the 2001 Acm Symposium on Applied Computing, Mar 1, 2001
The typical implementations for parametric polymorphism in object oriented programming languages ... more The typical implementations for parametric polymorphism in object oriented programming languages are space consuming, in that new binary code is created as new instantiations of parametric types are used. Recently, it was proposed a translation for parameterized types into Java, called LM translation, which avoids this problem by collecting type descriptors for parametric types at load-time. Another useful feature related to parametric polymorphism is that of parametric methods, which is often a necessary tool to completely benefit from th expressiveness and the code reuse of parametric polymorphism. In this paper the LM translator is extended in order to deal with parametric methods too. While previous implementations lead to a relevant size overhead, the one here proposed defers most of the overhead at the classes' load-time, with only little overhead at run-time. It turns out that the general impact of this implementation on the code execution is definitely lower than that of previous approaches.
The key role of environment as a first-class abstraction in the engineering of MAS (multi-agent s... more The key role of environment as a first-class abstraction in the engineering of MAS (multi-agent systems) is today generally acknowledged in the MAS community. However, the support for the notion of environment in today AOSE (agent-oriented software engineering) methodologies is still either absent, weak, or incomplete at best.
Similarly to human organizations, where the environment plays a fundamental role in supporting so... more Similarly to human organizations, where the environment plays a fundamental role in supporting social activities, the environment of a multi-agent system (MAS) is the natural place where understanding and designing agent coordination. Accordingly, we propose the notion of coordination artifact as a unifying abstraction for engineering environment-based coordination of agents. This is meant to capture at the MAS level abstractions and concepts like services, tools, and artifacts, which are typically shared and exploited by the ...
Minority Game (MG) is a mathematical model that takes inspiration from the "El Farol Bar" problem... more Minority Game (MG) is a mathematical model that takes inspiration from the "El Farol Bar" problem introduced by Brian Arthur (1). It is based on a simple scenario where at each step a set of agents perform a boolean vote which conceptually splits them in two classes: the agents in the smaller class win. In this game, a rational agent keeps track of previous votes and victories, and has the goal of winning throughout the steps of the game-for which a rational strategy has to be figured out.
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Congress on Evolutionary Computation, May 18, 2009
Abstract The interest in self-organization as a feasible metaphor for dealing with the growing co... more Abstract The interest in self-organization as a feasible metaphor for dealing with the growing complexity of today's software systems is constantly rising. In particular, by adopting self-organization, systems can adapt to highly dynamic environments by local interactions among system's components. As a consequence, the global behavior of the system can be regarded as an emergent property since it appears by a process emerging from local interactions among components. The corresponding system dynamics is usually non- ...
Coordination between multiple autonomous agents is a major issue for open multi-agent systems. Th... more Coordination between multiple autonomous agents is a major issue for open multi-agent systems. This paper proposes the notion of Behavioural Implicit Communication (BIC) originally devised in human and animal societies as a different and critical coordination mechanism also for artificial agents. BIC is a parasitical form of communication that exploits both some environmental properties and the agents' capacity to interpret each other's actions. In this paper we abstract from the agents' architecture to focus on the interaction mediated by the environment. In order to implement BIC in artificial societies two environmental properties are necessary: the observability of the software agents' actions and the traceability of the environment. The goal of this paper is to address the first property defining a model of observation mediated by the environment. A typology of environments and examples of observation based coordination with and without implicit communication are described.
Coordination models like Linda were first conceived in the context of closed systems -like high-p... more Coordination models like Linda were first conceived in the context of closed systems -like high-performance parallel applications -, where all coordinated entities were known once and for all at design time, and coordination media were conceptually part of a coordinated application. Correspondingly, traditional formalisations of coordination models -where both coordinated entities and coordination media are uniformly represented as terms of a process algebra -endorse the viewpoint of coordination as a language for building concurrent systems.
Technology evolution is providing new pervasive service scenarios characterised by a huge number ... more Technology evolution is providing new pervasive service scenarios characterised by a huge number of distributed and dynamic devices. Accordingly, a new generation of services and infrastructures are emerging which support situatedness, adaptivity and diversity. In this paper we model the overall world of services, data and devices, as a distributed computational ecosystem. Each entity will be modelled as an autonomous, spatially-situated individual of the ecosystem, whose existence is reified by an LSA (Live Semantic Annotation). Ecosystem's behaviour is controlled by coordination rules called eco-laws, which are sort of chemical-like reactions evolving the population of LSAs. We describe an architecture supporting this vision, a formal model of eco-laws, and finally show their usefulness in a scenario of crowd steering through pervasive displays.
The intrinsic complexity of self-organising MASs (multi-agent systems) makes it difficult to pred... more The intrinsic complexity of self-organising MASs (multi-agent systems) makes it difficult to predict global system evolutions at early stages of the design process. Simulating high-level models to analyse properties of a MAS design can anticipate detection of incorrect / wrong design choices, and allow tuning of system parameters. In this paper, we take abnormal-behaviour detection as a case study, and devise an artifact-based MAS architecture inspired by principles of the human immune systems. We use stochastic π-calculus to specify and run quantitative large-scale simulations, which allow us to verify the basic applicability of our IDS (intrusion detection system) and possibly obtain a preliminary set of its main working parameters.
Stigmergy has been variously adopted in MASs (multi-agent systems) and in other fields as well-as... more Stigmergy has been variously adopted in MASs (multi-agent systems) and in other fields as well-as a technique for realising forms of emergent coordination in societies composed by a large amount of typically simple, ant-like, non-rational agents. In this article we introduce a conceptual and engineering framework for exploring the use of stigmergy in the context of societies composed by cognitive / rational agents, as a means for supporting high-level, knowledge-based social activities. We refer to this kind of stigmergy as cognitive stigmergy. Cognitive stigmergy is based on the use of suitable engineered artifacts as tools populating the agent working environment, and which agents share and rationally use for their individual goals. In this seminal paper, we introduce an agent-based framework for cognitive stigmergy based on artifacts. After discussing the main conceptual issues-the notion of cognitive stigmergy, the role of artifacts-, we sketch an abstract architecture for cognitive stigmergy, and we consider its implementation on the TuCSoN agent coordination infrastructure.
Stigmergy has been variously adopted in MASs (multi-agent systems) and in other fields as well-as... more Stigmergy has been variously adopted in MASs (multi-agent systems) and in other fields as well-as a technique for realising forms of emergent coordination in societies composed by a large amount of typically simple, ant-like, non-rational agents. In this article we introduce a conceptual and engineering framework for exploring the use of stigmergy in the context of societies composed by cognitive / rational agents, as a means for supporting high-level, knowledge-based social activities. We refer to this kind of stigmergy as cognitive stigmergy. Cognitive stigmergy is based on the use of suitable engineered artifacts as tools populating the agent working environment, and which agents share and rationally use for their individual goals. In this seminal paper, we introduce an agent-based framework for cognitive stigmergy based on artifacts. After discussing the main conceptual issues-the notion of cognitive stigmergy, the role of artifacts-, we sketch an abstract architecture for cognitive stigmergy, and we consider its implementation on the TuCSoN agent coordination infrastructure.
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Environments For Multi Agent Systems Iii, May 8, 2006
This paper describes CArtA gO, a framework for developing artifact-based working environments for... more This paper describes CArtA gO, a framework for developing artifact-based working environments for multiagent systems (MAS). The framework is based on the notion of artifact, as a basic abstraction to model and engineer objects, resources and tools designed to be used and manipulated by agents at run-time to support their working activities, in particular the cooperative ones. CArtA gO enables MAS engineers to design and develop suitable artifacts, and to extend existing agent platforms with the possibility to create artifact-based ...
Proceedings of the 6th International Joint Conference, May 14, 2007
In human society, almost any cooperative working context accounts for different kinds of object, ... more In human society, almost any cooperative working context accounts for different kinds of object, tool, artifacts in general, that humans adopt, share and intelligently exploit so as to support their working activities, in particular social ones. According to theories in human sciences--Activity Theory and Distributed Cognition are two main examples [5, 4]--and to related disciplines in computer science--such as Computer
Coordination between multiple autonomous agents is a major issue for open multi-agent systems. Th... more Coordination between multiple autonomous agents is a major issue for open multi-agent systems. This paper proposes the notion of Behavioural Implicit Communication (BIC) originally devised in human and animal societies as a new and critical coordination mechanism also for artificial agents. BIC is a parasitical form of communication that exploits both some environmental properties and the agents' capacity to interpret their actions. In this paper we abstract from the agents' architecture to focus on the interaction mediated by the environment. Observability of the environment -and in particular of agents' actionsis crucial for implementing BIC-based form of coordination in artificial societies. Accordingly in this paper we introduce an abstract model of environment providing services to enhance observation power of agents, enabling BIC and other form of observation-based coordination. Also, we describe a typology of environments and examples of observation based coordination with and without implicit communication.
The Agent Coordination Context abstraction (ACC) has been recently introduced as a mean to model ... more The Agent Coordination Context abstraction (ACC) has been recently introduced as a mean to model the environment and the agent-environment interaction in the context of Multi-Agent Systems (MASs). In this article we discuss how the ACC notion has been embedded in a MAS infrastructure, in terms of the new runtime structures and services. As a reference, we will take TuCSoN coordination infrastructure, which is extended with the ACC framework to integrate organisation and security support with coordination. * This work has been partially supported by MIUR, project COFIN 2003 (ex 40%) "Fiducia e diritto nella società dell'informazione", and by MIPAF, project SIPEAA "Strumenti Integrati per la Pianificazione Eco-compatibile dell'Azienda Agricola".
Proceedings of the 2001 Acm Symposium on Applied Computing, Mar 1, 2001
The typical implementations for parametric polymorphism in object oriented programming languages ... more The typical implementations for parametric polymorphism in object oriented programming languages are space consuming, in that new binary code is created as new instantiations of parametric types are used. Recently, it was proposed a translation for parameterized types into Java, called LM translation, which avoids this problem by collecting type descriptors for parametric types at load-time. Another useful feature related to parametric polymorphism is that of parametric methods, which is often a necessary tool to completely benefit from th expressiveness and the code reuse of parametric polymorphism. In this paper the LM translator is extended in order to deal with parametric methods too. While previous implementations lead to a relevant size overhead, the one here proposed defers most of the overhead at the classes' load-time, with only little overhead at run-time. It turns out that the general impact of this implementation on the code execution is definitely lower than that of previous approaches.
The key role of environment as a first-class abstraction in the engineering of MAS (multi-agent s... more The key role of environment as a first-class abstraction in the engineering of MAS (multi-agent systems) is today generally acknowledged in the MAS community. However, the support for the notion of environment in today AOSE (agent-oriented software engineering) methodologies is still either absent, weak, or incomplete at best.
Similarly to human organizations, where the environment plays a fundamental role in supporting so... more Similarly to human organizations, where the environment plays a fundamental role in supporting social activities, the environment of a multi-agent system (MAS) is the natural place where understanding and designing agent coordination. Accordingly, we propose the notion of coordination artifact as a unifying abstraction for engineering environment-based coordination of agents. This is meant to capture at the MAS level abstractions and concepts like services, tools, and artifacts, which are typically shared and exploited by the ...
Minority Game (MG) is a mathematical model that takes inspiration from the "El Farol Bar" problem... more Minority Game (MG) is a mathematical model that takes inspiration from the "El Farol Bar" problem introduced by Brian Arthur (1). It is based on a simple scenario where at each step a set of agents perform a boolean vote which conceptually splits them in two classes: the agents in the smaller class win. In this game, a rational agent keeps track of previous votes and victories, and has the goal of winning throughout the steps of the game-for which a rational strategy has to be figured out.
Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Congress on Evolutionary Computation, May 18, 2009
Abstract The interest in self-organization as a feasible metaphor for dealing with the growing co... more Abstract The interest in self-organization as a feasible metaphor for dealing with the growing complexity of today's software systems is constantly rising. In particular, by adopting self-organization, systems can adapt to highly dynamic environments by local interactions among system's components. As a consequence, the global behavior of the system can be regarded as an emergent property since it appears by a process emerging from local interactions among components. The corresponding system dynamics is usually non- ...
Coordination between multiple autonomous agents is a major issue for open multi-agent systems. Th... more Coordination between multiple autonomous agents is a major issue for open multi-agent systems. This paper proposes the notion of Behavioural Implicit Communication (BIC) originally devised in human and animal societies as a different and critical coordination mechanism also for artificial agents. BIC is a parasitical form of communication that exploits both some environmental properties and the agents' capacity to interpret each other's actions. In this paper we abstract from the agents' architecture to focus on the interaction mediated by the environment. In order to implement BIC in artificial societies two environmental properties are necessary: the observability of the software agents' actions and the traceability of the environment. The goal of this paper is to address the first property defining a model of observation mediated by the environment. A typology of environments and examples of observation based coordination with and without implicit communication are described.
Coordination models like Linda were first conceived in the context of closed systems -like high-p... more Coordination models like Linda were first conceived in the context of closed systems -like high-performance parallel applications -, where all coordinated entities were known once and for all at design time, and coordination media were conceptually part of a coordinated application. Correspondingly, traditional formalisations of coordination models -where both coordinated entities and coordination media are uniformly represented as terms of a process algebra -endorse the viewpoint of coordination as a language for building concurrent systems.
Technology evolution is providing new pervasive service scenarios characterised by a huge number ... more Technology evolution is providing new pervasive service scenarios characterised by a huge number of distributed and dynamic devices. Accordingly, a new generation of services and infrastructures are emerging which support situatedness, adaptivity and diversity. In this paper we model the overall world of services, data and devices, as a distributed computational ecosystem. Each entity will be modelled as an autonomous, spatially-situated individual of the ecosystem, whose existence is reified by an LSA (Live Semantic Annotation). Ecosystem's behaviour is controlled by coordination rules called eco-laws, which are sort of chemical-like reactions evolving the population of LSAs. We describe an architecture supporting this vision, a formal model of eco-laws, and finally show their usefulness in a scenario of crowd steering through pervasive displays.
The intrinsic complexity of self-organising MASs (multi-agent systems) makes it difficult to pred... more The intrinsic complexity of self-organising MASs (multi-agent systems) makes it difficult to predict global system evolutions at early stages of the design process. Simulating high-level models to analyse properties of a MAS design can anticipate detection of incorrect / wrong design choices, and allow tuning of system parameters. In this paper, we take abnormal-behaviour detection as a case study, and devise an artifact-based MAS architecture inspired by principles of the human immune systems. We use stochastic π-calculus to specify and run quantitative large-scale simulations, which allow us to verify the basic applicability of our IDS (intrusion detection system) and possibly obtain a preliminary set of its main working parameters.
Stigmergy has been variously adopted in MASs (multi-agent systems) and in other fields as well-as... more Stigmergy has been variously adopted in MASs (multi-agent systems) and in other fields as well-as a technique for realising forms of emergent coordination in societies composed by a large amount of typically simple, ant-like, non-rational agents. In this article we introduce a conceptual and engineering framework for exploring the use of stigmergy in the context of societies composed by cognitive / rational agents, as a means for supporting high-level, knowledge-based social activities. We refer to this kind of stigmergy as cognitive stigmergy. Cognitive stigmergy is based on the use of suitable engineered artifacts as tools populating the agent working environment, and which agents share and rationally use for their individual goals. In this seminal paper, we introduce an agent-based framework for cognitive stigmergy based on artifacts. After discussing the main conceptual issues-the notion of cognitive stigmergy, the role of artifacts-, we sketch an abstract architecture for cognitive stigmergy, and we consider its implementation on the TuCSoN agent coordination infrastructure.
Stigmergy has been variously adopted in MASs (multi-agent systems) and in other fields as well-as... more Stigmergy has been variously adopted in MASs (multi-agent systems) and in other fields as well-as a technique for realising forms of emergent coordination in societies composed by a large amount of typically simple, ant-like, non-rational agents. In this article we introduce a conceptual and engineering framework for exploring the use of stigmergy in the context of societies composed by cognitive / rational agents, as a means for supporting high-level, knowledge-based social activities. We refer to this kind of stigmergy as cognitive stigmergy. Cognitive stigmergy is based on the use of suitable engineered artifacts as tools populating the agent working environment, and which agents share and rationally use for their individual goals. In this seminal paper, we introduce an agent-based framework for cognitive stigmergy based on artifacts. After discussing the main conceptual issues-the notion of cognitive stigmergy, the role of artifacts-, we sketch an abstract architecture for cognitive stigmergy, and we consider its implementation on the TuCSoN agent coordination infrastructure.
Uploads
Papers by Mirko Viroli