Franco ZAMBONELLI - personale UniMoRe

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Franco ZAMBONELLI

Professore Ordinario
Dipartimento di Scienze e Metodi dell'Ingegneria

Pubblicazioni

2023 - A Flexible and Modular Architecture for Edge Digital Twin: Implementation and Evaluation [Articolo su rivista]
Picone, Marco; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

IoT systems based on Digital Twins (DTs) - virtual copies of physical objects and systems - can be very effective to enable data-driven services and promote better control and decisions, in particular by exploiting distributed approaches where cloud and edge computing cooperate effectively. In this context, digital twins deployed on the edge represents a new strategic element to design a new wave of distributed cyber-physical applications. Existing approaches are generally focused on fragmented and domain-specific monolithic solutions and are mainly associated to model-driven, simulative or descriptive visions. The idea of extending the DTs role to support last-mile digitalization and interoperability through a set of general purpose and well-defined properties and capabilities is still underinvestigated. In this paper, we present the novel Edge Digital Twins (EDT) architectural model and its implementation, enabling the lightweight replication of physical devices providing an efficient digital abstraction layer to support the autonomous and standard collaboration of things and services. We model the core capabilities with respect to the recent definition of the state of the art, present the software architecture and a prototype implementation. Extensive experimental analysis shows the obtained performance in multiple IoT application contexts and compares them with that of state-of-the-art approaches.

2023 - Cooperative Driving at Intersections Through Agent-Based Argumentation [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mariani, Stefano; Ferrari, Dario; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2023 - Digital Management of Competencies in Web 3.0: The C-Box® Approach [Articolo su rivista]
Francia, Alberto; Mariani, Stefano; Adduce, Giuseppe; Vecchiarelli, Sandro; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2023 - Enabling causality learning in smart factories with hierarchical digital twins [Articolo su rivista]
Lippi, M.; Martinelli, M.; Picone, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Smart factories are complex systems where many different components need to interact and cooperate in order to achieve common goals. In particular, devices must be endowed with the skill of learning how to react in front of evolving situations and unexpected scenarios. In order to develop these capabilities, we argue that systems will need to build an internal, and possibly shared, representation of their operational world that represents causal relations between actions and observed variables. Within this context, digital twins will play a crucial role, by providing the ideal infrastructure for the standardisation and digitisation of the whole industrial process, laying the groundwork for the high-level learning and inference processes. In this paper, we introduce a novel hierarchical architecture enabled by digital twins, that can be exploited to build logical abstractions of the overall system, and to learn causal models of the environment directly from data. We implement our vision through a case study of a simulated production process. Our results in that scenario show that Bayesian networks and intervention via do-calculus can be effectively exploited within the proposed architecture to learn interpretable models of the environment. Moreover, we evaluate how the use of digital twins has a strong impact on the reduction of the physical complexity perceived by external applications.

2023 - Learning Stigmergic Communication for Self-organising Coordination [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mariani, Stefano; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2023 - Let's stay close: An examination of the effects of imagined contact on behavior toward children with disability [Articolo su rivista]
Cocco, V. M.; Bisagno, E.; Bernardo, G. A. D.; Bicocchi, N.; Calderara, S.; Palazzi, A.; Cucchiara, R.; Zambonelli, F.; Cadamuro, A.; Stathi, S.; Crisp, R.; Vezzali, L.
abstract

In line with current developments in indirect intergroup contact literature, we conducted a field study using the imagined contact paradigm among high-status (Italian children) and low-status (children with foreign origins) group members (N = 122; 53 females, mean age = 7.52 years). The experiment aimed to improve attitudes and behavior toward a different low-status group, children with disability. To assess behavior, we focused on an objective measure that captures the physical distance between participants and a child with disability over the course of a five-minute interaction (i.e., while playing together). Results from a 3-week intervention revealed that in the case of high-status children imagined contact, relative to a no-intervention control condition, improved outgroup attitudes and behavior, and strengthened helping and contact intentions. These effects however did not emerge among low-status children. The results are discussed in the context of intergroup contact literature, with emphasis on the implications of imagined contact for educational settings.

2023 - Multi-agent Learning of Causal Networks in the Internet of Things [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mariani, Stefano; Roseti, Pasquale; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2023 - Space-Fluid Adaptive Sampling by Self-Organisation [Articolo su rivista]
Casadei, Roberto; Mariani, Stefano; Pianini, Danilo; Viroli, Mirko; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2023 - Towards Multi-agent Learning of Causal Networks [Abstract in Atti di Convegno]
Mariani, Stefano; Roseti, Pasquale; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2022 - Combining Coordination Strategies for Autonomous Vehicles in Intersections Networks [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Gambelli, Marco; Mariani, Stefano; Cabri, Giacomo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2022 - Individual and Collective Self-Development: Concepts and Challenges [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Lippi, Marco; Mariani, Stefano; Martinelli, Matteo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2022 - Self-Development and Causality in Intelligent Environments [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Martinelli, Matteo; Mariani, Stefano; Lippi, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2022 - Space-Fluid Adaptive Sampling: A Field-Based, Self-organising Approach [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Casadei, Roberto; Mariani, Stefano; Pianini, Danilo; Viroli, Mirko; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2022 - Toward a Kinetic Framework to Model the Collective Dynamics of Multi-agent Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Monica, S.; Bergenti, F.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2021 - An Adaptive Approach for the Coordination of Autonomous Vehicles at Intersections [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Glorio, Nicholas; Mariani, Stefano; Cabri, Giacomo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2021 - Continual Activity Recognition with Generative Adversarial Networks [Articolo su rivista]
Ye, Juan; Nakwijit, Pakawat; Schiemer, Martin; Jha, Saurav; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Continual learning is an emerging research challenge in human activity recognition (HAR). As an increasing number of HAR applications are deployed in real-world environments, it is important and essential to extend the activity model to adapt to the change in people’s activity routine. Otherwise, HAR applications can become obsolete and fail to deliver activity-aware services. The existing research in HAR has focused on detecting abnormal sensor events or new activities, however, extending the activity model is currently under-explored. To directly tackle this challenge, we build on the recent advance in the area of lifelong machine learning and design a continual activity recognition system, called HAR-GAN, to grow the activity model over time. HAR-GAN does not require a prior knowledge on what new activity classes might be and it does not require to store historical data by leveraging the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to generate sensor data on the previously learned activities. We have evaluated HAR-GAN on four third-party, public datasets collected on binary sensors and accelerometers. Our extensive empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of HAR-GAN in continual activity recognition and shed insight on the future challenges.

2021 - Continual learning in sensor-based human activity recognition: An empirical benchmark analysis [Articolo su rivista]
Jha, S.; Schiemer, M.; Zambonelli, F.; Ye, J.
abstract

Sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR), i.e., the ability to discover human daily activity patterns from wearable or embedded sensors, is a key enabler for many real-world applications in smart homes, personal healthcare, and urban planning. However, with an increasing number of applications being deployed, an important question arises: how can a HAR system autonomously learn new activities over a long period of time without being re-engineered from scratch? This problem is known as continual learning and has been particularly popular in the domain of computer vision, where several techniques to attack it have been developed. This paper aims to assess to what extent such continual learning techniques can be applied to the HAR domain. To this end, we propose a general framework to evaluate the performance of such techniques on various types of commonly used HAR datasets. Then, we present a comprehensive empirical analysis of their computational cost and of their effectiveness of tackling HAR specific challenges (i.e., sensor noise and labels’ scarcity). The presented results uncover useful insights on their applicability and suggest future research directions for HAR systems.

2021 - ContrasGAN: Unsupervised domain adaptation in Human Activity Recognition via adversarial and contrastive learning [Articolo su rivista]
Rosales Sanabria, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco; Dobson, Simon; Ye, Juan
abstract

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) makes it possible to drive applications directly from embedded and wearable sensors. Machine learning, and especially deep learning, has made significant progress in learning sensor features from raw sensing signals with high recognition accuracy. However, most techniques need to be trained on a large labelled dataset, which is often difficult to acquire. In this paper, we present ContrasGAN, an unsupervised domain adaptation technique that addresses this labelling challenge by transferring an activity model from one labelled domain to other unlabelled domains. ContrasGAN uses bi-directional generative adversarial networks for heterogeneous feature transfer and contrastive learning to capture distinctive features between classes. We evaluate ContrasGAN on three commonly-used HAR datasets under conditions of cross-body, cross-user, and cross-sensor transfer learning. Experimental results show a superior performance of ContrasGAN on all these tasks over a number of state-of-the-art techniques, with relatively low computational cost.

2021 - Coordination of Autonomous Vehicles: Taxonomy and Survey [Articolo su rivista]
Mariani, Stefano; Cabri, Giacomo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In the near future, our streets will be populated by myriads of autonomous self-driving vehicles to serve our diverse mobility needs. This will raise the need to coordinate their movements in order to properly handle both access to shared resources (e.g., intersections and parking slots) and the execution of mobility tasks (e.g., platooning and ramp merging). The aim of this paper is to provide a global view of the coordination issues and the related solutions in the field of autonomous vehicles. To this end, we firstly introduce the general problems associated with coordination of autonomous vehicles, by identifying and framing the key classes of coordination problems. Then, we overview the different approaches that can be adopted to deal with such problems, by classifying them in terms of the degree of autonomy in decision making that is left to autonomous vehicles during the coordination process. Finally, we overview some further research challenges to address before autonomous coordinated vehicles can safely hit our streets.

2021 - Developing a 'Sense of Agency' in IoT Systems: Preliminary Experiments in a Smart Home Scenario [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Lippi, M.; Mariani, S.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Smart IoT systems are increasingly required to take decisions and act in contexts that are only partially known, or that dynamically evolve through time. Therefore, they should become able to to autonomously learn models of their context, there included a model of the effects of their own actions on it (that is, developing a 'sense of agency'). This would enable them to learn how to act purposefully towards the achievement of specific goals. In this paper we propose a general-purpose Bayesian learning approach to build such context models and the associated sense of agency, and present some promising preliminary experiments performed in a smart home scenario.

2021 - Developing an ML pipeline for asthma and COPD: The case of a Dutch primary care service [Articolo su rivista]
Mariani, S.; Lahr, M. M. H.; Metting, E.; Vargiu, E.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

A complex combination of clinical, demographic and lifestyle parameters determines the correct diagnosis and the most effective treatment for asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease patients. Artificial Intelligence techniques help clinicians in devising the correct diagnosis and designing the most suitable clinical pathway accordingly, tailored to the specific patient conditions. In the case of machine learning (ML) approaches, availability of real-world patient clinical data to train and evaluate the ML pipeline deputed to assist clinicians in their daily practice is crucial. However, it is common practice to exploit either synthetic data sets or heavily preprocessed collections cleaning and merging different data sources. In this paper, we describe an automated ML pipeline designed for a real-world data set including patients from a Dutch primary care service, and provide a performance comparison of different prediction models for (i) assessing various clinical parameters, (ii) designing interventions, and (iii) defining the diagnosis.

2021 - Forecasting Parking Lots Availability: Analysis from a Real-World Deployment [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Barraco, M.; Bicocchi, N.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Smart parking technologies are rapidly being deployed in cities and public/private places around the world for the sake of enabling users to know in real time the occupancy of parking lots and offer applications and services on top of that information. In this work, we detail a real-world deployment of a full-stack smart parking system based on industrial-grade components. We also propose innovative forecasting models (based on CNN-LSTM) to analyze and predict parking occupancy ahead of time. Experimental results show that our model can predict the number of available parking lots in a ±3% range with about 80% accuracy over the next 1-8 hours. Finally, we describe novel applications and services that can be developed given such forecasts and associated analysis.

2021 - Sensing and Forecasting Crowd Distribution in Smart Cities: Potentials and Approaches [Articolo su rivista]
Cecaj, Alket; Lippi, Marco; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The possibility of sensing and predicting the movements of crowds in modern cities is of fundamental importance for improving urban planning, urban mobility, urban safety, and tourism activities. However, it also introduces several challenges at the level of sensing technologies and data analysis. The objective of this survey is to overview: (i) the many potential application areas of crowd sensing and prediction; (ii) the technologies that can be exploited to sense crowd along with their potentials and limitations; (iii) the data analysis techniques that can be effectively used to forecast crowd distribution. Finally, the article tries to identify open and promising research challenges.

2021 - Time-Fluid Field-Based Coordination through Programmable Distributed Schedulers [Articolo su rivista]
Pianini, Danilo; Casadei, Roberto; Viroli, Mirko; Mariani, Stefano; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Emerging application scenarios, such as cyber-physical systems (CPSs), the Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing, call for coordination approaches addressing openness, self-adaptation, heterogeneity, and deployment agnosticism. Field-based coordination is one such approach, promoting the idea of programming system coordination declaratively from a global perspective, in terms of functional manipulation and evolution in "space and time" of distributed data structures called fields. More specifically regarding time, in field-based coordination it is assumed that local activities in each device are regulated by a fair and unsynchronised fixed clock working at the platform level. In this work, we challenge this assumption, and propose an alternative approach where scheduling is programmed in a natural way (along with usual field-based coordination) in terms of causality fields, each enacting a programmable distributed notion of a computational "cause" (why and when a field computation has to be locally computed) and how it should change across time and space. Starting from low-level platform triggers, such causality fields can be organised into multiple layers, up to defining high-level, collectively-computed time abstractions, to be used at the application level. This reinterpretation of the traditional view of time in terms of articulated causality relations allows us to express what we call "time-fluid" coordination, where scheduling can be finely tuned so as to select the triggers to react to, generally allowing to adaptively balance performance (system reactivity) and cost (resource usage) of computations. We formalise the proposed scheduling framework for field-based coordination in the context of the field calculus, discuss an implementation in the aggregate computing framework, and finally evaluate the approach via simulation on several case studies.

2021 - Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Activity Recognition: a GAN-based Approach [Articolo su rivista]
Sanabria, Andrea Rosales; Zambonelli, Franco; Ye, Juan
abstract

Sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) is having a significant impact in a wide range of applications in smart city, smart home, and personal healthcare. Such wide deployment of HAR systems often faces the annotation-scarcity challenge; that is, most of the HAR techniques, especially the deep learning techniques, require a large number of training data while annotating sensor data is very time- and effort-consuming. Unsupervised domain adaptation has been successfully applied to tackle this challenge, where the activity knowledge from a well-annotated domain can be transferred to a new, unlabelled domain. However, these existing techniques do not perform well on highly heterogeneous domains. This paper proposes shift-GAN that integrate bidirectional generative adversarial networks (Bi-GAN) and kernel mean matching (KMM) in an innovative way to learn intrinsic, robust feature transfer between two heterogeneous domains. Bi-GAN consists of two GANs that are bound by a cyclic constraint, which enables more effective feature transfer than a classic, single GAN model. KMM is a powerful non-parametric technique to correct covariate shift, which further improves feature space alignment. Through a series of comprehensive, empirical evaluations, shift-GAN has not only achieved its superior performance over 10 state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques but also demonstrated its effectiveness in learning activity-independent, intrinsic feature mappings between two domains, robustness to sensor noise, and less sensitivity to training data.

2021 - WIP: Preliminary evaluation of digital twins on MEC software architecture [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Picone, M.; Mariani, S.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.; Berlier, M.
abstract

Digital Twins (DTs) are becoming a reference design abstraction for many Internet of Things (IoT) application scenarios. Also, data processing is shifting to a decentralised setting leveraging the edge computing paradigm to move computation closer to the physical devices. In this context, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) technologies on 5G cellular networks are redefining the IoT networking infrastructure by enabling ultra low latency, and reliable and responsive connectivity. However, evaluation of the MEC architecture from the application developer standpoint is currently missing from literature, as well as an assessment of performance while adopting DT on top of MEC. Therefore, this paper reports on a MEC implementation based on OpenNESS toolkit, in the context of DT-based mobility, and an evaluation of its service-level performance.

2021 - WLDT: A general purpose library to build IoT digital twins [Articolo su rivista]
Picone, M.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2020 - Comparing deep learning and statistical methods in forecasting crowd distribution from aggregated mobile phone data [Articolo su rivista]
Cecaj, A.; Lippi, M.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Accurately forecasting how crowds of people are distributed in urban areas during daily activities is of key importance for the smart city vision and related applications. In this work we forecast the crowd density and distribution in an urban area by analyzing an aggregated mobile phone dataset. By comparing the forecasting performance of statistical and deep learning methods on the aggregated mobile data we show that each class of methods has its advantages and disadvantages depending on the forecasting scenario. However, for our time-series forecasting problem, deep learning methods are preferable when it comes to simplicity and immediacy of use, since they do not require a time-consuming model selection for each different cell. Deep learning approaches are also appropriate when aiming to reduce the maximum forecasting error. Statistical methods instead show their superiority in providing more precise forecasting results, but they require data domain knowledge and computationally expensive techniques in order to select the best parameters.

2020 - Complementing Agents with Cognitive Services: A Case Study in Healthcare [Articolo su rivista]
Montagna, S.; Mariani, S.; Gamberini, E.; Ricci, A.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Personal Agents (PAs) have longly been explored as assistants to support users in their daily activities. Surprisingly, few works refer to the adoption of PAs in the healthcare domain, where they can assist physicians’ activities reducing medical errors. Although literature proposes different approaches for modelling and engineering PAs, none of them discusses how they can be integrated with cognitive services in order to empower their reasoning capabilities. In this paper we present an integration model, specifically devised for healthcare applications, that enhances Belief-Desire-Intention agents reasoning with advanced cognitive capabilities. As a case study, we adopt this integrated model in the critical care path of trauma resuscitation, stepping forward to the vision of Smart Hospitals.

2020 - Degrees of Autonomy in Coordinating Collectives of Self-Driving Vehicles [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mariani, S.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Our streets will be soon populated by multitudes of self-driving vehicles, calling for appropriate solutions to coordinate their collective movements in order to ensure safety and efficiency. In this paper, after introducing the general issues associated to coordination of self-driving vehicles, we show that a key engineering issue is identifying the most suitable degree of autonomy in decision making that should be left to vehicles during the coordination process. This issue also includes the possibility, depending on factors such as traffic conditions or the need to enact specific mobility policies, to dynamically adjust such degree of autonomy and thus the adopted coordination scheme. This introduces many theoretical and practical challenges in modelling self-driving vehicles coordination schemes and in their rigorous engineering, as in the case of intersection crossing, analysed in the paper.

2020 - Forecasting Crowd Distribution in Smart Cities [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cecaj, A.; Lippi, M.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

In this work we present a forecasting method that can be used to predict crowd distribution across the city. Specifically, we analyze and forecast cellular network traffic and estimate crowd on such basis. Our forecasting model is based on a neural network combined with time series decomposition techniques. Our analysis shows that this approach can give interesting results in two directions. First, it creates a forecasting solution that fits all the variability in our dataset without having to create specific features and without complex search procedures for optimal parameters. Second, the method performs well, showing to be robust even in the presence of spikes in the data thus enabling better applications such as event management and detection of crowd gathering.

2020 - From Agents to Blockchain: Stairway to Integration [Articolo su rivista]
Ciatto, Giovanni; Mariani, Stefano; Omicini, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2020 - The SOTA approach to engineering collective adaptive systems [Articolo su rivista]
Abeywickrama, Dhaminda B.; Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The emergence of collective adaptive systems-i.e., computational systems made up of an ensemble of autonomous components that have to operate in a coordinated and adaptive way in open-ended and unpredictable environments-calls for innovative modeling and software engineering tools, to support their systematic and rigorous design and development. In this paper, we present a general model for collective adaptive systems called SOTA ("State Of The Affairs"). SOTA brings together the lessons of goal-oriented requirements modeling, context-aware system modeling, and dynamical systems modeling. It has the potential for acting as a general reference model to help tackling some key issues in the design and development of collective adaptive systems. In particular, as we will show with reference to a scenario of collectives of autonomous vehicles, SOTA enables: early verification of requirements, identification of knowledge requirements for self-adaptation, and the identification of the most suitable architectural patterns for self-adaptation.

2020 - Time-fluid field-based coordination [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Pianini, D.; Mariani, S.; Viroli, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Emerging application scenarios, such as cyber-physical systems (CPSs), the Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing, call for coordination approaches addressing openness, self-adaptation, heterogeneity, and deployment agnosticism. Field-based coordination is one such approach, promoting the idea of programming system coordination declaratively from a global perspective, in terms of functional manipulation and evolution in “space and time” of distributed data structures, called fields. More specifically, regarding time, in field-based coordination it is assumed that local activities in each device, called computational rounds, are regulated by a fixed clock, typically, a fair and unsynchronized distributed scheduler. In this work, we challenge this assumption, and propose an alternative approach where the round execution scheduling is naturally programmed along with the usual coordination specification, namely, in terms of a field of causal relations dictating what is the notion of causality (why and when a round has to be locally scheduled) and how it should change across time and space. This abstraction over the traditional view on global time allows us to express what we call “time-fluid” coordination, where causality can be finely tuned to select the event triggers to react to, up to to achieve improved balance between performance (system reactivity) and cost (usage of computational resources). We propose an implementation in the aggregate computing framework, and evaluate via simulation on a case study.

2020 - Twenty years of coordination technologies: COORDINATION contribution to the state of art [Articolo su rivista]
Ciatto, Giovanni; Mariani, Stefano; Di Marzo Serugendo, Giovanna; Louvel, Maxime; Omicini, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2020 - XLearn: Learning activity labels across heterogeneous datasets [Articolo su rivista]
Ye, J.; Dobson, S.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Sensor-driven systems often need to map sensed data into meaningfully labelled activities to classify the phenomena being observed. A motivating and challenging example comes from human activity recognition in which smart home and other datasets are used to classify human activities to support applications such as ambient assisted living, health monitoring, and behavioural intervention. Building a robust and meaningful classifier needs annotated ground truth, labelled with what activities are actually being observed - and acquiring high-quality, detailed, continuous annotations remains a challenging, time-consuming, and errorprone task, despite considerable attention in the literature. In this article, we use knowledge-driven ensemble learning to develop a technique that can combine classifiers built from individually labelled datasets, even when the labels are sparse and heterogeneous. The technique both relieves individual users of the burden of annotation and allows activities to be learned individually and then transferred to a general classifier. We evaluate our approach using four third-party, real-world smart home datasets and show that it enhances activity recognition accuracies even when given only a very small amount of training data.

2019 - Argumentation-based coordination in IoT: A speaking objects proof-of-concept [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mariani, S.; Bicego, A.; Lippi, M.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Coordination of Cyberphysical Systems is an increasingly relevant concern for distributed systems engineering, mostly due to the rise of the Internet of Things vision in many application domains. Against this background, Speaking Objects has been proposed as a vision of future smart objects coordinating their collective perception and action through argumentation. Along this line, in this paper we describe a Proof-of-Concept implementation of the Speaking Objects vision in a smart home deployment.

2019 - CAMeL: A Self-Adaptive Framework for Enriching Context-Aware Middlewares with Machine Learning Capabilities [Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, N.; Fontana, D.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Context-aware middlewares support applications with context management. Current middlewares support both hardware and software sensors providing data in structured forms (e.g., temperature, wind, and smoke sensors). Nevertheless, recent advances in machine learning paved the way for acquiring context from information-rich, loosely structured data such as audio or video signals. This paper describes a framework (CAMeL) enriching context-aware middlewares with machine learning capabilities. The framework is focused on acquiring contextual information from sensors providing loosely structured data without the need for developers of implementing dedicated application code or making use of external libraries. Nevertheless the general goal of context-aware middlewares is to make applications more dynamic and adaptive, and the proposed framework itself can be programmed for dynamically selecting sensors and machine learning algorithms on a contextual basis. We show with experiments and case studies how the CAMeL framework can (i) promote code reuse and reduce the complexity of context-aware applications by natively supporting machine learning capabilities and (ii) self-adapt using the acquired context allowing improvements in classification accuracy while reducing energy consumption on mobile platforms.

2019 - Case studies for a new IoT programming paradigm: Fluidware [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mariani, S.; Casadei, R.; Fornari, F.; Fortino, G.; Pianini, D.; Re, B.; Russo, W.; Savaglio, C.; Viroli, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

A number of scientific and technological advancements enabled turning the Internet of Things vision into reality. However, there is still a bottleneck in designing and developing IoT applications and services: each device has to be programmed individually, and services are deployed to specific devices. The Fluidware approach advocates that to truly scale and raise the level of abstraction a novel perspective is needed, focussing on device ensembles and dynamic allocation of resources. In this paper, we motivate the need for such a paradigm shift through three case studies emphasising a mismatch between state of art solutions and desired properties to achieve.

2019 - Deliver intelligence to integrate care: the Connecare way [Abstract in Rivista]
Mariani, Stefano; Vargiu, Eloisa; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Miralles, Felip
abstract

2019 - Distributed Speaking Objects: A Case for Massive Multiagent Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Lippi, M.; Mamei, M.; Mariani, S.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Smart sensors and actuators, embedding learning and reasoning features and associated to everyday objects and locations, will soon densely populate our everyday environments. Being capable of understanding, reasoning, and reporting about what is happening (for sensors) and about what they can make possibly happen (for actuators), these “speaking objects” will thus be assimilable to autonomous situated agents. Accordingly, populations of speaking objects will define dense and massive multiagent systems, devoted to monitor and control our environments, let them be homes, industries or, in the large-scale, whole cities. In this context, the necessary coordination among speaking objects will be likely to become associated with the capability of argumenting about situations and about the current state of the affairs, triggering and directing proper distributed conversations, and eventually collectively reach future desirable state of the affairs. In this article, we detail the speaking objects vision, overview the key enabling technologies, and analyze the key challenges for engineering large-scale collectives of speaking objects and their conversations.

2019 - Evaluating origin–destination matrices obtained from CDR data [Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, M.; Bicocchi, N.; Lippi, M.; Mariani, S.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Understanding and correctly modeling urban mobility is a crucial issue for the development of smart cities. The estimation of individual trips from mobile phone positioning data (i.e., call detail records (CDR)) can naturally support urban and transport studies as well as marketing applications. Individual trips are often aggregated in an origin–destination (OD) matrix counting the number of trips from a given origin to a given destination. In the literature dealing with CDR data there are two main approaches to extract OD matrices from such data: (a) in time-based matrices, the analysis focuses on estimating mobility directly from a sequence of CDRs; (b) in routine-based matrices (OD by purpose) the analysis focuses on routine kind of movements, like home-work commute, derived from a trip generation model. In both cases, the OD matrix measured by CDR counts is scaled to match the actual number of people moving in the area, and projected to the road network to estimate actual flows on the streets. In this paper, we describe prototypical approaches to estimate OD matrices, describe an actual implementation, and present a number of experiments to evaluate the results from multiple perspectives.

2019 - Fluidware: An approach towards adaptive and scalable programming of the IoT [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Fortino, G.; Re, B.; Viroli, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

The objective of this paper is to present the vision and structure of Fluidware, an approach towards an innovative programming model to ease the development of flexible and robust large-scale IoT services and applications. The key distinctive idea of Fluidware is to abstract collectives of devices of the IoT fabric as sources, digesters, and targets of distributed “flows” of contextualized events, carrying information about data produced and actuating commands. Accordingly, programming of services and applications relies on declarative specification of “funnel processes” to channel, elaborate, and re-direct such flows in a fully-distributed way, as a means to coordinate the activities of devices and realize services and applications. The potential applicability of Fluidware and its expected advantages are exemplified via a case study scenario in the area of ambient assisted living.

2019 - Lifelong Learning in Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition [Articolo su rivista]
Ye, J.; Dobson, S.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2019 - Massively Multiagent Systems II, LNAI No. 11422 [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
Lin, Donghui; Ishida, Toru; Zambonelli, Franco; Noda, Itsuki
abstract

2019 - Pervasive computing middleware: current trends and emerging challenges [Articolo su rivista]
Becker, Christian; Julien, Christine; Lalanda, Philippe; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Driven by the increasing diffusion of embedded sensors and actuators, and more in general by “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, pervasive computing is becoming a reality. Yet, most actual implementations of pervasive computing environments rely on rather centralized architectures and on middleware solutions that integrate only the minimal set of services to enable interoperabilty and data integration. In this article, after having overviewed the state of the art in the area of pervasive computing middleware, we discuss the many challenges that still have to be faced for pervasive computing middleware to be able to support elastic, easy to configure, easy to develop, safe, and ethically acceptable, pervasive computing services and applications.

2019 - Preface [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Lin, D.; Ishida, T.; Zambonelli, F.; Noda, I.
abstract

2019 - Risk prediction as a service: A DSS architecture promoting interoperability and collaboration [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mariani, S.; Zambonelli, F.; Tenyi, A.; Cano, I.; Roca, J.
abstract

Clinical research and practice are rapidly changing mostly due to Information and Communication Technology, especially, as Machine Learning (ML) offers great potential for predictive and personalised medicine. Nevertheless, barriers are still existing for widespread adoption of ML tools, as highlighted by studies from the European Union. In this paper, we propose an architecture for a Decision Support System assisting clinicians in assessing health risk of patients by delivering 'Risk Prediction as a Service'. By leveraging standard web technologies as well as the PMML and PFA formats for exchange of trained models, we achieve ubiquitous access to predictions, ease of deployment, and seamless interoperability, while promoting collaboration.

2019 - Towards Adaptive Flow Programming for the IoT: The Fluidware Approach [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.; Viroli, M.; Fortino, G.; Re, B.
abstract

The objective of this position paper is to present Fluidware, a proposal towards an innovative programming model for the IoT, conceived to ease the development of flexible and robust large-scale IoT services and applications. The key innovative idea of Fluidware is to abstract collectives of devices of the IoT fabric as sources, digesters, and targets of distributed 'flows' of contextualized events, carrying information about data produced and actuating commands. Accordingly, programming services and applications implies declaratively specifying 'funnel processes' to channel, elaborate, and re-direct such flows in a fully-distributed way, as a means to coordinate the activities of devices and realize services and applications. The potential applicability of Fluidware and its expected advantages are exemplified via example in the area of ambient assisted living.

2018 - Algorithmic Governance in Smart Cities: The Conundrum and the Potential of Pervasive Computing Solutions [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; Salim, Flora; Loke, Seng W.; De Meuter, Wolfgang; Kanhere, Salil
abstract

Pervasive and mobile computing technologies can make our everyday living environments and our cities «smart», i.e., capable of reaching awareness of physical and social processes and of dynamically affecting them in a purposeful way [1]. This is already happening, e.g., in the form of digital traffic signs that suggest in real-time the best traffic directions or the availability of parking spots, and also in the form of location-based social networks that inform us about noteworthy events. Soon we expect that the pervasive diffusion of sensing, actuation, and computing will allow our urban environment to fully self-regulate in autonomy most of its processes, and to guide and support our everyday activities.

2018 - An Argumentation-based Perspective over the Social IoT [Articolo su rivista]
Lippi, Marco; Mamei, Marco; Mariani, Stefano; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The crucial role played by social interactions between smart objects in the Internet of Things is being rapidly recognized by the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) vision. In this paper, we build upon the recently introduced vision of Speaking Objects – “things” interacting through argumentation – to show how different forms of human dialogue naturally fit cooperation and coordination requirements of the SIoT. In particular, we show how speaking objects can exchange arguments in order to seek for information, negotiate over an issue, persuade others, deliberate actions, and so on, namely, striving to reach consensus about the state of affairs and their goals. In this context, we illustrate how argumentation naturally enables such a form of conversational coordination through practical examples and a case study scenario.

2018 - Comportamento non verbale intergruppi “oggettivo”: una replica dello studio di Dovidio, kawakami e Gaertner (2002) [Abstract in Atti di Convegno]
Di Bernardo, Gian Antonio; Vezzali, Loris; Giovannini, Dino; Palazzi, Andrea; Calderara, Simone; Bicocchi, Nicola; Zambonelli, Franco; Cucchiara, Rita; Cadamuro, Alessia; Cocco, Veronica Margherita
abstract

Vi è una lunga tradizione di ricerca che ha analizzato il comportamento non verbale, anche considerando relazioni intergruppi. Solitamente, questi studi si avvalgono di valutazioni di coder esterni, che tuttavia sono soggettive e aperte a distorsioni. Abbiamo condotto uno studio in cui si è preso come riferimento il celebre studio di Dovidio, Kawakami e Gaertner (2002), apportando tuttavia alcune modifiche e considerando la relazione tra bianchi e neri. Partecipanti bianchi, dopo aver completato misure di pregiudizio esplicito e implicito, incontravano (in ordine contro-bilanciato) un collaboratore bianco e uno nero. Con ognuno di essi, parlavano per tre minuti di un argomento neutro e di un argomento saliente per la distinzione di gruppo (in ordine contro-bilanciato). Tali interazioni erano registrate con una telecamera kinect, che è in grado di tenere conto della componente tridimensionale del movimento. I risultati hanno rivelato vari elementi di interesse. Anzitutto, si sono creati indici oggettivi, a partire da un’analisi della letteratura, alcuni dei quali non possono essere rilevati da coder esterni, quali distanza interpersonale e volume di spazio tra le persone. I risultati hanno messo in luce alcuni aspetti rilevanti: (1) l’atteggiamento implicito è associato a vari indici di comportamento non verbale, i quali mediano sulle valutazioni dei partecipanti fornite dai collaboratori; (2) le interazioni vanno considerate in maniera dinamica, tenendo conto che si sviluppano nel tempo; (3) ciò che può essere importante è il comportamento non verbale globale, piuttosto che alcuni indici specifici pre-determinati dagli sperimentatori.

2018 - Engineering Collectives of Self-driving Vehicles: The SOTA Approach [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Abeywickrama, Dhaminda B.; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Future cities will be populated by myriads of autonomous self-driving vehicles. Although individual vehicles have their own goals to pursue in autonomy, they may also be part of a collective of vehicles, as in the case of a fleet of vehicles of a car sharing company. Accordingly, they may also be required to act in a coordinated way towards the achievement of specific collective goals, or to meet specific city-level objectives. This raises the issue of properly engineering the behavior of such collective of vehicles, by properly capturing their collective requirements also in consideration of their individual goals, and understanding which knowledge about the state of the collective they must be provided with. In this context, this paper shows how the SOTA model can be a very effective tool to support the engineering of self-driving vehicle collectives. SOTA, by bringing together the lessons of goal-oriented requirements engineering, context-aware systems, and dynamical systems modeling, has indeed the potential for acting as a general reference model to help tackle some key issues in the design and development of complex collective systems immersed in dynamic environments, as collectives of self-driving vehicles are.

2018 - Farewell editorial [Articolo su rivista]
Parashar, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2018 - Is social capital associated with synchronization in human communication? An analysis of Italian call records and measures of civic engagement [Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Pancotto, Francesca; De Nadai, Marco; Lepri, Bruno; Vescovi, Michele; Zambonelli, Franco; Pentland, Alex
abstract

Social capital has been studied in economics, sociology and political science as one of the key elements that promote the development of modern societies. It can be defined as the source of capital that facilitates cooperation through shared social norms. In this work, we investigate whether and to what extent synchronization aspects of mobile communication patterns are associated with social capital metrics. Interestingly, our results show that our synchronization-based approach well correlates with existing social capital metrics (i.e., Referendum turnout, Blood donations, and Association density), being also able to characterize the different role played by high synchronization within a close proximity-based community and high synchronization among different communities. Hence, the proposed approach can provide timely, effective analysis at a limited cost over a large territory.

2018 - Predict Cellular network traffic with markov logic [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Lippi, M.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Forecasting spatio-temporal data is a challenging task in transportation scenarios involving agents. In this paper, we propose a statistical relational learning approach to cellular network traffic forecasting, that exploits spatial relationships between close cells in the network grid. The approach is based on Markov logic networks, a powerful framework that combines first-order logic and graphical models into a hybrid model capable of handling both uncertainty in data, and background knowledge of the problem. Experimental results conducted on a real-world data set show the potential of using such information. The proposed methodology can have a strong impact in mobility demand forecasting and in transportation applications.

2018 - Twenty years of coordination technologies: State-of-the-art and perspectives [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ciatto, Giovanni; Mariani, Stefano; Louvel, Maxime; Omicini, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Since complexity of inter- and intra-systems interactions is steadily increasing in modern application scenarios (e.g., the IoT), coordination technologies are required to take a crucial step towards maturity. In this paper we look back at the history of the COORDINATION conference in order to shed light on the current status of the coordination technologies there proposed throughout the years, in an attempt to understand success stories, limitations, and possibly reveal the gap between actual technologies, theoretical models, and novel application needs.

2018 - Using Kinect camera for investigating intergroup non-verbal human interactions [Abstract in Atti di Convegno]
Vezzali, Loris; Di Bernardo, Gian Antonio; Cadamuro, Alessia; Cocco, Veronica Margherita; Crapolicchio, Eleonora; Bicocchi, Nicola; Calderara, Simone; Giovannini, Dino; Zambonelli, Franco; Cucchiara, Rita
abstract

A long tradition in social psychology focused on nonverbal behaviour displayed during dyadic interactions generally relying on evaluations from external coders. However, in addition to the fact that external coders may be biased, they may not capture certain type of behavioural indices. We designed three studies examining explicit and implicit prejudice as predictors of nonberval behaviour as reflected in objective indices provided by Kinect cameras. In the first study, we considered White-Black relations from the perspective of 36 White participants. Results revealed that implicit prejudice was associated with a reduction in interpersonal distance and in the volume of space between Whites and Blacks (vs. Whites and Whites), which in turn were associated with evaluations by collaborators taking part in the interaction. In the second study, 37 non-HIV participants interacted with HIV individuals. We found that implicit prejudice was associated with reduced volume of space between interactants over time (a process of bias overcorrection) only when they tried hard to control their behaviour (as captured by a stroop test). In the third study 35 non-disabled children interacted with disabled children. Results revealed that implicit prejudice was associated with reduced interpersonal distance over time.

2017 - A new era in the study of intergroup nonverbal behaviour: Studying intergroup dyadic interactions “online” [Abstract in Atti di Convegno]
DI BERNARDO, GIAN ANTONIO; Vezzali, Loris; Palazzi, Andrea; Calderara, Simone; Bicocchi, Nicola; Zambonelli, Franco; Cucchiara, Rita; Cadamuro, Alessia
abstract

We examined predictors and consequences of intergroup nonverbal behaviour by relying on new technologies and new objective indices. In three studies, both in the laboratory and in the field with children, behaviour was a function of implicit prejudice.

2017 - Agent abstractions for engineering IoT systems: A case study in smart healthcare [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Vargiu, Eloisa; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Despite the rapid progresses in IoT research, a general principled software engineering approach for the systematic development of IoT systems and applications is still missing. In this paper, we show that agent-oriented concepts and abstractions can play a key role in the design and development of IoT systems and applications, and could represent the ground on which to shape a new IoT-oriented software engineering discipline. A case study in the area of smart healthcare is adopted as a running example to ground the discussion.

2017 - Challenges in composing and decomposing assurances for self-adaptive systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Schmerl, B.; Andersson, J.; Vogel, T.; Cohen, M. B.; Rubira, C. M. F.; Brun, Y.; Gorla, A.; Zambonelli, F.; Baresi, L.
abstract

Self-adaptive software systems adapt to changes in the environment, in the system itself, in their requirements, or in their business objectives. Typically, these systems attempt to maintain system goals at run time and often provide assurance that they will meet their goals under dynamic and uncertain circumstances. While significant research has focused on ways to engineer self-adaptive capabilities into both new and legacy software systems, less work has been conducted on how to assure that self-adaptation maintains system goals. For traditional, especially safety-critical software systems, assurance techniques decompose assurances into sub-goals and evidence that can be provided by parts of the system. Existing approaches also exist for composing assurances, in terms of composing multiple goals and composing assurances in systems of systems. While some of these techniques may be applied to self-adaptive systems, we argue that several significant challenges remain in applying them to self-adaptive systems in this chapter. We discuss how existing assurance techniques can be applied to composing and decomposing assurances for self-adaptive systems, highlight the challenges in applying them, summarize existing research to address some of these challenges, and identify gaps and opportunities to be addressed by future research.

2017 - Coordinating Distributed Speaking Objects [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Lippi, Marco; Mamei, Marco; Mariani, Stefano; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In this paper we sketch a vision of future environments densely populated by smart sensors and actuators-possibly embedded in everyday objects-that, rather than simply producing streams of data, are capable of understanding and reporting, via factual assertions and arguments, about what is happening (for sensors) and about what they can make possibly happen (for actuators). These 'speaking objects' form the nodes of a dense distributed computing infrastructure that can be exploited to monitor and control activities in our everyday environment. However, the nature of speaking objects will dramatically change the approaches to implementing and coordinating the activities of distributed processes. In fact, distributed coordination is likely to become associated with the capability of argumenting about situations and about the current 'state of the affairs', with the aim of triggering and directing proper distributed 'conversations' to collectively reach a future desirable state. Accordingly, we discuss how such a novel vision can build upon some readily available technologies, and the research challenges that it poses. Two case studies are used as exemplary scenarios.

2017 - Engineering IoT systems through agent abstractions: Smart healthcare as a case study [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Vargiu, Eloisa; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The increasing percentage of elderly people in the population (at least in Europe and North America) is part of a demographic change that will have an enormous impact on the society in the next few years. Thus, intelligent solutions that rely on the Internet of Things have been proposed in the literature, with the final goal to give remote support to elderly people at their home. Those solutions aim at monitoring activities and behaviors, and automatically send alarms in case of anomalies, putting in contact the end-user with her/his GP or alerting the emergency center or familiars, according to the specific needs. However, although the great deal of worldwide researches in the area of the Internet of Things and its early applications to healthcare and teleassistance, the technologies to apply it in real-world with the necessary dependability levels are far from being assessed. In this paper, we propose novel software engineering concepts that, by synthesizing existing proposals bringing in the lessons of agent-based computing and agent-oriented software engineering, can effectively support the systematic (and thus more dependable) development of Internet of Things applications.

2017 - Key Abstractions for IoT-Oriented Software Engineering [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Despite the progress in Internet of Things (IoT) research, a general software engineering approach for systematic development of IoT systems and applications is still missing. A synthesis of the state of the art in the area can help frame the key abstractions related to such development. Such a framework could be the basis for guidelines for IoT-oriented software engineering.

2017 - On Recommending Opportunistic Rides [Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Sassi, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Research on social and mobile technologies recently provided tools to collect and mine massive amounts of mobility data. Ride sharing is one of the most prominent applications in this area. While a number of research and commercial initiatives already proposed solutions for long-distance journeys, the opportunities provided by modern pervasive systems can be used to promote local, daily ride sharing within the city. We present a set of algorithms to analyze urban mobility traces and to recognize matching rides along similar routes. These rides are amenable for ride sharing recommendations. We validate the proposed methodology using data provided by a large Italian telecom operator. Assuming the full set of considered users are willing to accept 1-km detours, experimental results on two large cities show that more than 60% of trips could be saved. These results can be used to evaluate the potential of a ride sharing system before its actual deployment and to actually support an opportunistic ride sharing recommender system.

2017 - On the effect of human mobility to the design of metropolitan mobile opportunistic networks of sensors [Articolo su rivista]
Tomasini, Marcello; Mahmood, Basim; Zambonelli, Franco; Brayner, Angelo; Menezes, Ronaldo
abstract

We live in a world where demand for monitoring natural and artificial phenomena is growing. The practical importance of Sensor Networks is continuously increasing in our society due to their broad applicability to tasks such as traffic and air-pollution monitoring, forest-fire detection, agriculture, and battlefield communication. Furthermore, we have seen the emergence of sensor technology being integrated in everyday objects such as cars, traffic lights, bicycles, phones, and even being attached to living beings such as dolphins, trees, and humans. The consequence of this widespread use of sensors is that new sensor network infrastructures may be built out of static (e.g., traffic lights) and mobile nodes (e.g., mobile phones, cars). The use of smart devices carried by people in sensor network infrastructures creates a new paradigm we refer to as Social Networks of Sensors (SNoS). This kind of opportunistic network may be fruitful and economically advantageous where the connectivity, the performance, of the scalability provided by cellular networks fail to provide an adequate quality of service. This paper delves into the issue of understanding the impact of human mobility patterns to the performance of sensor network infrastructures with respect to four different metrics, namely: detection time, report time, data delivery rate, and network coverage area ratio. Moreover, we evaluate the impact of several other mobility patterns (in addition to human mobility) to the performance of these sensor networks on the four metrics above. Finally, we propose possible improvements to the design of sensor network infrastructures.

2017 - Software engineering for self-adaptive systems: research challenges in the provision of assurances [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
de Lemos, R.; Garlan, D.; Ghezzi, C.; Giese, H.; Andersson, J.; Litoiu, M.; Schmerl, B.; Weyns, D.; Baresi, L.; Bencomo, N.; Brun, Y.; Camara, J.; Calinescu, R.; Cohen, M. B.; Gorla, A.; Grassi, V.; Grunske, L.; Inverardi, P.; Jezequel, J. -M.; Malek, S.; Mirandola, R.; Mori, M.; Muller, H. A.; Rouvoy, R.; Rubira, C. M. F.; Rutten, E.; Shaw, M.; Tamburrelli, G.; Tamura, G.; Villegas, N. M.; Vogel, T.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

The important concern for modern software systems is to become more cost-effective, while being versatile, flexible, resilient, dependable, energy-efficient, customisable, configurable and self-optimising when reacting to run-time changes that may occur within the system itself, its environment or requirements. One of the most promising approaches to achieving such properties is to equip software systems with self-managing capabilities using self-adaptation mechanisms. Despite recent advances in this area, one key aspect of self-adaptive systems that remains to be tackled in depth is the provision of assurances, i.e., the collection, analysis and synthesis of evidence that the system satisfies its stated functional and non-functional requirements during its operation in the presence of self-adaptation. The provision of assurances for self-adaptive systems is challenging since run-time changes introduce a high degree of uncertainty. This paper on research challenges complements previous roadmap papers on software engineering for self-adaptive systems covering a different set of topics, which are related to assurances, namely, perpetual assurances, composition and decomposition of assurances, and assurances obtained from control theory. This research challenges paper is one of the many results of the Dagstuhl Seminar 13511 on Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems: Assurances which took place in December 2013.

2017 - Towards Argumentation-based Recommendations for Personalised Patient Empowerment [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Juan Manuel Fernandez, ; Mamei, Marco; Mariani, Stefano; Felip, Miralles; Alexander, Steblin; Vargiu, Eloisa; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Patient empowerment is a key issue in healthcare. Approaches to increase patient empowerment encompass patient self-management programs. In this paper we present ArgoRec, a recommender system that exploits argumentation for leveraging explanatory power and natural language interactions so as to improve patients' user experience and quality of recommendations. ArgoRec is part of a great effort concerned with supporting complex chronic patients in, for instance, their daily life activities after hospitalisation, pursued within the CONNECARE project by following a co-design approach to define a comprehensive Self-Management System.

2016 - Challenges of decentralized coordination in large-scale ubicomp systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Omicini, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The peculiar features of emerging large-scale ubicomp systems require novel approaches to coordinate their overall activities and functionalities in a decentralized way. In this position paper, we introduce a few representative application scenarios that calls for decentralized and adaptive coordination, and discuss some key-challenges to be faced by research in decentralized coordination models and technologies.

2016 - Coordination in Large-Scale Socio-Technical Systems: Introduction to the Special Section [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; Omicini, Andrea; Scerri, Paul
abstract

Most of the emerging software-intensive systems nowadays are very large-scale ones, and inherently socio-technical. In this introduction to the special section on 'Coordination in Large-Scale Socio-Technical Systems' we argue that the peculiar features of such emerging systems (up to millions of interacting components, lacking central control, mixing humans and artificial components) call for novel approaches to coordinate the overall activities and functionalities. Accordingly, we discuss some key-challenges to be faced by research in coordination models and technologies, and introduce the three articles of the special section.

2016 - Designing a Collaborative Middleware for Semantic and User-aware Service Composition [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Martoglia, Riccardo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The large availability of services, provided by different means such as the Web, smartphone apps and wearable devices, provides users a valuable support for their everyday activities, but at the same time introduces the need for a tailored choice and exploitation of them.Several approaches have been proposed that take into account users' preferences, but a comprehensive user-aware approach is still missing.In this paper we propose a middleware for composing and exploiting services that exhibits some key features: (i) it considers the profile of users that exploit the service to choose appropriate services, (ii) it exploits semantic similarity techniques to make the choice more effective, and (iii) it enables the collaboration among users.By means of a case study we present a possible scenario that can take advantage of our middleware, and show how it can be exploited.

2016 - Re-identification and information fusion between anonymized CDR and social network data [Articolo su rivista]
Cecaj, Alket; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The analysis of multiple datasets on users’ behaviors opens interesting information fusion possibilities and, at the same time, creates a potential for re-identification and de-anonymization of users’ data. On the one hand, this kind of approaches can breach users’ privacy despite anonymization. On the other hand, combining different datasets is a key enabler for advanced context-awareness in that information from multiple sources can complement and enrich each other. In this work we analyze different anonymized mobility datasets in the direction of highlighting re-identification and information fusion possibilities. In particular we focus on call detail record (CDR) datasets released by mobile telecom operators and datasets comprising geo-localized messages released by social network sites. Results shows that: (1) in line with previous findings, few (about 4) data points are enough to uniquely pin point the majority (90 %) of the users, (2) more than 20 % of CDR users have a single social network user exhibiting a number of matching data points. We speculate that these two users might be the same person. (3) We derive an estimate of the probability of two users begin the same person given the number of data points they have in common, and estimate that for 3 % of the social network users we can find a CDR user very likely (>90 % probability) to be the same person.

2016 - Smart Cities: Intelligent Environments and Dumb People? [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.; de Meuter, W.; Kanhere, S.; Loke, S.; Salim, F.
abstract

Pervasive and mobile computing technologies can make our everyday living environments and our cities "smart", i.e., capable of reaching awareness of physical and social processes and of dynamically affecting them in a purposeful way. In general, living in a smart environment and being made part of its activities somehow make us as individuals smarter as well, by increasing our perceptory and social capabilities. However, a potential risk could be to start delegating too much to the environment itself, losing in critical attention, abandoning individual decision making for relying on collective computational governance of our activity, and in the end also losing awareness of environmental and social processes. The panel intends to discuss the above issues with the help of relevant researchers in the area of pervasive computing, smart environments, collective intelligence.

2016 - Spatial awareness in pervasive ecosystems [Articolo su rivista]
Dobson, Simon; Viroli, Mirko; Fernandez Marquez, Jose Luis; Zambonelli, Franco; Stevenson, Graeme; Di Marzo Serugendo, Giovanna; Montagna, Sara; Pianini, Danilo; Ye, Juan; Castelli, Gabriella; Rosi, Alberto
abstract

Pervasive systems are intended to make use of services and components that they encounter in their environment. Such systems are naturally spatial in that they can only be understood in terms of the ways in which components meet and interact in space. Rather than treating spatiality separately from system components, researchers are starting to develop computational models in which the entire structure of a pervasive system is modelled and constructed using an explicit spatial model, supporting multi-level spatial reasoning, and adapting autonomously to spatial interactions. In this paper, we review current and emerging models of spatial computing for pervasive ecosystems, and highlight some of the trends that will guide future research.

2016 - Spotting prejudice with nonverbal behaviours [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Palazzi, Andrea; Calderara, Simone; Bicocchi, Nicola; Vezzali, Loris; DI BERNARDO, GIAN ANTONIO; Zambonelli, Franco; Cucchiara, Rita
abstract

Despite prejudice cannot be directly observed, nonverbal behaviours provide profound hints on people inclinations. In this paper, we use recent sensing technologies and machine learning techniques to automatically infer the results of psychological questionnaires frequently used to assess implicit prejudice. In particular, we recorded 32 students discussing with both white and black collaborators. Then, we identiﬁed a set of features allowing automatic extraction and measured their degree of correlation with psychological scores. Results conﬁrmed that automated analysis of nonverbal behaviour is actually possible thus paving the way for innovative clinical tools and eventually more secure societies.

2016 - Towards User-Aware Service Composition [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leoncini, Mauro; Martoglia, Riccardo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Our everyday life is more and more supported by the information technology in general and specific services provided by means of our electronic devices. The AMBIT project (Algorithms and Models for Building context-dependent Information delivery Tools) aims at providing a support to develop services that are automatically tailored based on the user profile. However, while the adaptation of the single services is the first step, the next step is to achieve adaptation in the composition of different services. In this paper, we explore how services can be composed in a user-aware way, in order to decide the composition that better meets users’ requirements. That is, we exploit the user profile not only to provide her customized services, but also to compose them in a suitable way.

2016 - Towards a discipline of IoT-Oriented software engineering [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Despite the rapid progresses in IoT research, a general principled software engineering approach for the systematic development of IoT systems and applications is still missing. In this article, by synthesizing form the state of the art in the area, we attempt at framing the key concepts and abstractions that revolve around the design and development of IoT systems and applications, and that could represent the ground on which to start shaping the guidelines of a new IoT-oriented software engineering discipline.

2015 - A coordination model of pervasive service ecosystems [Articolo su rivista]
Viroli, Mirko; Pianini, Danilo; Montagna, Sara; Stevenson, Graeme; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The complexity of pervasive computing systems is rapidly increasing, and this calls for service models and coordination approaches intrinsically manifesting self-organisation of component interactions. The goal of this paper is to provide a coordination model (formalised as a process algebra) capturing the relevant aspects of such systems. It should allow the behaviour of large-scale, situated, and self-organising systems to be conveniently expressed, paving the way towards their rigorous study as well as development of supporting platforms. Focusing on the recently introduced concept of pervasive ecosystems, the proposed model revolves around (i) the notion of a distributed and dynamic space of “live semantic annotations” (wrapping data, knowledge, and the relevant facts about activities of humans, devices, and services) upon which autonomous agents coordinate and (ii) a small set of chemical-resembling coordination rules that enforce mechanisms of diffusion, aggregation, decay, and bonding between such annotations.

2015 - Agent environments for multi-agent systems – A research roadmap [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Weyns, D.; Michel, F.; van Dyke Parunak, H.; Boissier, O.; Schumacher, M.; Ricci, A.; Brandao, A.; Carrascosa, C.; Dikenelli, O.; Galland, S.; Pijoan, A.; Kanmeugne, P. S.; Rodriguez-Aguilar, J. A.; Saunier, J.; Urovi, V.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Ten years ago, researchers in multi-agent systems became more and more aware that agent systems consist of more than only agents. The series of workshops on Environments for Multi-Agent Systems (E4MAS 2004-2006) emerged from this awareness. One of the primary outcomes of this endeavor was a principled understanding that the agent environment should be considered as a primary design abstraction, equally important as the agents. A special issue in JAAMAS 2007 contributed a set of influential papers that define the role of agent environments, describe their engineering, and outline challenges in the field that have been the drivers for numerous follow up research efforts. The goal of this paper is to wrap up what has been achieved in the past 10 years and identify challenges for future research on agent environments. Instead of taking a broad perspective, we focus on three particularly relevant topics of modern software intensive systems: large scale, openness, and humans in the loop. For each topic, we reflect on the challenges outlined 10 years ago, present an example application that highlights the current trends, and from that outline challenges for the future. We conclude with a roadmap on how the different challenges could be tackled.

2015 - Collective adaptation in very large scale ubicomp: towards a superorganism of wearables [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ferscha, Alois; Lukowicz, Paul; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Personalized wearable ICT systems presented in fashionable and appealing lifestyle-designs have gained critical user acceptance, and comprise momentum to bring wearable computing to a socio-technical mass phenomenon within the next few years. Early indicators for this expected wearable systems 'tsunami' are the 'spring tide' of 7.3 billion mobile connected platforms (i.e. mobile subscribers) as of the end of 2014, 300 mio. shipped smart watches in 2014 with an expected annually growth of 35% till 2020, and a possible market for more than 200 million smart eyewear systems in 2015 [1]. Following the great success of the 1st Superorganism of Wearables Workshop at Ubicomp 2014 with roughly 50 participants from 15 different countries, we build on the immense interest of the research community in the proposed topic. The structuring of the workshop in slots initiated by a keynote presentation accompanied by technical paper presentations and position statements resulted in lively and vibrant discussions. Collected material for the dissemination of the Workshop ideas can be found at the Workshop Website (https://www.pervasive.jku.at/ubicomp14/) The 2nd instantiation of the workshop will reattach to last years agenda and ask the questions on the potentials and opportunities of turning these massively deployed wearable systems to a globe spanning superorganism of socially interactive personal digital assistants. While the individual wearables are of heterogeneous provenance and typically act autonomously, we can assume that they can (and will) self-organize into large scale cooperative collectives, with humans being mostly out-of-the-loop [2]. We may not assume a common objective or central controller, but rather volatile network topologies, co-dependence and internal competition, non-linear and non-continuous dynamics, and sub-ideal, failure prone operation. We could refer to these emerging massive collectives of wearables as a "superorganism" [3], since it exhibits properties of a living organism (like e.g. 'collective intelligence') on its own. In order to properly exploit such superorganisms, we need to develop a deeper scientific understanding of the foundational principles by which they operate.

2015 - Coordination of large-scale socio-technical systems: Challenges and research directions [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Omicini, A.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Most of the emerging software-intensive systems nowadays are very large-scale ones, and inherently socio-technical. In this position paper, we argue that the peculiar features of such emerging systems (up to millions of interacting components, lacking central control, mixing humans and artificial components) call for novel approaches to coordinate the overall activities and functionalities. Accordingly, we discuss the key challenges to be faced by research in coordination models and technologies, and try to sketch some promising research directions.

2015 - Crowd steering in public spaces: Approaches and strategies [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Sassi, Andrea; Borean, Claudio; Giannantonio, Roberta; Mamei, Marco; Mana, Dario; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Smart phones and environmental sensors make it possible to dynamically monitor the positions and patterns of movements of people in urban areas and public spaces, identify or predict possible dangerous situations (e.g., overcrowded areas) or simply recognize the profitability of a different patterns of distribution and collective movements. In this article, we focus on the problem of using such technologies also to steer the movement of people in public and urban spaces, i.e., suggesting people where to move to eventually reach some desirable global configuration in terms of crowd distribution. In particular, we overview and motivate the general problem of crowd steering, identify the technologies that can be put into play, and the possible strategies to direct people movements. Following, we present the results of a set of simulations that we have performed to assess the effectiveness of two exemplary crowd steering strategies.

2015 - Cyber-Physical Systems and Pervasive Computing: Overlap or Divergent? [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Corman, D.; Julien, C.; Sha, L.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Cyber-physical systems represents a holistic approach to co-design cyber and physical aspects of networked embedded systems. Pervasive computing systems are built to seamlessly integrate computing into our everyday environments. How will the emergence of cyber-physical systems as a crosscutting discipline impact the field of pervasive computing? How can research in cyber-physical systems and pervasive computing leverage the advancements and insights made in both fields? Will we see a convergence of both fields? Or are there fundamental differences that will keep them separate but interleaving fields of research? This panel brings leading experts in cyber-physical systems and pervasive computing to brainstorm about these important issues.

2015 - Developing pervasive multi-agent systems with nature-inspired coordination [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; Omicini, Andrea; Anzengruber, Bernhard; Castelli, Gabriella; De Angelis, Francesco L.; Serugendo, Giovanna Di Marzo; Dobson, Simon; Fernandez Marquez, Jose Luis; Ferscha, Alois; Mamei, Marco; Mariani, Stefano; Molesini, Ambra; Montagna, Sara; Nieminen, Jussi; Pianini, Danilo; Risoldi, Matteo; Rosi, Alberto; Stevenson, Graeme; Viroli, Mirko; Ye, Juan
abstract

Pervasive computing systems can be modelled effectively as populations of interacting autonomous components. The key challenge to realizing such models is in getting separately-specified and -developed sub-systems to discover and interoperate with each other in an open and extensible way, supported by appropriate middleware services. In this paper, we argue that nature-inspired coordination models offer a promising way of addressing this challenge. We first frame the various dimensions along which nature-inspired coordination models can be defined, and survey the most relevant proposals in the area. We describe the nature-inspired coordination model developed within the SAPERE project as a synthesis of existing approaches, and show how it can effectively support the multifold requirements of modern and emerging pervasive services. We conclude by identifying what we think are the open research challenges in this area, and identify some research directions that we believe are promising.

2015 - Engineering Environment Mediated Natural Coordination for Multiagent Systems in SAPERE [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.
abstract

SAPERE is a general multiagent framework to support the development of self-organizing pervasive computing services. One of the key aspects of the SAPERE approach is to have all interactions between agents take place in an indirect way, via a shared spatial environment. In such environment, a set of nature-inspired coordination laws have been defined to rule the coordination activities of the application agents and promote the provisioning of adaptive and self-organizing services.

2015 - Engineering Pervasive Service Ecosystems: The SAPERE approach [Articolo su rivista]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Emerging pervasive computing services will typically involve a large number of devices and service components cooperating together in an open and dynamic environment. This calls for suitable models and infrastructures promoting spontaneous, situated, and self-adaptive interactions between components. SAPERE (Self-Aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems) is a general coordination framework aimed at facilitating the decentralized and situated execution of self-organizing and self-adaptive pervasive computing services. SAPERE adopts a nature-inspired approach, in which pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services and devices, all of which interact in accord to a limited set of coordination laws, or eco-laws. In this article, we present the overall rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference architecture. We introduce the eco-laws--based coordination model and show how it can be used to express and easily enforce general-purpose self-organizing coordination patterns. The middleware infrastructure supporting the SAPERE model is presented and evaluated, and the overall advantages of SAPERE are discussed in the context of exemplary use cases.

2015 - Engineering environment-mediated coordination via nature-inspired laws [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2015 - Engineering self-organizing urban superorganisms [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Progresses in ubiquitous, embedded, and social networking and computing make possible for people in urban areas to dynamically interact with each other and with ICT devices around. This can result in a system with a very large number of agents working together in an orchestrated and self-organizing way to achieve specific urban-level goals, i.e., as if they were a “superorganism”. In this paper, we sketch the future vision of urban superorganisms and overview some emerging application areas heading towards the vision. Following, we identify the key challenges in engineering self-organizing multi-agent systems that can work as a superorganism, i.e., seamlessly involving ICT agents and human agents so to achieve some required urban level goals. Finally, we introduce the reference architecture for an infrastructure to support our future vision of self-organizing urban superorganisms.

2015 - Following the Problem Organisation: A Design Strategy for Engineering Emergence [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Noel, Victor; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

To support the development of self-organising systems, we explain and rationalise the following architectural strategy: directly mapping the solution decomposition on the problem organisation and only relying on the problem abstractions for the design. We illustrate this with an example from swarm robotics.

2015 - How to Develop Pervasive Social Applications with the SAPERE Middleware [Articolo su rivista]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

SAPERE ("Self-Aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems'') is a general framework to support the decentralized execution of self-organizing pervasive computing services. In this paper we present the rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference conceptual architecture. Following, we sketch the middleware infrastructure of SAPERE and detail the interaction model implemented by it, based on a limited set of "eco-laws'' allowing general-purpose distributed self-organizing schemes. Finally, we show how a social application can be easily implemented exploiting such an infrastructure and report on performances.

2015 - Methodological Guidelines for Engineering Self-organization and Emergence [Capitolo/Saggio]
Noel, Victor; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The ASCENS project deals with the design and development of complex self-adaptive systems, where self-organization is one of the possible means by which to achieve self-adaptation. However, to support the development of self-organising systems, one has to extensively re-situate their engineering from a software architectures and requirements point of view. In particular, in this chapter, we highlight the importance of the decomposition in components to go from the problem to the engineered solution. This leads us to explain and rationalise the following architectural strategy: designing by following the problem organisation. We discuss architectural advantages for development and documentation, and its coherence with existing methodological approaches to self-organisation, and we illustrate the approach with an example on the area of swarm robotics.

2015 - Mixed environments for MAS: Bringing humans in the loop [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ricci, Alessandro; Rodriguez Aguilar, Juan A.; Pijoan, Ander; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In many application domains for agents and MAS, the interaction between the systems and human users is a main element. In some cases, the interaction occurs behind a traditional computing device, such as a computer desktop or a smartphone. In other cases, the interaction occurs through the physical world. This is the case, for instance, of smart/intelligent environment applications, and more generally in the wide context of Internet-of-Things based apps. Can the concept of agent environment for MAS play a role in the design of such systems, where humans are in the loop? In this position paper we further develop this question, providing some reflections and suggestions for future works.

2015 - Opportunistic Ride Sharing via Whereabouts Analysis [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Sassi, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Smart phones and social networking tools allow to collect large-scale data about mobility habits of people. These data can support advanced forms of sharing, coordination and cooperation possibly able to reduce the overall demand for mobility. We present a methodology, based on the extraction of suitable information from mobility traces, to identify rides along the same trajectories that are amenable for ride sharing. Results on a real dataset show that, assuming users are willing to share rides and tolerate 1Km detours, about 60% of trips could be saved.

2015 - Patterns for self-adaptive systems: agent-based simulations [Capitolo/Saggio]
Puviani, Mariachiara; Cabri, Giacomo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Self-adaptive systems are distributed computing systems that can adapt their behavior and structure to different kinds of conditions. This adaptation does not concern the single components only, but the entire system. In a previous work we have identified several patterns for self-adaptation, classifying them by means of a taxonomy, which aims at being a support for developers of self-adaptive systems. Starting from that theoretical work, we have simulated the described self-adaptation patterns, in order to better understand the concrete and real features of each pattern. The contribution of this paper is to report about the simulation work of three patterns as examples, detailing how it was carried out, in order to provide a further support for the developers.

2015 - Reasoning on data streams: An approach to adaptation in pervasive systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, N.; Vassev, E.; Zambonelli, F.; Hinchey, M.
abstract

Urban environments are increasingly invaded by devices that acquire sensor information and pave the way for innovative forms of context awareness. Collecting knowledge from loosely-structured data streams and reasoning about changes are two key elements of the process. This paper illustrates a possible way to combine these two elements in a coordinated way. We make use of a recently-developed framework for classifying data streams with service-oriented, reconfigurable components. Furthermore, we embed the KnowLang Reasoner, allowing logical and statistical reasoning on the acquired knowledge aiming to achieve self-adaptation.

2015 - Software-Intensive Systems for Smart Cities: from Ensembles to Superorganisms [Capitolo/Saggio]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Smart cities infrastructures can be considered as large-scale, software-intensive systems exhibiting close sinergies among ICT devices and humans. However, current deployments of smart city technologies rely on rather traditional technologies. This chapter introduces a novel perspective in which large-scale ensembles of software components, ICT devices, and humans, can be made working together in an orchestrated and self-organized way to achieve urban-level goals as if they were part of a single large-scale organism, i.e., a superorganism. Accordingly, we delineate our vision of urban superorganisms and overview related application areas. Finally, we identify the key challenges in engineering selforganizing systems that can work as a superorganism, and we introduce the reference architecture for an infrastructure capable of supporting our vision.

2015 - The Ensemble Development Life Cycle and Best Practices for Collective Autonomic Systems [Capitolo/Saggio]
Hölzl, Matthias; Koch, Nora; Puviani, Mariachiara; Wirsing, Martin; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Collective autonomic systems are adaptive, open-ended, highly parallel, interactive and distributed software systems. Their key features are so-called self-* properties, such as self-awareness, self-adaptation, self-expression, self-healing and self-management. We propose a software development life cycle that helps developers to engineer adaptive behavior and to address the issues posed by the diversity of self-* properties. The life cycle is characterized by three feedback loops, i.e. based on verification at design time, based on monitoring and awareness in the runtime, and the feedback provided by runtime data to the design phases. We illustrate how the life cycle can be instantiated using specific languages, methods and tools developed within the ASCENS project. In addition, a pattern catalog for the development of collective autonomic systems is presented to ease the engineering process.

2015 - Urban crowd steering: An overview [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Borean, Claudio; Giannantonio, Roberta; Mamei, Marco; Mana, Dario; Sassi, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Smart phones and environmental sensors make it possible to dynamically monitor the positions and patterns of movements of people in urban areas and public spaces, identify or predict possible dangerous situations (e.g., overcrowded areas) or simply recognize the profitability of a different patterns of distribution and collective movements. In this overview paper, we focus on the problem of using such technologies also to steer the movement of people. In particular, this paper has the goal of motivating the general problem of crowd steering, identifying the technologies that can be put to play to enforce crowd steering strategies, and presenting the possible strategies that can be adopted to steer people movements, other than the key research challenges.

2014 - A Self-Reconfigurable Framework for Context Awareness [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Fontana, Damiano; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Urban environments are increasingly pervaded by ICT devices. Soon, citizens and technologies could collaboratively constitute large-scale socio-technical organisms supporting both individual and collective awareness. This paper illustrates a modern awareness framework designed to deal with the complexity of this scenario. The framework is able to collect and classify data streams in a modular way by supporting service oriented, reconfigurable components. Furthermore, we evaluate an innovative meta-classifcation scheme based on state-automata for (i) improving energy efficiency, (ii) improving classification accuracy and (iii) improving software engineering of aware systems, without affecting the overall performance.

2014 - A pattern-based architectural style for self-organizing software systems [Capitolo/Saggio]
Fernandez-Marquez, J. L.; Serugendo, G. D. M.; Snyder, P. L.; Valetto, G.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

In this chapter, Jose Luis Fernandez-Marquez et al. propose an approach to engineering self-organizing software systems toward self-adaptation and resilience from an architectural point of view. They argue that the adaptation of complete systems is different from the adaptation of single components within the systems and propose an architectural approach based on patterns. Besides adaptation, the authors also claim to achieve resilience by leveraging the capabilities of self-organizing systems, which are able to modify themselves in order to continue providing their functionality even in the face of unexpected situations.

2014 - Advances in Practical Applications of Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems. The {PAAMS} Collection [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
Demazeau, Yves; Zambonelli, Franco; Corchado, Juan; Bajo, Javier
abstract

2014 - Agent-based simulations of patterns for self-adaptive systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Puviani, Mariachiara; Cabri, Giacomo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Self-adaptive systems are distributed computing systems composed of different components that can adapt their behavior to different kinds of conditions. This adaptation does not concern the single components only, but the entire system. In a previous work we have identified several patterns for self-adaptation, classifying them by means of a taxonomy, which aims at being a support for developers of self-adaptive systems. Starting from that theoretical work, we have simulated the described self-adaptation patterns, in order to better understand the concrete and real features of each pattern. The contribution of this paper is to report about the simulation work, detailing how it was carried out, and to present a table of applicability that completes the initial taxonomy of patterns and provides a further support for the developers.

2014 - An Integrated Eclipse Plug-In for Engineering and Implementing Self-Adaptive Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Abeywickrama, Dhaminda B.; Hoch, Nicklas; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

A highly decentralized system of autonomous service components consists of multiple and possibly interacting feedback loops. These loops can be organized into a variety of architectural patterns. Although several authors have addressed the need to make feedback loops first-class entities, little attention has been given to providing solid tool support for their engineering and implementation. In this paper, we present SimSOTA - an integrated Eclipse plug-in tool to architect, engineer and implement self-adaptive systems based on our feedback loop-based approach. SimSOTA adopts model-driven development to model and simulate complex self-adaptive architectural patterns, and to automate the generation of Java-based implementation code for the patterns. The approach is validated using a case study in cooperative electric vehicles.

2014 - Collective Adaptive Systems: Qualitative and Quantitative Modelling and Analysis (Dagstuhl Seminar 14512) [Articolo su rivista]
Hillston, Jane; Pitt, Jeremy; Wirsing, Martin; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 14512 "Collective Adaptive Systems: Qualitative and Quantitative Modelling and Analysis". Besides presentations on current work in the area, the seminar focused on the following topics: (i) Modelling techniques and languages for collective adaptive systems based on the above formalisms. (ii) Verification of collective adaptive systems. (iii) Humans-in-the-loop in collective adaptive systems.

2014 - Coordination Infrastructures for Future Smart Social Mobility Services [Articolo su rivista]
Sassi, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In this article, we introduce the vision of smart social mobility services, and claim that their widespread deployment will require the identification and implementation of a general-purpose coordination infrastructure to support the effective realization of such services.

2014 - Engineering and implementing software architectural patterns based on feedback loops [Articolo su rivista]
Abeywickrama, Dhaminda; Hoch, Nicklas; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

A highly decentralized system of autonomous service components consists of multiple and interacting feedback loops which can be organized into a variety of architectural patterns. The highly complex nature of these loops make engineering and implementation of these patterns a very challenging task. In this paper, we present SimSOTA - an integrated Eclipse plug-in to architect, engineer and implement self-adaptive systems based on our feedback loop-based approach. SimSOTA adopts model-driven development to model and simulate complex self-adaptive architectural patterns, and to automate the generation of Java-based implementation code. The approach is validated using a case study in cooperative electric vehicles.

2014 - Engineering emergence in Multi-Agent Systems: Following the problem organisation [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Noel, Victor; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

To support the development of self-organising systems with emergence, we re-situate such systems and approaches from a software architecture point of view and explain and rationalise an important architectural strategy: designing the solution by following the problem organisation. We extract the architectural advantages of such a strategy and show how it is well coherent with existing methodological approaches to self-organisation. We illustrate it with a robotics example.

2014 - Formalising Adaptation Patterns for Autonomic Ensembles [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cesari, Luca; De Nicola, Rocco; Pugliese, Rosario; Puviani, Mariachiara; Tiezzi, Francesco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Autonomic behavior and self-adaptation in software can be supported by several architectural design patterns. In this paper we illustrate how some of the component- and ensemble-level adaptation patterns proposed in the literature can be rendered in SCEL, a formalism devised for modeling autonomic systems. Specifically, we present a compositional approach: first we show how a single generic component is modelled in SCEL, then we show that each pattern is rendered as the (parallel) composition of the SCEL terms corresponding to the involved components (and, possibly, to their environment). Notably, the SCEL terms corresponding to the patterns only differ from each other for the definition of the predicates identifying the targets of attribute-based communication. This enables autonomic ensembles to dynamically change the pattern in use by simply updating components’ predicate definitions, as illustrated by means of a case study from the robotics domain.

2014 - HPC from a self-organisation perspective: The case of crowd steering at the urban scale [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Pianini, Danilo; Viroli, Mirko; Zambonelli, Franco; Ferscha, Alois
abstract

HPC normally refers to the aggregation of computational capabilities in such a way that intense computations can be executed in a much shorter time than it would require on a classic end-user machine. In this paper, we propose a different point of view on such matter: focussing on situated self-organising systems, i.e. systems in which myriads of nodes deployed in a physical environment locally cooperate in order to obtain a global coherent and robust behaviour. We show how the intrinsic need of contextual information pushes towards distribution of the computation among such nodes, resembling a sort of high-performance computing system at a urban scale. We exemplify this concept by discussing an experience on designing and simulating a crowd steering application, able to provide users walking directions considering the contingencies, in this case overcrowded areas.

2014 - Human aware superorganisms [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Fontana, Damiano; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Massive networks of wearable devices have recently become a key scenario for pattern recognition technologies. Applications range from implicit human-machine interactions, to autonomous monitoring of user habits and activities. This paper presents a framework providing developers with tools to orchestrate the continuous process of collecting and classifying data streams in aware-systems. It supports service oriented, reconfigurable components and provides a solid background to put at joint work specification- and data-driven approaches. It also provides an innovative meta-classification scheme allowing to implement applications by editing a simple state automata. Experimental results suggest that the approach could be integrated in a number of applications for: (i) improving energy efficiency, (ii) improving classification accuracy and (iii) improving software engineering of aware systems.

2014 - Improving Activity Recognition via Satellite Imagery and Commonsense Knowledge [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Fontana, Damiano; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Activity recognition gained relevance in recent years because of its numerous applications. Despite relevant improvements, current classifiers are still inaccurate in several usage conditions or require time-consuming training. In this paper we show how localisation data and common sense knowledge could be used to improve activity recognition. More specifically, given the GPS position of the user, we both gather (i) a list of neighbouring commercial activities using a reverse geo-coding service and (ii) classify the satellite image of the area with state-of-the-art techniques. The approach maps classification labels produced by the three classifiers (i.e., activity, reverse geocoding localisation, satellite imagery localisation) to concepts within the ConceptNet network for the sake of improving activity recognition accuracy.

2014 - Modeling Self-Expression by Holons [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Capodieci, Nicola; Cabri, Giacomo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In the field of autonomic computing the current trend is to develop cooperating computational entities enabled with enhanced self-* properties. The term self-* indicates the possibility of an element inside a set (an ensemble) composed of many potentially heterogeneous components to self organize, heal (repair), optimize and configure without little or no human interaction. The goal is to increase the level of adaptivity for both the ensemble and the single element, especially in scenarios in which stopping a system for further tuning is unfeasible. In this paper, we propose an approach to model and enable the capability of adopting different collaboration patterns in ensembles of autonomic components inserted in open and nondeterministic environments. This model takes inspiration from the holonic organisation of multi agent systems and from a Self-* property, called Self-Expression, which is defined as the property of a distributed system to change its collaboration pattern at run time in order to better adapt its execution of tasks in unknown situations. Ensembles able to deploy Self-Expression, show a higher level of adaptation and the concept of Self-Expression can be easily exploited though a Self-Repeating structure like a hierarchy of holons.

2014 - Preface [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Demazeau, Y.; Zambonelli, F.; Corchado, J. M.; Bajo, J.
abstract

2014 - Programming Self-organizing Pervasive Applications with SAPERE [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto
abstract

SAPERE (“Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems”) is a general framework to support the decentralized execution of self-organizing pervasive computing services. In this paper, we present the rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference conceptual architecture. Following, we sketch the middleware infrastructure of SAPERE and detail the interaction model implemented by it, based on a limited set of “eco-laws”. Finally, we show how in SAPERE one can express general-purpose distributed self-organizing schemes.

2014 - Self-Expression and Dynamic Attribute-based Ensembles in SCEL [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Capodieci, Nicola; Luca, Cesari; Rocco De, Nicola; Rosario, Pugliese; Francesco, Tiezzi; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In the field of distributed autonomous computing the current trend is to develop cooperating computational entities enabled with enhanced self-* properties. The expression self-* indicates the possibility of an element inside an ensemble, i.e. a set of collaborative autonomic components, to self organize, heal (repair), optimize and configure with little or no human interaction. We focus on a self-* property called Self-Expression, defined as the ability to deploy run-time changes of the coordination pattern of the observed ensemble; the goal of the ensemble is to achieve adaptivity by meeting functional and non-functional requirements when specific tasks have to be completed. The purpose of this paper is to rigorously present the mechanisms involved whenever a change in the coordination pattern is needed, and the interactions that take place. To this aim, we use SCEL (Software Component Ensemble Language), a formal language for describing autonomic components and their interactions, featuring an highly dynamic and flexible way to form ensembles based on components' attributes.

2014 - Self-managing and self-organising mobile computing applications: a separation of concerns approach [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
J. . L., Fernandez Marquez; G., Di Marzo; G., Stevenson; J., Ye; S., Dobson; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Although the research area of self-organising systems is well established, their construction is often ad hoc. Consequently, such software is difficult reuse across applications that require similar functionality of have similar goals. The development of self-organising applications and, a fortiori, self-organising mobile applications is therefore limited to developers who are experts in specific self-organising mechanisms. As a first step towards addressing this, this paper discusses the notion of self-organising mechanisms provided as services for building higher level functionality in a modular way. This eases reuse and thus provides separation of concerns. Additionally, because of the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of mobile networks, services need to adapt themselves in order to ensure both functional and non-functional requirements. This paper discusses whether the self-management of self-organising mobile applications can be achieved in a modular fashion, via the self-management of low level self-organising services it employs, rather than considering the management of the complex system as a whole. We empirically investigate two non-functional aspects: resource optimisation and accuracy.

2014 - Social Collective Awareness in Socio-Technical Urban Superorganisms [Capitolo/Saggio]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Cecaj, Alket; Fontana, Damiano; Mamei, Marco; Sassi, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Smart cities are characterized by the close integration of ICT devices and humans. However, the vast majority of current deployments of smart technologies relies on sensing devices collecting data and data mining techniques squeezing little meanings out of them. Nevertheless, we believe that citizens integrated with ICT technologies could collaboratively constitute large-scale socio-technical superorganisms supporting collective awareness and behaviours. This paper clarifies our vision on urban superorganisms, identifies the key challenges towards their actual deployment and proposes a prototype architecture supporting their development.

2014 - Special Issue on “The Social Car: Socially-inspired Mechanisms for Future Mobility Services” [Articolo su rivista]
Riener, Andreas; Jeon, Myounghoon; Alvarez, Ignacio; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

We introduce the special issue on the social car.

2014 - The socio-technical superorganism vision [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

We present the vision of the socio-technical superorganisms, and discuss the associated research challenges.

2014 - The superorganism of massive collective wearables [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
A., Ferscha; P., Lukowicz; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Personalized wearable ICT systems presented in fashionable and appealing lifestyle-designs have gained critical user acceptance, and comprise momentum to bring wearable computing to a socio-technical mass phenomenon within the next few years. Early indicators for this expected wearable systems "tsunami" are the "spring tide" of 5.3 billion mobile phone platforms (i.e. mobile subscribers) as of the end of 2013, an assessed market potential for 300 million smart watches in 2014, and a possible market for more than 200 million smart eye-wear systems in 2015 [1]. This workshop asks the questions on the potentials and opportunities of turning these massively deployed wearable systems to a globe spanning super-organism of socially interactive personal digital assistants. While the individual wearables are of heterogeneous provenance and typically act autonomously, we can assume that they can (and will) self-organize into large scale cooperative collectives, with humans being mostly out-of-the-loop [2]. We may not assume a common objective or central controller, but rather volatile network topologies, co-dependence and internal competition, non-linear and non-continuous dynamics, and sub-ideal, failure prone operation. We could refer to these emerging massive collectives of wearables as a "super-organism" [7], since it exhibits properties of a living organism (like e.g. 'collective intelligence') on its own. In order to properly exploit such super-organisms, we need to develop a deeper scientific understanding of the foundational principles by which they operate.

2014 - Towards a General Infrastructure for Location-based Smart Mobility Services [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Sassi, Andrea; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Penetration of smart phones and localization technologies are enabling a variety of smart location-based social mobility services that can notably improve the quality life of citizens on the go. Most existing solutions are shaped from a specific set of data sources processed through predefined computational flows to provide a specific class of services, and rarely strive for generality and urban-scale goals. The contribution of this paper is to presents an architectural model for a general-purpose distributed coordination infrastructure to support the dynamic composition of a variety of smart social mobility services, by focusing on the coordination of the agents involved to address both individual mobility needs and urban-scale mobility issues. Following, it analyzes the key requirements that the implementation of such infrastructure should satisfy. Finally, to exemplify, we show how the framework can be applied to a urban ride-sharing service.

2014 - Towards a human-aware operating system [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, N.; Fontana, D.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Body-area networks have become a key scenario for pattern recognition technologies. Applications range from implicit human-machine interactions, to autonomous monitoring of user habits and activities. This paper presents a general framework that provide developers with tools to orchestrate the continuous process of collecting and classifying data streams. This can facilitate the development of humanaware applications, i.e., applications that can adapt to the context of their users. The framework supports service oriented, reconfigurable components and provides a solid background to put at joint work specification-and data-driven approaches. It also provides an innovative meta-classification scheme allowing developers to implement applications by editing a state automata. Experimental results suggest that the approach could be integrated in a number of applications for: (i) improving energy efficiency, (ii) improving classification accuracy and (iii) improving software engineering of aware systems.

2014 - Towards self-aware and self-composing services [Capitolo/Saggio]
Cabri, G.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2013 - A Bio-chemical Approach to Awareness in Pervasive Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
G., Stevenson; Castelli, Gabriella; J., Ye; Rosi, Alberto; S., Dobson; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The emerging proliferation of devices with sensing, networking and computational technologies offers opportunities for delivering pervasive services through interactions between spatially local resources. Here, applications are challenged to become aware of their surroundings: to discover, filter and reason on information relevant to their goals. Without relying on centralised services to control information flow, decentralised mechanisms are required to partition these responsibilities across the environment. This paper explores a bio-chemically inspired approach to realising awareness in an open and dynamic setting, building towards complex self-organising awareness algorithms for data collection, reasoning, and querying. Through simulation we provide a preliminary evaluation of the proposed approach.

2013 - A Life Cycle for the Development of Autonomic Systems: The E-mobility Showcase [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bures, Tomas; Nicola, Rocco De; Gerostathopoulos, Ilias; Hoch, Nicklas; Kit, Michal; Koch, Nora; Monreale, Giacoma Valentina; Montanari, Ugo; Pugliese, Rosario; Serbedzija, Nikola; Wirsing, Martin; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Component ensembles are a promising way of building self-aware autonomic adaptive systems. This approach has been promoted by the EU project ASCENS, which develops the core idea of ensembles by providing rigorous semantics as well as models and methods for the whole development life cycle of an ensemble-based system. These methods specifically address adaptation, self-awareness, self-optimization, and continuous system evolution. In this paper, we demonstrate the key concepts and benefits of the ASCENS approach in the context of intelligent navigation of electric vehicles (e-Mobility), which itself is one of the three key case studies of the project.

2013 - A Taxonomy of Architectural Patterns for Self-Adaptive Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Puviani, Mariachiara; Cabri, Giacomo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Autonomic systems are able to adapt themselves to unpredicted and unexpected situations. Such adaptation capabilities can reside in individual components as well as in ensembles of components. In particular, a variety of different architectural patterns can be conceived to support self-adaptation at the level both of components and of ensembles. In this paper, we propose a classication of such self-adaptation patterns { for both the component level and the system level { by means of a taxonomy organized around the locus in which the feedback loops promoting adaptation reside. We show that the proposed classication covers most self-adaptation patterns, and enables deriving further ones by applying a simple set of composition mechanisms. Three examples of existing patterns of the taxonomy are detailed in the paper to show the applicability of the approach. As discussed in the paper, the advantage of the proposed classication is twofold: it enables identifying the (possibly common) properties of the existing self-adaptation patterns; and, consequently, it can help developers in choosing the most appropriate self-adaptation patterns for the development of autonomic systems.

2013 - Collective Awareness and Action in Urban Superorganisms [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Fontana, Damiano; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Future urban scenarios will be characterized by the close integration of ITC devices and humans. Citizens using their own capabilities integrated with ITC technologies could collaboratively constitute a large-scale socio-technical superorganism to support collective “urban” awareness and activities. This position paper, with the help of a representative case study, identifies the key challenges for future urban superorganisms and proposes a two-tier architecture to support their development.

2013 - Collective Awareness for Human-ICT Collaboration in Smart Cities [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Cecaj, Alket; Fontana, Damiano; Mamei, Marco; Sassi, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Future urban scenarios will be characterized by the close integration of ICT devices and humans. Citizens using their own capabilities integrated with ICT technologies could collaboratively constitute a large-scale socio-technical superorganism to support collective urban awareness and activities. This position paper, with the help of a representative case study in the area of intelligent transportation systems, identifies the key challenges for future urban superorganisms and proposes a two-tier architecture to support their development.

2013 - Developing Pervasive Agent-Based Applications: A Comparison of Two Coordination Approaches [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
I., Ayala; M., Amor; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pervasive computing is concerned with making our lives easier through digital environments that are sensitive, adaptive, and responsive to human needs. Different approaches have shown the suitability of the agent paradigm for the development of pervasive applications. However, so far no dominant approach has been adopted for the development of agent-based pervasive systems. In particular, two key classes of approaches exist, based on FIPA interaction protocols and tuple spaces. The contribution of this paper is the comparison and evaluation of tuple spaces and FIPA-compliant coordination mechanisms for the development of pervasive applications. We are therefore going to compare two approaches that exemplify these agent technologies: MalacaTiny-Sol and SAPERE.

2013 - Developing Social Applications in SAPERE [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Self-adaptability and spontaneous configuration are necessary features for emerging and future pervasive service systems. SAPERE (``Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems'') is a general framework aimed at facilitating the decentralized deployment, execution, and management, of self-organizing and self-adaptive pervasive computing services. In this paper, we firstly present the overall rationale underlying SAPERE, and its reference conceptual architecture. Following, we sketch the middleware infrastructure of SAPERE, and detail the specific coordination model implemented by it, based on a limited set of ``eco-laws". Finally, we show how, via the SAPERE eco-laws, it is possible to express and easily program a variety of general-purpose social applications.

2013 - Editorial [in ACM TRANSACTIONS ON AUTONOMOUS AND ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS, vol.8. 2013] [Articolo su rivista]
M., Parashar; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Introduction to the issue.

2013 - Engineering Pervasive Multiagent Systems in SAPERE [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
A., Molesini; A., Omicini; M., Viroli; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Given the growth of agent-based models and technologies in the last decade, nowadays the applicability of agent-oriented techniques to the engineering of complex systems such as pervasive computing ones critically depends on the availability and effectiveness of agent-oriented methodologies. Accordingly, in this paper we take SAPERE pervasive service ecosystems as a reference, and introduce a novel agent-oriented approach aimed at engineering SAPERE systems as multi-agent systems.

2013 - Evaluating the Performance of Social Networks of Sensors Under Different Mobility Models [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Tomasini, Marcello; Zambonelli, Franco; A., Brayner; R., Menezes
abstract

We live in a world where demand for monitoring natural phenomena is growing. Sensor Networks are becoming ubiquitous in our society due to their broad applicability to data intensive tasks such as keeping air population to safe levels, efficient communication in military applications, implementation of alarms for forest fires, to mention but a few. Furthermore, we have seen the emergence of sensor technology being integrated in everyday objects such as cars, traffic lights, bicycles, phones, and even being attached to living beings such dolphins, trees, birds and humans. The consequence of this widespread use of sensors is that new sensor network infrastructures may be built out of static and mobile nodes. When mobility is a variable one should define which mobility model is best for the infrastructure given their differences; for instance human mobility is not akin to bird mobility. This paper then tries to evaluate which mobility pattern (or model) is best suited to be used in a Social Network of Sensors (SNoS). We evaluate several mobility models and measure the efficiency of information flow in a SNoS if mobile sensors follow these mobility patterns. The paper provide us with a greater understanding of the benefits of mobility in realistic scenarios.

2013 - Injecting Self-Organisation into Pervasive Service Ecosystems [Articolo su rivista]
S., Montagna; M., Viroli; J., Fernandez Marquez; G., Di Marzo Serugendo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pervasive service ecosystems are a new paradigm for the design of context-aware systems featuring adaptivity and self-awareness. A theoretical and practical framework has been proposed for addressing these scenarios, taking primary inspirations from natural ecosystems and grounding upon two basic abstractions: “live semantic annotations” (LSAs), which are descriptions stored in infrastructure nodes and wrapping data, knowledge, and activities of humans, devices, and services; and “eco-laws”, acting as system rules evolving the population of LSAs as if they were molecules subject to chemical-like reactions. In this paper, we aim at deepening how self-organisation can be injected in pervasive service ecosystems in terms of spatial structures and algorithms for supporting the design of context-aware applications. To this end, we start from an existing classification of self-organisation patterns, and systematically show how they can be supported in pervasive service ecosystems, and be composed to generate a self-organising emergent behaviour. A paradigmatic crowd steering case study is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

2013 - Integrating Social Sensors and Pervasive Services: Approaches and Perspectives [Articolo su rivista]
Rosi, Alberto; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The key objective of this paper is to overview the many issues related to the integration of social sensing and pervasive sensing in the support of adaptive context-aware services.

2013 - Is self-expression useful? Evaluation by a case study [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Puviani, Mariachiara; C., Pinciroli; Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In the context of adaptive component-based systems, self-expression is the capability of changing the adaptation pattern when some changes occur in the system itself or in its environment. Even if functional requirements can be met without changing the adaptation pattern, the achievement of non-functional requirements, such as performance, can benefit from a change of adaptation pattern. The aim of this paper is to show, by means of a case study in swarm robotics, that a change of adaptation pattern can affect the performance of a system. In our case study, the robots must collect food items (foraging); we will show that while in an open arena the Reactive Stigmergy Pattern performs better, the Centralised AM Pattern better suits the presence of obstacles. Since the situation of the environment can be unknown in advance, or it can change at runtime, we claim that the change of adaptation pattern can be useful in adaptive componentbased systems.

2013 - Message from the UIC-13 organizing committee [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Guo, B.; Mazzocca, N.; Barnaghi, P.; Di Martino, B.; Egerton, S.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2013 - Multiagent Environment Design for Pervasive Human-ICT Systems: The SAPERE Approach [Capitolo/Saggio]
G., Castelli; Mamei, Marco; A., Rosi; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The environment in which agents are situated has been recognized as an explicit and exploitable element in the design of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). It can be assigned a number of responsibilities whose mechanisms for fulfillment would be more difficult to design solely using the notion of agents. To support the engineering of means to fulfill these responsibilities, we propose a novel nature-inspired approach developed by the EU project SAPERE. In particular, the intent of this chapter is to present a framework-based approach providing for context-awareness, dependability, openness, flexible and robust evolution. In such a framework all of these issues can be solved via a limited set of “laws” embedded in the framework to support and govern its self-organizing activities.

2013 - Pervasive Social Context: Taxonomy and Survey [Articolo su rivista]
M., Endler; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; D., Schuster; T., Springer; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

As pervasive computing meets social networks, there is a fast growing research field called Pervasive Social Computing. Applications in this area exploit the richness of information arising out of people using sensor-equipped pervasive devices in their everyday life combined with intense use of different Social Net- working Services. We call this set of information Pervasive Social Context. We provide a taxonomy to classify Pervasive Social Context along the dimensions space, time, people, and information source (STiPI) as well as commenting on the type and reason for creating such context. A survey of recent research work shows the applicability and usefulness of the taxonomy in classifying and assessing applications and systems in the area of Pervasive Social Computing. Finally, we present some research challenges in this area and illustrate how they affect the systems being surveyed.

2013 - Pervasive social context: Taxonomy and survey [Articolo su rivista]
Schuster, D.; Rosi, A.; Mamei, M.; Springer, T.; Endler, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

As pervasive computing meets social networks, there is a fast growing research field called pervasive social computing. Applications in this area exploit the richness of information arising out of people using sensorequipped pervasive devices in their everyday life combined with intense use of different social networking services.We call this set of information pervasive social context.We provide a taxonomy to classify pervasive social context along the dimensions space, time, people, and information source (STiPI) as well as commenting on the type and reason for creating such context. A survey of recent research shows the applicability and usefulness of the taxonomy in classifying and assessing applications and systems in the area of pervasive social computing. Finally, we present some research challenges in this area and illustrate how they affect the systems being surveyed. © 2013 ACM.

2013 - SimSOTA: engineering and simulating feedback loops for self-adaptive systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Abeywickrama, Dhaminda; N., Hoch; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Engineering a decentralized system of autonomous service components and ensembles having multiple and interacting feedback loops is very challenging. While several works have expressed feedback loops as first-class entities, very little attention has been given to providing actual tool support. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to architect and engineer self-adaptive systems based on feedback loops. We also present the first implementation of SimSOTA, an Eclipse plug-in being developed to support the modeling, simulating and validating of self-adaptive systems based on our feedback loop-based approach. We validate our approach using a case study in cooperative electric vehicles.

2013 - Social Feedback in Display Ecosystems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bernhard, Anzengruber; Castelli, Gabriella; Rosi, Alberto; Alois, Ferscha; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Public display technology (like digital signage) and private one (like smartphones) has advanced significantly in capacity, capability and spread over the past years. For the provision of information services in display technology rich settings we draw the analogy to biological ecosystems as a community of living organisms together with nonliving components of the environment, linked together through information flows, and by that acting as a global system. We identify individuals in the information society with their situational information demands and their implicit and explicit interaction styles as the living, and the plethora of display devices as the non-living part of an information ecosystem. A local interactions oriented service architecture is developed, the SAPERE pervasive service substrate. A situation aware social feedback mechanism is proposed and implemented in the SAPERE architecture, demonstrating how incentivizing local interactions can stand as a principle to attain desirable global information balance.

2013 - Using Patterns of Social Dynamics in the Design of Social Networks of Sensors [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Tomasini, Marcello; R., Menezes; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The practical importance of sensor networks is continuously increasing; from air-pollution monitoring to forest-fire detection, from agriculture to battlefield communication, sensor networks are now part of many dimensions of society. Furthermore, we live in a world where sensors integrated in smart objects and smart phones are increasingly pervasive. The use of such sensors as if they were sensor network infrastructures (towards what we call Social Networks of Sensors'', or SNoS) may be very fruitful and economically advantageous. However, it also introduces some new research challenges, one of which relates to understanding the potential impact of social mobility patterns---for sensors integrated into the performances of sensor infrastructures. This paper delves into such issue and analyses how the presence of mobile sensors moving according to social mobility patterns can impact the performances of fixed sensor network infrastructures and their design choices. Simulation results show that such integration can lead to increased efficiency of the integrated SNoS infrastructure for both sensing coverage and data delivery.

2012 - ASCENS: Engineering Autonomic Service-Component Ensembles [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
M., Wirsing; M., Holzl; M., Tribastone; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Today’s developers often face the demanding task of developing software for ensembles: systems with massive numbers of nodes, operating in open and non-deterministic environments with complex interactions, and the need to dynamically adapt to new requirements, technologies or environmental conditions without redeployment and without interruption of the system’s functionality. Conventional development approaches and languages do not provide adequate support for the problems posed by this challenge. The goal of the ASCENS project is to develop a coherent, integrated set of methods and tools to build software for ensembles. To this end we research foundational issues that arise during the development of these kinds of systems, and we build mathematical models that address them. Based on these theories we design a family of languages for engineering ensembles, formal methods that can handle the size, complexity and adaptivity required by ensembles, and software-development methods that provide guidance for developers. In this paper we provide an overview of several research areas of ASCENS: the SOTA approach to ensemble engineering and the underlying formal model called GEM, formal notions of adaptation and awareness, the SCEL language, quantitative analysis of ensembles, and finally software-engineering methods for ensembles.

2012 - ASENSIS 2012 - First International Workshop on Adaptive Service Ecosystems: Nature and Socially Inspired Solutions [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Marquez, J. L. F.; Montagna, S.; Omicini, A.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2012 - Approaches to fast sequential inventory and path following in RFID-enriched environments [Articolo su rivista]
A., Bosien; V., Turau; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Although RFID is mostly used for ticketing, e-passports and supply chain management applications, the technology is also suitable for transponder based navigation systems. There it can be applied to leave a virtual trace on writeable RFID tags. These applications use RFID in a different way, because the tags are stationary and related to each other, since each tag of the path points to the following one. This offers the possibility to develop more efficient algorithms for their detection. In this paper, we suggest to store the identifying masks of subsequent tag IDs on the tags. The approach can easily be used with query-tree anti-collision methods. We examine the requirements for such an approach and describe a concrete algorithm, which is simulated and compared with different anti-collision algorithms.

2012 - Behavior Predictability Despite Non-Determinism in the SAPERE Ecosystem [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

How can we have confidence that self organizing systems actually do what we expect them to? In this position paper we overview some mechanisms at the basis of controlling and predicting the behavior of autonomous and self-organizing systems despite components’ autonomy and non-deterministic behavior. In particular we focus the analysis on the SAPERE ecosystem as an exemplary model to frame the discussion. We identify three main directions with which to gain confidence on the overall system behavior: (i) confidence from layering, (ii) confidence from large numbers, (iii) confidence form the structure and dynamics of the state space. In the paper we describe this ideas and their implication in the design of self organizing applications.

2012 - Behavior predictability despite non-determinism in the SAPERE ecosystem preliminary ideas [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, G.; Mamei, M.; Rosi, A.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

How can we have confidence that self organizing systems actually do what we expect them to? In this position paper we overview some mechanisms at the basis of controlling and predicting the behavior of autonomous and self-organizing systems despite components' autonomy and non-deterministic behavior. In particular we focus the analysis on the SAPERE ecosystem as an exemplary model to frame the discussion. We identify three main directions with which to gain confidence on the overall system behavior: (i) confidence from layering, (ii) confidence from large numbers, (iii) confidence form the structure and dynamics of the state space. In the paper we describe this ideas and their implication in the design of self organizing applications.

2012 - Bridging vision and commonsense for multimodal situation recognition in pervasive systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Lasagni, Matteo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pervasive services may have to rely on multimodal classification to implement situation-recognition. However, the effectiveness of current multimodal classifiers is often not satisfactory. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to multimodal classification based on integrating a vision sensor with a commonsense knowledge base. Specifically, our approach is based on extracting the individual objects perceived by a camera and classifying them individually with non-parametric algorithms; then, using a commonsense knowledge base, classifying the overall scene with high effectiveness. Such classification results can then be fused together with other sensors, again on a commonsense basis, for both improving classification accuracy and dealing with missing labels. Experimental results are presented to assess, under different configurations, the effectiveness of our vision sensor and its integration with other kinds of sensors, proving that the approach is effective and able to correctly recognize a number of situations in open-ended environments.

2012 - Design and Implementation of a Socially-Enhanced Pervasive Middleware [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Middleware infrastructures for pervasive computing, in order to be able to support services and users activities, have to deal with both spatially-situated and socially-situated interactions. In this paper we present the solution adopted in the SAPERE middleware that exploits the graph of a social networks, and combines it with relations deriving from spatial proximity, to drive the topology of interactions among users, devices and services. This results in a middleware that facilitates the development and management of services that are adaptive to both spatial and social concerns, and can support effective service discovery and orchestration, and naturally tackles privacy issues.

2012 - Experiences on sensor fusion with commonsense reasoning [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; M., Lasagni; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Multi-modal sensor fusion recently became a widespread technique to provide pervasive services with context-recognition capabilities. However, classifiers commonly used to implement this technique are still far from being perfect. Thus, fusion algorithms able to deal with significant inaccuracies are required. In this paper we present preliminary results obtained with a novel approach that combines diverse classifiers through commonsense reasoning. The approach maps classification labels produced by classifiers to concepts organized within the ConceptNet network. Then it verifies their semantic proximity by implementing a greedy sub-graph search algorithm. Specifically, different classifiers are fused together on a commonsense basis for both: (i) improving classification accuracy and (ii) dealing with missing labels. Experimental results are discussed through a real-world case study in which three classifiers are fused to recognize both user activities and locations.

2012 - Introduction to the Special Section on Pervasive Adaptation [Articolo su rivista]
B., Paechter; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Introduction by the guest editors to the special issue on pervasive adaptation.

2012 - Keynote: Mobility in socio-technical urban organisms: From sensing to steering [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Here I discuss how future urban environments will be sorts of immense socio-technical superorganisms, in which it will be possible, other than sensing urban mobility patterns, to dynamically steer mobility towards the emergence of specific patterns.

2012 - Looking Ahead in Pervasive Computing: Challenging and Opportunities in the Era of Cyber-Physical Convergence [Articolo su rivista]
M., Conti; S., Das; C., Bisdikian; M., Kumas; L., Ni; A., Passarella; G., Roussos; G., Troster; G., Tsudik; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The physical environment is becoming more and more saturated with computing and communication entities that interact among themselves, as well as with users: virtually everything will be enabled to source information and respond to appropriate stimuli. In this technology-rich scenario, real-world components interact with cyberspace via sensing, computing and communication elements, thus driving towards what is called the Cyber–Physical World (CPW) convergence. Information flows from the physical to the cyber world, and vice-versa, adapting the converged world to human behavior and social dynamics. Indeed humans are at the center of this converged world since information about the context in which they operate is the key element to adapt the CPW applications and services. Alongside, a new wave of (human) social networks and structures are emerging as important drivers for the development of novel communication and computing paradigms. In this article we present some of the research issues, challenges and opportunities in the convergence between the cyber and physical worlds. This article is not a comprehensive survey of all aspects of the CPW convergence. Instead, it presents some exciting research challenges and opportunities identified by members of the journal’s editorial board with a goal to stimulate new research activities in the emerging areas of CPW convergence.

2012 - Model Checking Goal-Oriented Requirements for Self-Adaptive Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Abeywickrama, Dhaminda; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

To deal with the increasing complexity and uncertainty of software systems, novel software engineering models and tools are required to make such systems self-adaptive. As part of ongoing research, we investigate various models, schemes and mechanisms to model and engineer self-adaptation in complex software systems. To this end, we have defined SOTA (State of the Affairs) as a general goal-oriented modeling framework for the analysis and design of self-adaptive systems. In this paper, by transforming the conceptual SOTA model into an operational one, we show how SOTA can be an effective tool to perform an early, goal-level, model checking analysis for adaptive systems. This allows the developers of complex self-adaptive systems to validate the actual correctness of the self-adaptive requirements at an early stage in the software life-cycle. The approach is explored and validated using a case study in the area of e-mobility.

2012 - SOTA: Towards a General Model for Self-Adaptive Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Abeywickrama, Dhaminda; Bicocchi, Nicola; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The increasing complexity and dynamics in which software systems are deployed call for solutions to make such systems autonomic, i.e., capable of dynamically self-adapting their behavior in response to changing situations. To this end, proper models and software engineering tools are required to be available to support the design and development of autonomic systems. In this paper, we introduce a new general model, SOTA, for modeling the adaptation requirements. SOTA, by bringing together the lessons of goal-oriented modeling and of context-aware system modeling, has the potentials for tackling some key issues in the design and development of complex self-adaptive software systems. In particular, SOTA enables: early verification of requirements, identification of knowledge requirements for self-adaptation, and identification of the most suitable self-adaptive patterns.

2012 - Self-organizing Virtual Macro Sensors [Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The future mass deployment of pervasive and dense sensor network infrastructures calls for proper mechanisms to enable extracting general-purpose data from them at limited energy costs and in a compact way. The approach presented in this paper relieson a simple algorithm to let a sensor network self-organize a virtual partitioning in correspondence of spatial regions characterized by similar sensing patterns, and to let distributed aggregation of sensorial data take place on a per-region basis.The result of this process is that a sensor network can be modeled as made up of virtual macro sensors, each associated to a well-characterized region of the physical environment. Within each region, each physical sensor has the local availability of aggregated data related to its region and can act as an access point to such data. This feature promises to be very suitable for a number of emerging usage scenarios. Our approach is described and analyzed, evaluated both in a simulation environment andon a real test bed, and quantitatively compared with related works in the area. The current limitations of our approach and the areas for future research are also discussed.

2012 - Towards Simulating Architectural Patterns for Self-Aware and Self-Adaptive Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Abeywickrama, Dhaminda; Zambonelli, Franco; N., Hoch
abstract

Novel models and tools are required to support the engineering of systems that are self-aware of their current situations and capable of dynamically modifying their behavior and structure using feedback loops. In this paper, with the help of a case study in the area of e-mobility and based on our past work in self-adaptive systems modeling, we introduce a new tool (i.e., an Eclipse-based simulation plug-in) that we are developing for engineering and simulating architectural patterns based on feedback loops. Our plug-in can facilitate modeling of self-adaptive patterns using UML 2, visual animation of behavior to expose run-time information, animating composite structure, model-level debugging, simulating event-driven models, and run-time prompting.

2012 - Towards Sociotechnical Urban Superorganisms [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

We introduce the concept of sociotechnical urban superorganisms, and detail the associated technical challenges.

2012 - Towards an Infrastructure for Urban Superorganisms: Challenges and Architecture [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Fontana, Damiano; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Future urban computing scenarios will be characterized by the close integration of ICT devices and humans. Citizens, by using their own capabilities augmented and integrated with ICT technologies, could thus collaboratively realize a sort of socio-technical super organism to support high-levels of collective "urban" intelligence and various forms of collective actions. This position paper, also with the help of a representative case study, identifies the key engineering challenges for future urban super organisms and proposes a two-tier architecture for the infrastructure to support the activities of novel urban super organisms.

2011 - "All-about" diaries: Concepts and experiences [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ferrari, Laura; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Smart phones and pervasive computing technologies enablethe vision of all-about diaries: tools for recording, in abrowsable and machine-processable format, the everydayactivities and events of people, communities, objects andplaces. Diaries oer a wealth of opportunities for consumersand industries. Yet, while proposals exist indicating promisingapproaches to implement parts of them, several challengesstill have to be faced to produce fully-edged workingsystems. In this paper we discuss opportunities and technologiesthat enable such diaries to be created. Then, wepresent a prototype of a diary based on location data.

2011 - 2011 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, PERCOM Workshops 2011: Message from the workshops chairs [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.; Midkiff, S. F.
abstract

2011 - A Coordination Approach to Adaptive Pervasive Service Ecosystems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
M., Viroli; E., Nardini; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Technology evolution is providing new pervasiveservice scenarios characterised by a huge number of distributedand dynamic devices. Accordingly, a new generation of servicesand infrastructures are emerging which support situatedness,adaptivity and diversity. In this paper we model the overallworld of services, data and devices, as a distributed computationalecosystem. As such, each entity will be modelled asan autonomous, spatially-situated individual of the ecosystem,whose existence and state is reified by an LSA (Live SemanticAnnotation). Ecosystem behaviour is controlled by coordinationrules called eco-laws, which are chemical-like reactions evolvingthe population of LSAs.We describe an architecture supportingthis vision along with a model of eco-laws, and show theirusefulness in a scenario of adaptive pervasive displays.

2011 - A survey on nature-inspired metaphors for pervasive service ecosystems [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; M., Viroli
abstract

Emerging pervasive computing scenarios require open service frameworks promoting situated and self-adaptive behaviors, and supporting diversity in services and long-term evolvability. This suggests adopting a nature-inspired approach, where pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices. However, there are many possibly nature-inspired metaphors that can be adopted, and choosing one may require a careful analysis of the pros and cons of the different metaphors. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the key requirements and desiderata for next generation pervasive computing services and associated infrastructures.

2011 - ACM TAAS: Co-Editor in Chief [Direzione o Responsabilità Riviste]
Zambonelli, Franco; M., Parashar
abstract

2011 - Adaptable Multi-Agent Systems: The Case of the Gaia Methodology [Articolo su rivista]
L., Cernuzzi; A., Molesini; A., Omicini; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Changes and adaptations are always necessary after the deployment of a multi-agent system (MAS), as well as of any other type of software systems. Some of these changes may be simply perfective and have local impact only. However, adaptive changes to meet new situations in the operational environment of the MAS may impact globally on the overall design. More specifically, those changes usually affect the organizational structure of the MAS. In this paper we analyze the issue of design change/adaptation in a MAS organization, and the specific problem of how to properly model/design a MAS so as to make it ready to adaptation. Special attention is paid to the Gaia methodology, whose suitability in dealing with adaptable MAS organizations is discussed also with the help of an illustrative application example.

2011 - Adaptive Organizational Changes in Agent-oriented Methodologies [Articolo su rivista]
L., Cernuzzi; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

We analyze the problem of modeling and developing multi-agent systems (MAS) from the organizational theory point of view. Particularly, we focus on the critical issue of adapting MAS organizations whenever changes in the very MAS structure are required. We survey different relevant AOSE methodologies in order to discuss their suitability in dealing with adaptation in MAS organizations. Finally, we present some critical considerations about the analyzed methodologies together with some open issues related to the process of modeling organizations for facilitating their adaptations.

2011 - All-about Digital Diaries: Opportunities and Challenges [Articolo su rivista]
Ferrari, Laura; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

All-about diaries—software platforms that record, in a browsable and machine-processable format, the everyday activities of people, communities, and objects—offer a wealth of application opportunities, but their full-fledge implementation will require overcoming several challenges.

2011 - Augmenting mobile localization with activities and common sense knowledge [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Location is a key element for ambient intelligence services. Due to GPS inaccuracies, inferring high level information (i.e., being at home, at work, in a restaurant) from geographic coordinates in still non trivial. In this paper we use information about activities being performed by the user to improve location recognition accuracy. Unlike traditional methods, relations between locations and activities are not extracted from training data but from an external commonsense knowledge base. Our approach maps location and activity labels to concepts organized within the ConceptNet network. Then, it verifies their commonsense proximity by implementing a bio-inspired greedy algorithm. Experimental results show a sharp increase in localization accuracy.

2011 - Coordinating spatially-situated pervasive service ecosystems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Viroli, M.; Nardini, E.; Castelli, G.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

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.

2011 - Editorial [Articolo su rivista]
Parashar, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2011 - Editorial [in ACM TRANSACTIONS ON AUTONOMOUS AND ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS, vol. 6, 2011] [Articolo su rivista]
M., Parashar; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Welcome from the new co-editors in chief.

2011 - Extracting Urban Patterns from Location-based Social Networks [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ferrari, Laura; Rosi, Alberto; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Social networks attract lots of new users every day and ab- sorb from them information about events and facts happen- ing in the real world. The exploitation of this information can help identifying mobility patterns that occur in an urban environment as well as produce services to take advantage of social commonalities between people. In this paper we set out to address the problem of extracting urban patterns from fragments of multiple and sparse people life traces, as they emerge from the participation to social networks. To investigate this challenging task, we analyzed 13 millions Twitter posts (3 GB) of data in New York. Then we test upon this data a probabilistic topic models approach to au- tomatically extract urban patterns from location-based so- cial network data. We nd that the extracted patterns can identify hotspots in the city, and recognize a number of ma- jor crowd behaviors that recur over time and space in the urban scenario.

2011 - Improving Comparative Analysis for the Evaluation of AOSE Methodologies [Articolo su rivista]
L., Cernuzzi; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

AOSE methodologies, as they have been proposed so far, mainly try to suggest a clean and disciplined approach to analyze, design and develop MASs by using specific methods and techniques. Moreover, different studies have been proposed for the evaluation of agent-oriented methodologies adopting specific types of evaluation and criteria. However, little effort has been devoted to the comparison among such different evaluations. Comparison techniques may help in finding out new information from the existing studies, consolidating the results from the available evaluations, and consequently in obtaining greater reliability from the evaluation results and their acceptance. With the aim of improving the acceptability of agent-oriented methodologies evaluation in the agent community, among the existing comparative techniques, the paper proposes the Profile Analysis technique for comparing evaluations carried out by different authors (perhaps using different evaluation frameworks). To exemplify the proposal, we present the application of the Profile Analysis technique on a case study.

2011 - Improving Situation Recognition via Commonsense Sensor Fusion [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pervasive services often rely on multi-modal classification to implement situation-recognition capabilities. However, current classifiers are still inaccurate and unreliable. In this paper we present preliminary results obtained with a novel approach that combines well established classifiers using a commonsense knowledge base. The approach maps classification labels produced by independent classifiers to concepts organized within the Concept Net network. Then it verifies their semantic proximity by implementing a greedy approximate sub-graph search algorithm. Specifically, different classifiers are fused together on a commonsense basis for both: (i) improve classification accuracy and (ii) deal with missing labels. Experimental results are discussed through a real-world case study in which two classifiers are fused to recognize both user's activities and visited locations.

2011 - Integrating Pervasive Middleware with Social Networks in SAPERE [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto
abstract

Any middleware for pervasive computing services has to adaptive eectively support both spatially-situated activities and social models of interactions. In this paper, we present the solution integrated in the tuple-based SAPERE middleware to tackle this problem. The idea is to exploit the graph of a social network along with relations deriving from spatial proximity to rule the actual topology of interactions among devices, users, and services. The proposed approach can facilitate the autonomous and adaptive activities of pervasive services while accounting for both social and spatial issues, can support eective service discovery and orchestration, and can enable tackling critical privacy issues.

2011 - Landslide Monitoring with Sensor Networks: Experiences and Lessons Learnt from a Real-world Deployment [Articolo su rivista]
Rosi, Alberto; M., Berti; Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Corsini, Alessandro; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Wireless sensor networks have the potentials to be a very useful technology for fine-grained monitoring in remote and hostile environments. This paper reports on the implementation and deployment of a system for landslide monitoring in the Northern Italy Apennines, and analyzes the positive results we have achieved with it. Yet, the paper also critically analyzes the problems and the inherent limitations/difficulties we had to face in developing and deploying such a system, challenging many of the “big claims” that are often heard around wireless sensor networks.

2011 - Middleware Infrastructures for Self-organising Pervasive Computing Systems [Capitolo/Saggio]
M., Casadei; Mamei, Marco; VILLALBA CARDOZO, Cynthia Emilia; M., Viroli; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In this chapter, we focus on the need for innovative open pervasive middleware infrastructures to support self-organisation, self-adaptation and evolvability, in distributed applications, with a particular attention to pervasive computing scenarios. We discuss how such middleware infrastructures should be at the basis of a nature-inspired architectural approach to system design, enabling the modelling and the deployment of services as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices interacting with one another. A reference conceptual architecture is presented to clarify the concepts expressed and the role of middleware within it, and several possible approaches to realise the idea are surveyed and critically analysed, also with the help of a simple case study. Two concrete examples of middleware infrastructures—namely the TOTA (Tuples On The Air) middleware supporting a physically-inspired computing model and the TuCSoN (Tuple Centres over the Network) middleware supporting a chemical-inspired one—are detailed along with examples showing how to use such infrastructures.

2011 - On Self-adaptation, Self-expression, and Self-awareness in Autonomic Service Component Ensembles [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Bicocchi, Nicola; Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Puviani, Mariachiara
abstract

Software systems operating in open-ended andunpredictable environments have to become autonomic, i.e.,capable of dynamically adapting their behavior in response tochanging situations. To this end, key research issues include:(i) framing the schemes that can facilitate components (orensembles of) to exhibit self-adaptive behaviors; (ii) identifyingmechanisms to enable components or ensembles to self-expressthe most suitable adaptation scheme; and (iii) acquiring theproper degree of self-awareness to enable putting in action selfadaptation and self-expression schemes. In this position paper, with the help of a representative case study, we frame anddiscuss the above issues, survey the state of the art in the area,and sketch the main research challenges that will be faced inthe ASCENS project towards the definition of a fully-fledgedframework for autonomic services.

2011 - Pervasive Middleware Goes Social: the SAPERE Approach [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pervasive computing middleware, to support thespatially and socially situated activities of users, has to eectivelysupport both self-organizing spatial activities and socialmodels of interactions. In this paper, we present the solutionthat we are going to integrate in the SAPERE middleware totackle this problem. The basic idea is to exploit the graph of asocial network (e.g., Facebook), in conjunction with relationsderiving from spatial proximity, to drive and rule the actualtopology of interactions among devices, users, and services. Aswe will discuss trough this paper, such an approach: facilitatesthe autonomous and adaptive activities of pervasive serviceswhile accounting for both social and spatial issues; supportseective service discovery and orchestration; enables tacklingcritical privacy issues.

2011 - Pervasive Urban Crowdsourcing: Visions and Challenges [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pervasive computing technologies can enable very flexible situated collaboration patterns among citizens and, via crowdsourcing, can promote a participatory way of contributing to the wealth and quality of life of our urban environments. This position paper firstly sketches a future vision of pervasive computing rich and crowdsourcing-enabled urban environments. Then, it presents several case studies showing how such environments can be of great use and highly impactful from both the individual and societal viewpoint. Finally, it discusses several open research challenges to be faced for these ideas to become reality.

2011 - Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Castelli, Gabriella; Ferrari, Laura; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; G., Di Marzo; M., Risoldi; A., Tchao; S., Dobson; G., Stevenson; E., Ye; E., Nardini; A., Omicini; S., Montagna; M., Viroli; A., Ferscha; S., Maschek; B., Wally
abstract

Here we present the overall objectives and approach of the SAPERE (“Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems”) project, focussed on the development of a highly-innovative nature-inspired framework, suited for the decentralized deployment, execution, and management, of self-aware and adaptive pervasive services in future network scenarios.

2011 - Self-optimized Cognitive Network of Networks [Articolo su rivista]
A., Manzalini; P. H., Deussen; S., Nechifor; Mamei, Marco; R., Minerva; C., Moiso; A., Salden; T., Wauters; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

uture processing, storage and communication services will be highly pervasive: people, smart objects, machines and the surrounding space (all embedding devices such as with sensors, RFID tags etc.) will define a highly decentralized cyber environment of resources interconnected by dynamic networks of networks. As communications will extend to cover any combination of ’people, machines and things’, future networks will be increasingly complex and heterogeneous, yet always endorsed with the challenging task of ensuring end-to-end QoS. This paper proposes the groundwork for an advanced cognitive networking paradigm exploitable in future wired and wireless infrastructures: a decentralized cognitive plane to allow for cross-layer, cross-node and cross-network domain self-management, self-control and self-optimization, while being compatible with legacy management and control systems.

2011 - Social Sensors and Pervasive Services: Approaches and Perspectives [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Rosi, Alberto; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; S., Dobson; G., Stevenson; J., Ye
abstract

Social Networks represent ones of the most mature expressionof Web 2.0 advent. If from one side, social networkingsites provide us the opportunity to browse new digitalworlds, make friends, share moments and resources withthe rest of the internet community, from another side theyrepresent a sophisticated tool for measuring properties of agroup of people, allowing for the extraction of up-to-date,valuable and full of context information. In this paper weinvestigate how the above Social Sensing can be integratedin pervasive services and infrastructures. In particular, weframe the possible approach that can be undertake to pursuesuch integration, and survey the leading proposals inliterature. From the limitations of actual approaches andimplementations come a general discussion on open issuesand challenges that researchers have to overcome to makesocial sensing a general-purpose tool for forthcoming pervasiveapplications.

2011 - Spatial Coordination of Pervasive Services through Chemical-inspired Tuple Spaces [Articolo su rivista]
M., Viroli; M., Casadei; S., Montagna; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

To support and engineer the spatial coordination of distributed pervasive services, we propose a chemical-inspired model, which extends tuple spaces with the ability of evolving tuples mimicking chemical systems, i.e. in terms of reaction and diffusion rules that apply to tuples modulo semantic match. The suitability of this model is studied considering a self-adaptive display infrastructure providing nearby people with several visualisation services (advertisements, news, personal and social content). The key result of this paper is that general-purpose chemical reactions inspired by population dynamics can be used in pervasive applications to enact spatial computing patterns of competition and gradient-based interaction.

2011 - The Changing Role of Pervasive Middleware: from Discovery and Orchestration to Recommendation and Planning [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Future pervasive computing scenarios will be characterized by an increasing diversity and dynamics of services and of contextual data sources, and by an increasing exploitation of crowdsourcing for social sensing and human computation. Accordingly, the role of middleware should no longer be limited to facilitating interactions and compositions via discovery and orchestration, but should approach that of a recommendation engine capable of dynamically and adaptively planning patterns of service interaction and composition on a best-effort basis. Along these lines, this position paper elaborates on the limitations of traditional middleware infrastructures in meeting the new requirements of the emerging pervasive computing scenarios. Then, it introduces two case study scenarios to motivate and clarify the concepts expressed. Finally, it identifies some key research challenges for future pervasive middleware infrastructures.

2011 - Towards Nature-Inspired Pervasive Service Ecosystems: Concepts and Simulation Experiences [Articolo su rivista]
VILLALBA CARDOZO, Cynthia Emilia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pervasive and mobile computing devices increasingly populate ourenvironments. In this context, innovative frameworks have to beidentified for the deployment and execution of pervasive servicesystems made up of a massive number of components, and able to exhibit properties of self-organization and self-adaptability, and of long-lasting evolvability. This paper discusses how such frameworks could get inspiration from natural systems, by modeling and deploying services as autonomous agents, spatially-situated in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices, all of which acting, interacting, and evolving according to a limited set of laws of nature. A conceptual architecture is introduced to frame the key concepts of nature-inspired approaches and to survey the key natural metaphors that can be adopted to realize the concept of pervasive service ecosystems. Following, the key characteristics of our originalecological approach are detailed, also with the help of representative case studies, and an extensive set of simulationexperiments are reported to show the potential effectiveness ofthe approach.

2011 - Towards a Coordination Approach to Adaptive Service Ecosystems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
M., Viroli; E., Nardini; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

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. As such, each entity will be modelled as an autonomous, spatially-situated individual of the ecosystem, whose existence and state is reified by an LSA (Live Semantic Annotation). Ecosystem behaviour is controlled by coordination rules called eco-laws, which are chemical-like reactions evolving the population of LSAs-similarly to the approaches in [1], [2]. We describe an architecture that is at the basis of the SAPERE project ("Self-aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems", www.sapere-project.eu), supporting the vision along with a model of eco-laws, and show their usefulness in a scenario of adaptive pervasive displays.

2011 - Towards a Taxonomy of Adaptive Agent-based Collaboration Patterns for Autonomic Service Ensembles [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Puviani, Mariachiara; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Services are increasingly becoming the building block of today's distributedsystems. However, to support the development of robust complex applications made up ofensembles of cooperating service components and to promote autonomic features(i.e., self-management and self-adaptation), adaptive collaboration patterns among components have to be enforced. In this paper, to analyze adaptive collaboration patterns in agent-based terms,we would like to introduce a taxonomy of adaptive agent-based collaborationpatterns, for their exploitation in the area of autonomic service ensembles. The proposed taxonomy, as preliminary as it can be, has two main advantages: (i) it enables the reuse of existing experience from the agents' world in the area of autonomic service systems, and (ii) it can provide useful suggestions to designer for the choice of the most suitable patterns.

2010 - A Roadmap towards Sustainable Self-aware Service Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
S., Dustdar; C., Dorn; F., Li; L., Baresi; Cabri, Giacomo; C., Pautasso; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Self-awareness and self-adaptation have become primary concerns in large-scale systems as they have become too complex to be managed by human administrators alone, but rather require a new blend of coordination mechanisms between people and software services. This paper presents a roadmap to effective and efficient system adaptation through coupling self- awareness of global-level goals with sustainability constraints. Sustainability of large-scale systems challenges self-adaptation approaches by its intrinsic characters of global and long-lasting effects. We introduce a scientific architecture comprising five levels of awareness: (i) event-awareness, (ii) situation-awareness, (iii) adaptability awareness, (iv) goal-awareness, and (v) future-awareness. Within each level we introduce applicable principles and subsequently outline necessary models, algorithms, and protocols. The approach puts special focus on the interdependencies of human and service elements.

2010 - A Self-Organizing Approach for Building and Maintaining Knowledge Networks [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pervasive and mobile devices can generate huge amounts of contextual data, from which knowledge about situations occurring in the world can be inferred for the use of pervasive services. Due to the overwhelming amount of data and the distributed and dynamic nature of pervasive systems, this may be not a trivial task. Indeed the management of contextual data should be run by a dedicate middleware layer, i.e., knowledge networks in charge of organizing and aggregating such data to facilitate its exploitation by pervasive services. In this paper we introduce a unsupervised, distributed and self-organizing approach to build and maintain such a layer based on simple agents that organize and extract useful information from the data space. We also present a Java-based implementation of the approach and discuss experimental results.

2010 - A biochemical approach to adaptive service ecosystems [Articolo su rivista]
M., Viroli; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Emerging network scenarios call for innovative open service frameworks to ensure capability of self-adaptability and long-lasting evolvability. In this paper, we assess the need for such innovative service frameworks, and discuss how their engineering should get inspiration from natural ecosystems, i.e., by modelling services as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services and data sources. We introduce a reference conceptual architecture with the goal of clarifying the concepts expressed and framing the several possible nature-inspired metaphors that could be adopted to realise the idea. On this basis, we go into details about one of such possible approaches, in which the rules governing the ecosystem are inspired by biochemical mechanisms. A case study is also introduced to exemplify the potentials of the presented biochemical approach and to experiment with some representative biochemistry-inspired patterns of adaptive service organisation and evolution.

2010 - A self-organizing architecture for pervasive ecosystems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
C., Villalba; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

It is getting increasingly recognized that the models and tools of standard service-oriented architectures are not adequate to tackle the decentralized, pervasive, and very dynamic scenarios of modern ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) systems, and that innovative and flexible software architectures have to be identified. This paper discusses how these architectures could get inspiration from natural systems, so as to enforce those features of self-adaptability and evolvability that are inherent in natural systems. In particular, we propose to get inspiration from ecological systems to model and deploy services as autonomous individuals, spatially-situated in an ecosystem of other services, data sources and pervasive devices. Services will be able to self-organize their interaction patterns according to a sort of “food web” and in respect of a limited set of interaction laws. Accordingly, the paper introduces a general reference architecture to frame the key concepts of our ecological approach, details its characteristics, and also with the help of a case study, discusses its implementation and presents simulation results to show the effectiveness of the approach.

2010 - Adaptive Pervasive Advertisement: Scenarios and Strategies [Articolo su rivista]
Rosi, Alberto; A., Codeluppi; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Digital screens increasingly pervade our everyday urban and social environments to serve a variety of purposes such as informing us about social and cultural events, traffic problems, or (in most of the cases) simply having the goal of displaying commercial advertisements. By exploiting pervasive computing and communication technologies, screens can “understand” who’s close to them and adapt accordingly the content shown on the screen, supplying to users a better service. In particular, advertisement companies can be lead to a much more targeted exploitation of the screen resource and, eventually, to higher revenues. In this paper, we firstly introduce the key concepts of adaptive pervasive advertisement, its potential scenarios of adoption and the design and implementation of a simple advertisement system. Then, we present and evaluate different strategies for composing the sequence of commercials to be broadcasted. Simulation studies demonstrate that an adaptive advertisement system, able to sense about people in the environment and of exploiting a context-sensitive strategy accordingly, offers a notable commercial advantage over traditional advertisement system, even when visitors demonstrate poor collaboration towards the system.

2010 - Automatic Analysis of Geotagged Photos for Intelligent Tourist Services [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Web communities are making available an increasing volume of free, fresh, detailed and powerful information about living people. Among them, the Flickr photo-sharing service offers to researchers a database of several millions of geotagged pictures from users all around the world. Working on that opens the door to the study of meaningful mobility data, where title and description of a geotagged picture represent a mine from which extract labels to detect places and events, and useful information about user trends, behaviors and tastes. Our approach goes in the direction of developing an intelligence and unattended system able to extract and take advantage of up-to-date and spontaneous information embedded with pictures, making cities intelligent and able to reach user expectations. Such system, learning from past touristic user experiences, could make customized recommendations on “where to go”, and “what to see”, to people going to visit touristic places for the first time.

2010 - Contextual data management and retrieval: A self-organized approach [Capitolo/Saggio]
Castelli, G.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Pervasive computing devices are able to generate enormous amounts of distributed data, from which knowledge about situations and facts occurring in the world should be inferred for the use of pervasive services. However accessing and managing effectively such a huge amount of distributed information is challenging for services. In this paper after having outlined these challenges, we propose a self-organized agent-based approach to autonomously organize distributed contextual data items into sorts of knowledge networks. Knowledge networks are conceived as an alive self-organized layer in charge of managing data, that can facilitate services in extracting useful information out of a large amount of distributed items. In particular, we present the W4 Data Model we used to represent data and the self-organized approach to build Knowledge Networks. Some experimental results are reported to support our arguments and proposal, and related research work are extensively discussed. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

2010 - Detecting Activities from Body-Worn Accelerometers via Instance-based Algorithms [Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The automatic and unobtrusive identification of user’s activities is one of the challenging goals of context-aware computing. This paper discusses and experimentally evaluates instance-based algorithms to infer user’s activities on the basis of data acquired from body-worn accelerometer sensors. We show that instance-based algorithms can classify simple and specific activities with high accuracy. In addition, due to their low requirements, we show how they can be implemented on severely resource-constrained devices. Finally, we propose mechanisms to take advantage of the temporal dimension of the signal, and to identify novel activities at run time.

2010 - Environmental Monitoring and Task-Driven Computing [Articolo su rivista]
Rosi, Alberto; M., Berti; Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Corsini, Alessandro; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; e. t. a., L.
abstract

We report on our early experience in landslide monitoring with sensor networks.

2010 - From service-oriented architectures to nature-inspired pervasive service ecosystems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.; Viroli, M.
abstract

Emerging pervasive computing scenarios require open service frameworks promoting situated adaptive behaviors and supporting diversity in services and long-term evolvability. We argue that this naturally calls for a nature-inspired approach, in which pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices. As an evolution of standard service-oriented architectures, we present a general framework framing the concepts expressed, and discuss a number of natural metaphors that we can adopt to concretely incarnate the proposed framework and implement pervasive service ecosystems.

2010 - Handling dynamics in diffusive aggregation schemes: An evaporative approach [Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Distributed computing in large-size dynamic networks often requires the availability at each and every node of globally aggregated information about some overall properties of the network. In this context, traditional broadcasting solutions become inadequate as the number of participating nodes increases. Therefore, aggregation schemes inspired by the physical/biological phenomenon of diffusion have been recently proposed as a simple yet effective alternative to solve the problem. However, diffusive aggregation algorithms require solutions to cope with the dynamics of the network and/or of the values being aggregated solutions, which are typically based on periodic restarts (epoch-based approaches). This paper proposes an original and autonomic solution, relying on coupling diffusive aggregation schemes with the “bio-inspired” mechanism of evaporation. While a gossip-based diffusive communication scheme is used to aggregate values over a network, gradual evaporation of values can be exploited to account for network and value dynamics without requiring periodic restarts. A comparative performance evaluation shows that the evaporative approach is able to manage the dynamism of the values and of the network structure in an effective way: in most situations it leads to more accurate aggregate estimations than epoch-based techniques.

2010 - Innovative integrated airborne and wireless systems for landslide monitoring [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
P., Sterzai; M., Vellico; M., Berti; F., Coren; Corsini, Alessandro; Rosi, Alberto; P., Mora; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Landslides are a widespread phenomenon over the Italian territory and economical losses due to this hazard are impressive (an average of 2 billion of euros per year in the last 50 years). In the framework of the WISELAND research project (Integrated Airborne and Wireless Sensor Network systems for Landslide Monitoring) funded by the Italian Government, we are testing new monitoring devices devoted to control large landslides at different degrees of activity. Integrated monitoring tools with a strong innovative character are being explored, in particular ground-based wireless sensor networks combined with airborne laser-scanning and hyperspectral surveys.A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a set of low cost micro-computers capable to measure physical parameters and to communicate between them. Such a technique allows landslides remote monitoring, measuring spatially distributed parameters and recognizing deformation patterns. Ground-based sensor networks can be effectively integrated with grid-based data measured by the use of airborne techniques. The Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) technology is used primarily to densely map wide areas, even in presence of a thick vegetation coverage, to retrieve high resolution Digital Terrain Models (DTMs); DTMs are fundamental in monitoring and describing landslide movements. Hyperspectral sensors are capable to measure parameters such as soil moisture content, vegetation coverage and surface roughness, that can be correlated with slope movements.In the first year of the project we tested and validated these monitoring tools on two large earthflows, which are representative of the widespread slope instability in the Northern Apennine: the Silla landslide (Bologna Province, Italy) and the Valoria landslide (Modena Province, Italy). Although characterised by different geological settings and evolution stages, both landslides are associated to a high degree of risk because of the presence of vulnerable elements and their tendency to periodic and abrupt reactivations.Periodic airborne surveys were performed in Valoria site in different periods, in order to monitor the surface displacement of the slopes. Multitemporal Lidar DTMs allowed the calculation of a differential surface, therefore highlighting absolute height variations and recognizing the main landslide components. Hyperspectral data helped in the landslide characterization; for instance the analysis of PCA components are also correlated with results coming from DTM analysis and this has been evidenced to be a proper system to identify depletion and accumulation zones.A prototype wireless sensor network was installed at Silla landslide in July 2009. The network consists of four nodes (located in the upper part of the landslide) configured with static routing table which forward packets (one data every 15 minutes) to a master node connected to a laptop. Parallel to this test, a new node hardware platform, more shaped for low power – high range data transmission in outdoor conditions has been developed and it is now ready to be deployed in the field.

2010 - Lidar And Hyperspectral Data Integration For Landslide Monitoring: The Test Case Of Valoria Landslide [Articolo su rivista]
Sterzai, P.; Vellico, M.; Berti, M.; Coren, F.; Corsini, Alessandro; Rosi, Alberto; Mora, P.; Zambonelli, Franco; Ronchetti, Francesco
abstract

In the framework of the WISELAND project, funded by MIUR, we tested the integration between Lidar and hyperspectral methodologies in the Valoria landslide (Modena province, Italy), a high risk area with vulnerable elements, subjected to periodic and abrupt reactivations. Multitemporal Lidar Digital Terrain Models (DTMs) allowed the calculation of a differential surface, highlighting absolute height variations, recognizing the main landslide components and identifying depletion and accumulation zones. Hyperspectral data helped in the landslide terrain roughness characterization, performing the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and correlating the results with Flatness and Organization geomorphometric parameters derived from Lidar DTM.

2010 - Role-Based Software Agent Interaction Models: A Survey [Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; L., Ferrari; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The role concept represents a useful approach that has been exploited in different agent-based systems, in particular applied to interactions between agents. There are some requirements that are important for the development of agent-based applications using roles, for instance the support for the analysis, the design and the implementation phases. We have considered and compared different role-based proposals in the literature, and this paper presents a survey of the most spread ones. Weexplain each proposal and point out if and how it meets the identified requirements. Far from deciding the best proposal, our aim is to present the advantages and drawbacks of several proposals to designers and developers, so that they can make the best choice with regard to their needs.

2010 - Self-optimized Cognitive Network of Networks [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
A., Manzalini; P., Deussen; S., Nechifor; Mamei, Marco; R., Minerva; C., Moiso; A., Salden; T., Wauters; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Future processing, storage and communication services will be highly pervasive: people, smart objects, machines and the surrounding space (all embedding devices such as with sensors, RFID tags etc.) will define a highly decentralized cyber environment of resources interconnected by dynamic networks of networks. As communications will extend to cover any combination of ’people, machines and things’, future networks will be increasingly complex and heterogeneous, yet always endorsed with the challenging task of ensuring end-to-end QoS. This paper proposes the groundwork for an advanced cognitive networking paradigm exploitable in future wired and wireless infrastructures: a decentralized cognitive plane to allow for cross-layer, cross-node and cross-network domain selfmanagement, self-control and self-optimization, while being compatible with legacy management and control systems.

2010 - Self-organized Data Ecologies for Pervasive Situation-Aware Services: the Knowledge Networks Approach [Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, Nicola; M., Baumgarten; M., Brgulja; R., Kusber; Mamei, Marco; M., Mulvenna; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pervasive computing services exploit information about the physical world both to adapt their own behavior in a context-aware way and to deliver to users enhanced means of interaction with their surrounding environment. The technology to acquire digital information about the physical world is increasingly available, making services at risk of being overwhelmed by such growing amounts of data. This calls for novel approaches to represent and automatically organize, aggregate, and prune such growing amounts of data before delivering it to services. In particular, individual data items should form a sort of self-organized ecology in which, by linking and combining with each other into sorts of “knowledge networks”, they can be able to provide to services compact and easy to be managed higher-level knowledge about situations occurring in the environment. In this context, the contribution of this paper is twofold. First, with the help of a simple case study, we motivate the need to evolve from models of “context-awareness” towards models of “situation-awareness” via proper self-organized “knowledge networks” tools, and introduce a general reference architecture for knowledge networks. Second, we describe the design and implementation of a knowledge network toolkit we have developed, and exemplify algorithms for knowledge self-organization integrated within it. Open issues and future research directions are also discussed.

2010 - Simulation Experiences with an Ecological Approach for Pervasive Service Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
C., Villalba; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Innovative frameworks have to be identified for the deployment and execution of pervasive service systems. These systems, composed by a massive number of components, should be able to exhibit properties of self-organization and self-adaptability, and of long-lasting evolvability. In this context, this paper discusses how such frameworks should get inspiration from natural systems. In particular, we focus on ecological systems that model and deploy services as autonomous individuals (i.e., agents), spatially- situated in an ecosystem of other services, pervasive devices, and data sources, all of which acting, interacting, and evolving according to a limited set of "laws of nature". The key characteristics of the proposed ecological approach are detailed with the help of a representative case study. Also, an extensive set of simulation experiments are reported to outline the peculiarities of its dynamic behavior and to show the potential effectiveness of the approach.

2010 - Spatial coordination of pervasive systems through chemical-inspired tuple spaces [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Viroli, M.; Casadei, M.; Montagna, S.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Pervasive computing calls for developing distributed infrastructures featuring large-scale distribution, opennes, context-awareness, self-organisation and self-adaptation. There, it is quite natural to see services (software functionality, data, knowledge, signals) as spatial concepts: they are naturally diffused in the network, and in each location they are sensitive to the context and compete with each other - as such, they can be active in one or multiple regions (niches) of the network. To support and engineer this scenario, we propose a nature-inspired coordination model of chemical-inspired tuple spaces. They extend standard tuple spaces with the ability of evolving the "weight" of a tuple just as it represented the concentration of a chemical substance in a biochemical system, namely, in terms of reaction and diffusion rules that adaptively apply to tuples modulo semantic match. We show that this model can be used to enact self-* properties in pervasive systems, through typical spatial patterns involving computational fields, paths, and segregation. © 2010 IEEE.

2010 - The Computer Journal: Member of the Editorial Board [Direzione o Responsabilità Riviste]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2010 - Unsupervised Learning in Body-area Networks [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Lasagni, Matteo; Mamei, Marco; Prati, Andrea; Cucchiara, Rita; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pattern recognition is becoming a key application in bodyarea networks. This paper presents a framework promoting unsupervised training for multi-modal, multi-sensor classification systems. Specifically, it enables sensors provided with patter-recognition capabilities to autonomously supervise the learning process of other sensors. The approach is discussed using a case study combining a smart camera and a body-worn accelerometer. The body-worn accelerometer sensor is trained to recognize four user activities pairing accelerometer data with labels coming from the camera. Experimental results illustrate the applicability of the approach in different conditions.

2009 - A Biochemical Metaphor for Developing Eternally Adaptive Service Ecosystems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
M., Casadei; S., Montagna; M., Viroli; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In the near future, pervasive sensing and actuating devices will densely populate our everyday environments, and will be tightly integrated with Telecom and Internet networks---also eventually contributing to blur their distinction.

2009 - A Nature Inspired Approach for Large-scale Pervasive Service Ecosystems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
VILLALBA CARDOZO, Cynthia Emilia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Innovative frameworks have to be identified for the deploymentand execution of pervasive services made up of a massive numberof components, and able to exhibit properties of self-organizationand self-adaptability, and of long-lasting evolvability. This paper discusshow such frameworks should get inspiration from Ecological systems,modeling and deploying services as autonomous individuals (i.e agents),spatially-situated in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, andpervasive devices, all of which acting, interacting, and evolving accordingto a limited set of “laws of nature”. In this context, we presenta reference architecture to frame the concepts and components of ecoinspiredsystems, discuss the characteristics of the ecological approach,and exemplify it with the help of a representative case study. Preliminarysimulation results show the potential effectiveness of the approach.

2009 - A context-sensitive infrastructure for coordinating agents in ubiquitous environments [Articolo su rivista]
M., Bortenschlager; Castelli, Gabriella; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The combination of contextual information about the real world (e.g., collected by sensors) with information coming from the virtual world (e.g., the Web 2.0), may represent an enormous enrichment particularly for services organized and provided by agents in ubiquitous environments. To address the challenging need for coordination in such environments, and to provide the user a high-level of service quality, an engineered approach to exploit such information is required. Such an approach should generate added-value by offering means for combining diverse data sources, should allow delivering context-sensitive information and, hence, should promote context-dependent coordination of entities in ubiquitous environments. In this paper, we report the scenario-based analysis of key requirements for ubiquitous environments that we have used as the basis for the design of our proposal. Following, our proposal for the Ubiquitous Coordination Model (UbiCoMo) and its associated infrastructure is detailed. The UbiCoMo model covers an expressive data model based on four-field tuples to represent contextual information, data distribution and management concepts based on tuple spaces, and the integration of coordination patterns to resolve reoccurring coordination problems in ubiquitous scenarios. The UbiCoMo infrastructure integrates the fundamental mechanisms for agent-based coordination in ubiquitous environments, and is well-suited to provide the specific means required to offer high-level services and context-sensitive functionalities. A concrete ubiquitous application, the living diary, is assumed as a case study both to illustrate the requirements analysis and to exemplify the usage and the suitability of UbiCoMo.

2009 - A self-organized multiagent approach for distributed management of contextual data [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, G.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Pervasive computing devices are able to generate enormous amounts of data, from which knowledge about situations and facts occurring in the world should be inferred for the use of pervasive services. However accessing and managing effectively such a huge amount of distributed information is challenging for services. In this paper we propose a self-organized approach to autonomously organize distributed contextual data items into sorts of knowledge networks. Knowledge networks are conceived as an alive self-organized layer in charge of managing data, that can facilitate services in extracting useful information out of a large amount of distributed items. We motivate our approach and present the W4 Data Model that we used to represent contextual data. On these basis, we introduce the general idea of W4 Knowledge Networks and we detail the specific bio-inspired approach for self-organized networking of data items. A case study is introduced to clarify the concepts expressed, and experimental results are reported to support our arguments and proposal.

2009 - An Evaporative Approach to Handle Dynamics in Diffusive Aggregation Schemes [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Distributed computing in large-size dynamic networks oftenrequires the availability at each and every node globally ag-gregated information about some overall properties of thenetwork. In this context, since traditional broadcasting so-lutions become inadequate as the number of participatingnodes increases, aggregation schemes inspired by the phys-ical/biological phenomenon of diusion have been recentlyproposed as a simple yet eective alternative to solve theproblem. However, diusive aggregation requires specicsolutions to cope with the dynamics of the network and/orof the values being aggregated. While typical solutions arebased on periodic restarts (epoch-based approaches), in thispaper, we propose an original and more autonomic solution,relying on coupling diusive aggregation schemes with theadditional bio-inspired mechanism of evaporation. While agossip-based diusive communication scheme is used to ag-gregate values over a network, gradual evaporation of valuescan be exploited to account for network and value dynamicswithout requiring periodic restarts. A comparative perfor-mance evaluation shows that the evaporative approach isable to manage the dynamism of the values sensed over thenetwork in an eective way and, in the most of the cases,it leads to more accurate aggregate estimations than epoch-based techniques.

2009 - Contextual data management and retrieval: A self-organized approach [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, G.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Pervasive computing devices are able to generate enormous amounts of distributed data, from which knowledge about situations and facts occurring in the world should be inferred for the use of pervasive services. However accessing and managing effectively such a huge amount of distributed information is challenging for services. In this paper we propose a self-organized agent-based approach to autonomously organize distributed contextual data items into sorts of knowledge networks. Knowledge networks are conceived as an alive selforganized layer in charge of managing data, that can facilitate services in extracting useful information out of a large amount of distributed items. We present the W4 Data Model we used to represent data and the self-organized approach to build Knowledge Networks. Some experimental results are reported to support our arguments and proposal. © 2009 IEEE.

2009 - Extracting High-Level Information from Location Data: the W4 Diary Example [Articolo su rivista]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Services for mobile and pervasive computingshould extensively exploit contextual information both toadapt to user needs and to enable autonomic behavior. Tofulfill this idea it is important to provide two key tools: amodel supporting context-data representation and manipulation,and a set of algorithms relying on the model toperform application tasks. Following these lines, we firstdescribe the W4 context model showing how it canrepresent a simple yet effective framework to enableflexible and general-purpose management of contextualinformation. In particular, we show the model suitability indescribing user-centric situations, e.g., describing situationsin terms of where a user is located and what he is doing.Then, we illustrate a set of algorithms to semanticallyenrich W4 represented data and to extract relevantinformation from it. In particular, starting from W4 data,such algorithms are able to identify the places that matter tothe user and to describe them semantically. Overall, weshow how the context-model and the algorithms allow tocreate an high-level, semantic and context-aware diarybasedservice. This service meaningfully collects andclassifies the user whereabouts and the places that the uservisited

2009 - GAIA4E: A Tool Supporting the Design of MAS Using Gaia [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cernuzzi, Luca Carlo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Different efforts have been devoted to improve the original version of Gaia methodology. The more relevantis the official extension of Gaia, exploiting the organizational abstractions to provide clear guidelines for theanalysis and design of complex and open multiagent systems. However, now a day a successful designmethodology should include some other strategic factors like the support of a specific CASE tool tosimplify the work of the designer. Such a tool supporting the Gaia design process may facilitate theadoption of the methodology in the industrial arena. The present study introduces Gaia4E, a plug-in for theECLIPSE environment which covers all the phases of Gaia allowing agent engineers to produce anddocument the corresponding models.

2009 - Handling Dynamics in Gossip-based Aggregation Schemes [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

A problem in large and dynamic networks consists in making available at each node global information about the state of the network. Gossip-based aggregation schemes are a simple yet effective mechanism to solve the problem. However, they have to cope with the dynamics either of the network and the values being aggregated and thus have to integrate specific solutions to deal with them. The contribution of this paper is to analyze and compare three different solutions to handle network and values dynamics in gossip-based aggregation schemes: (i) an epoch-based approach based on periodic restarts, (ii) an optimized epoch-based approach based on concurrent aggregation threads and (iii) an original approach based on values evaporation that does not require periodic restarts. Experimental results show that our proposal is effective and often more accurate than epoch-based techniques

2009 - JPCC: Member of the Editorial Advisory BOard [Direzione o Responsabilità Riviste]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2009 - Knowledge Networks for Pervasive Services [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco; M., Baumgarten; M., Mulvenna
abstract

Technologies to pervasively acquireinformation about the physical and socialworlds – as needed by services to achievecontext-awareness – are becomingincreasingly available. Paradoxically, the riskis to make pervasive services overwhelmed bygrowing amounts of contextual data, andunable to properly exploit them. This calls forspecific approaches to automatically organizeand aggregate such data before delivering itto services. Contextual data items should forma sort of self-organized ecology within whichthey autonomously link and combine with eachother into sorts of “knowledge networks”.This can produce compact and easy-to-bemanagedhigher-level knowledge aboutsituations occurring in the environment, andeventually can make services able to easilyacquire “situation-awareness”. In this paper,after having framed the key concepts andmotivations underlying “situation-awareness”and our “knowledge networks” approach, wepresent the design and implementation of a“knowledge networks” prototype, intended asa tool to support self-organization and selfaggregationof contextual data item and tofacilitate their exploitation by pervasiveservices. A representative case study in thearea of adaptive pervasive advertisement isintroduced to clarify the concepts expressed,to exemplify the actual functioning of thetoolkit and of some specific algorithmsintegrated within it, as well as to evaluate itseffectiveness.

2009 - MyAds: A system for adaptive pervasive advertisements [Articolo su rivista]
A., Di Ferdinando; Rosi, Alberto; R., Lent; A., Manzalini; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In this paper we show how pervasive technologies can be employed on a public-display advertisement scenario to enable behavioral self-adaptation of content. We show this through MyAds, a system capable of exploiting pervasive technologies to autonomously adapt the advertisement process to the trends of interests detected among the audience in a venue. After describing the rationale, the architecture and the prototype of MyAds, we describe the advantages brought by the use of such a system, in terms of impact on the audience and economic efficiency. The comparison of MyAds performances with different advertisement selection techniques confirms the validity of our advertisement model, and our prototype in particular, as a means for maximising product awareness in an audience and for enhancing economic efficiency.

2009 - Programming Pervasive and Mobile Computing Applications: the TOTA Approach [Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pervasive and mobile computing call for suitable middleware and programming models to supportthe activities of complex software systems in dynamic network environments. In this paper wepresent TOTA (“Tuples On The Air”), a novel middleware and programming approach for sup-porting adaptive context-aware activities in pervasive and mobile computing scenarios. The keyidea in TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples, adaptively propagated across a networkon the basis of application-specific rules, for both representing contextual information and sup-porting uncoupled interactions between application components. TOTA promotes a simple wayof programming that facilitates access to distributed information, navigation in complex environ-ments, and achievement of complex coordination tasks in a fully distributed and adaptive way,mostly freeing programmers and system managers from the need to take care of low-level issuesrelated to network dynamics. This paper includes both application examples to clarify conceptsand performance figures to show the feasibility of the approach

2009 - Reti di Sensori Wireless per il Monitoraggio di una Zona in Frana [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
R., Sabbadini; M., Berti; Rosi, Alberto; A., Simoni; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Le recenti innovazioni nel campo dell’elettronica e della tecnologia dell’informazione hanno reso disponibili sensori avanzati e a basso costo finalizzati al monitoraggio del territorio. In particolare, le reti di sensori wireless (Wireless Sensor Network, WSN) ed i sensori per il telerilevamento Lidar e iperspettrale (Airborne Terrain Mapping, ATM) stanno attirando l’interesse degli enti territoriali per la loro vocazione a monitorare in modo distribuito ambienti naturali ostili quali siti contaminati, zone sismicamente attive e aree in frana (Polastre, 2003; Martinez et al., 2005; Werner-Allen et al., 2006).Nell’ambito del progetto WISELAND (Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca Scientifica, finanziamento PRIN2007; http://prin07.geomin.unibo.it/prin07/index.html) sono state combinate le tecnologie WSN e ATM per il monitoraggio di una zona franosa ad elevata pericolosità (frana di Silla-Montecchi, Gaggio Montano, BO). Il progetto prevede di restituire i dati della rete WSN (spostamento del corpo di frana, condizioni idrauliche del versante) su una piattaforma ArcSDE utilizzando come base un DEM ad alta risoluzione ottenuto dal rilievo Lidar. L’integrazione tra sensori di nuova generazione, tecnologie GIS e WebGIS ha lo scopo di promuovere la diffusione dei dati di monitoraggio e di migliorarne la condivisione con i soggetti istituzionali.

2009 - Self-organized Control of Knowledge Generation in Pervasive Computing Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; R., Menezes; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pervasive computing devices (e.g., sensor networks, localization devices, cameras, etc.) are increasingly present in every aspect of our lives. These devices are able to generate enormous amounts of data, from which knowledge about situations and facts occurring in the world can be inferred; inference can also be done by combining data items and generating new (higher-level) ones. Such data and knowledge is of extreme importance for to context-aware and mobile services. However, we are left with the problem that the possibly huge amount of data and knowledge generated can be very hard to be analyzed and made usable in real-time. The core of the problem in today's pervasive environments lies between the ability to extract meaningful (useful) knowledge from the data while making sure the total amount of data does not become overwhelming to the system. This paper focus on this trade-off using (without loss of generality) the W4 model for contextual data as a case study. Starting from the basic mechanism by which the W4 model autonomously generate new knowledge, the paper shows how this can generate knowledge overflow, and propose a method to select---in a self-organizing way---what kinds of knowledge should be generated based on their importance; hence preventing knowledge overflow. Experimental results are reported to support our arguments and proposals.

2009 - The CASCADAS Framework for Autonomic Communication [Capitolo/Saggio]
L., Baresi; A., Di Ferdinando; A., Manzalini; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

An interesting approach to the design and development of the future Internetforesees a networked service eco-system capable of seamlessly offering servicesfor human-to-human, human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions.This chapter builds in this direction by describing a distributed component-wareframework for autonomic and situation-aware communication developed within theCASCADAS project. The core of this framework is the Autonomic CommunicationElement (ACE), an innovative software abstraction capable of providing dynamicallyadaptable services that can be built, composed, and let evolve according toautonomic principles. Services are capable of adapting their logic to the dynamicallychanging context they operate in without human intervention. As a result,whenever the need arises, ACEs can be federated autonomously and produce newservices on a situation-aware basis. Systems and, in particular, eco-systems can thusbe conceived as collections of ACEs.The chapter introduces the concept of ACE and its different facets. It also presentsthe architecture of a prototype ACE-based platform and exemplifies the differentconcepts through a future Pervasive Behavioral Advertisement scenario.

2008 - A Platform for Pervasive Combinatorial Trading with Opportunistic Self-aggregation [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Di, Ferdinando; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco; R., Lent; E., Gelenbe
abstract

We describe a prototype of trading system platform populated by agents who autonomously decide to buy and/or sell items according to a set of local needs which arise dynamically (also by possibly accessing information provided by pervasive devices) by in the process of fulfilling a given overall utility. The market has combinatorial nature in a way that items to be traded are combined into packages, in accordance with a principle that drives the nature of many current markets. However, differently from these, items belong to a number of distinct sellers distributed in the platform, and are chosen singularly on the basis of buyers preferences and needs. Agents are thus situation-aware, with sellers coming acquainted of the market demand, and buyers price offers, through a Knowledge Network. This latter drives the way market offers balance the demand by gathering the needed information in an autonomous way and taking advantage of pervasive devices. Packaging is realized by agent aggregation into Virtual Sellers, in an autonomous fashion, and we propose an opportunistic policy whereby aggregation is governed by a Combinatorial Auction. The market is studied through proof-of-concept simulation, where the efficiency deriving from the opportunistic aggregation based on Combinatorial Auctions and the influence of contextual self-awareness are studied.

2008 - Architecture and Metaphors for Eternally Adaptive Service Ecosystems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; M., Viroli
abstract

In this paper, we first motivate the need for innovative open service frameworks that ensure capability of self-adaptability and long-lasting evolvability (i.e., eternity).On this basis, we discuss how such frameworks should get inspiration from natural ecosystems, by enabling modelling and deployment of services as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices. A reference architecture is presented to clarify the concepts expressed, and then several possible approaches to realise the idea are surveyed and critically analyzed.

2008 - Autonomic communication services: a new challenge for software agents [Articolo su rivista]
Quitadamo, Raffaele; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The continuous growth in ubiquitous and mobile network connectivity, together with the increasing number of networked devices populating our everyday environments, call for a deep rethinking of traditional communication and service architectures. The emerging area of autonomic communication addresses such challenging issues by trying to identify novel flexible network architectures, and by conceiving novel conceptual and practical tools for the design, development, and execution of “autonomic” (i.e., self-organizing, self-adaptive and context-aware) communication services. In this paper, after having introduced the general concepts behind autonomic communication and autonomic communication services, we analyze the key issue of defining suitable “component” models for autonomic communication services, and discuss the strict relation between such models and agent models. On this basis, we survey and compare different approaches, and eventually try to synthesize the key desirable characteristics that one should expect from a general-purpose component model for autonomic communication services. The key message we will try to deliver is that current research in software agents and multi-agent systems have the potential for playing a major role in inspiring and driving the identification of such a model, and more in general for influencing and advancing the whole area of autonomic communication.

2008 - Browsing the World with RFID Tags: Design and Implementation of an RFID-Based Distributed Environmental Memory [Capitolo/Saggio]
Rosi, Alberto; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The increasing diffusion of pervasive computing technologies via which to interact with the physical world, together with the availability of innovative GIS-like tools relying on standard Web technologies (e.g., Google Earth and Google Maps) let us envision a future in which it will be possible to access in an undifferentiated way real-time information about the physical world, Web information and services, and to transparently merge them into a single coherent user-centric and location-dependent perspective. In this chapter, after having introduced the general underlying concepts and presented current related research initiatives, we illustrate a general user-centric architecture for “browsing the world” and show some services we developed.

2008 - Context-Aware Coordination in the Sensors' Continuum [Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags will soon densely pupulate our everyday environments. These, together with the increasing diffusion of geospatial Web 2.0 tools such as GoogleEarth, will soon form the basis of a shared distributed information space capable of producing and storing data about the physical and social worlds and their processes. This opens up the possibility of exploiting such information space as a general-purpose coordination infrastructure to facilitate users in gathering information about the world, interact with it in a context-aware way, and coordinate with each other via the mediation of that infrastructure. However, the extremely distributed and heterogeneous nature of such infrastructure and the potentially incredible density of the information produced within (at the very extreme, a spatio-temporal continuum of information), introduces several issues related to the management of such infrastructure, i.e., the need for properly aggregating data to abstract from its actual density and to enable multilevel views, and the need for representing data in a simple, uniform, and easy to be managed way. In this paper, after having sketched our general vision for such future coordination infrastructure, we analyse and discuss the key research chalenges to data aggregation and data representation, and present our current research and experimental activity in these areas.

2008 - Engineering Contextual Information for Pervasive Multiagent Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Multiagent systems for mobile and pervasive computing should extensively exploit contextual information both to adapt to user needs and to enable autonomic behavior. This raises the problem of how to represent, organize, aggregate, and make available such data so as to have it become meaningful and usable knowledge, facilitating the design and development of agents, and enabling them to acquire high-degrees of context awareness at limited efforts. In this paper, we identify the key software engineering challenges introduced by the need of accessing and exploiting huge amount of heterogeneous contextual information. Following, we survey the relevant proposals in the area of context-aware pervasive computing, data mining and granular computing discussing their potentials and limitations. On these bases, we propose the W4 model for contextual data and show how it can represent an effective model to enable flexible general-purpose management of contextual knowledge, to facilitate agents in achieving high degrees of context-awareness and, overall, to facilitate the design and development of complex multiagent systems.

2008 - Engineering Contextual Knowledge for Autonomic Pervasive Services [Articolo su rivista]
Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Services for mobile and pervasive computing should extensively exploit contextualinformation both to adapt to user needs and to enable autonomic behavior. This raises theproblem of how to represent, organize, aggregate, and make available such data to servicesso as to have it become meaningful and usable knowledge, facilitating the design anddevelopment of autonomic pervasive services, and enabling them to acquire high-degrees ofcontext awareness at limited efforts. In this paper, we identify the key software engineeringchallenges introduced by the need of accessing and exploiting huge amount ofheterogeneous contextual information. Following, we survey the relevant proposals in thearea of context-aware pervasive computing, data mining and granular computing discussingtheir potentials and limitations with regard to their adoption in the development of contextawarepervasive services. On these bases, we propose the W4 model for contextual data andshow how it can represent a simple yet effective model to enable flexible general-purposemanagement of contextual knowledge, to facilitate services in achieving high degrees ofcontext-awareness and, overall, to facilitate the design and development of complexpervasive services. A summarizing discussion and the identification of open researchdirections conclude the paper.

2008 - Field-based Coordination for Pervasive Computing Applications [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Emerging pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags can be embedded in our everyday environment to digitally store and elaborate a variety of information. By having application agents access in a dynamic and wireless way such distributed information, it is possible to enforce a notable degree of context-awareness in applications, and increase the capabilities of interacting with the physical world. In particular, biologically inspired field-based data structures such as gradients and pheromones are suitable to represent information in a variety of pervasive computing applications. This paper discusses how both sensor networks and RFID tags can be used to that purpose, outlining the respective advantages and drawbacks of these technologies.

2008 - Message from the general co-chairs [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.; Laddaga, R.
abstract

2008 - Multi-Agent Abstractions and Organizations and the i* Framework [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cernuzzi, Luca Carlo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

i* is one of the more promising goal-oriented modeling framework tocapture and model multi agent systems (MAS) requirements. Moreover, i* has beenincorporated as the foundation for one of the more important AOSE methodologies,that is, Tropos. Our research interests related with i* cover two mainly directions. Thefirst, is to compare i* with other methods, techniques and notations for capturing andmodeling MAS abstractions. The second is related to the computational organizationtheory to model the organizational perspective of the MAS. Specifically, we areanalyzing the critical issue of coping with adaptive changes of MAS organizationswhenever circumstances claim for changes in the very MAS structure. Then, we aresurveying different relevant AOSE methodologies, Tropos (and therefore i*) amongothers, to discuss their suitability in dealing with adaptation in MAS organizations.

2008 - Nature-inspired Spatial Metaphors for Pervasive Service Ecosystems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
VILLALBA CARDOZO, Cynthia Emilia; Rosi, Alberto; M., Viroli; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Innovative paradigms and frameworks have to be identiﬁed to enable the effective deployment and execution of pervasive computing services able to enforcing properties of self-organization and self-adaptability, self-management, and of long-lasting evolvability. This paper discusses how such frameworks should get inspiration from natural systems, by enabling modeling and deployment of services as autonomous individuals, spatially-situated in a system of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices, all of which acting, interacting, and evolving according to a limited set of spatial “laws of nature”. In this context, this paper presents a reference architecture to uniformly frame such concepts, surveys and critically analyzes different nature-inspired spatial metaphors to realize the idea, and details our current research agenda concerning the development of service frameworks inspired to the ecological metaphor.

2008 - Nature-inspired spatial metaphors for pervasive service ecosystems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Villalba, C.; Rosi, A.; Viroli, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Innovative paradigms and frameworks have to be identified to enable the effective deployment and execution of pervasive computing services. Such frameworks must be conceived so as to match the spatially-situated nature of pervasive services, and must be able to exhibit properties of self-organization and self-adaptability, self-management, and of long-lasting evolvability. This paper discusses how such frameworks should get inspiration from natural systems, by enabling modeling and deployment of services as autonomous individuals, spatially-situated in an ecosystem of other services, data sources, and pervasive devices, all of which acting, interacting, and evolving according to a limited set of spatial "eco-laws". In this context, this paper presents a reference architecture to uniformly frame ecosystem concepts, surveys and critically analyzes different nature-inspired spatial metaphors to realize the idea, and details our current research agenda concerning the development of service frameworks inspired to the ecological metaphor.

2008 - Pervasive Self-Learning with multi-modal distributed sensors [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Prati, Andrea; Cucchiara, Rita; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Truly ubiquitous computing poses new and significantchallenges. One of the key aspects that will condition theimpact of these new tecnologies is how to obtain a manageablerepresentation of the surrounding environment startingfrom simple sensing capabilities. This will make devicesable to adapt their computing activities on an everchangingenvironment. This paper presents a frameworkto promote unsupervised training processes among differentsensors. This framework allows different sensors to exchangethe needed knowledge to create a model to classifyevents. In particular we developed, as a case study,a multi-modal multi-sensor classification system combiningdata from a camera and a body-worn accelerometer to identifythe user motion state. The body-worn accelerometerlearns a model of the user behavior exploiting the informationcoming from the camera and uses it later on to classifythe user motion in an autonomous way. Experimentsdemonstrate the accuracy of the proposed approach in differentsituations.

2008 - Profile based comparative analysis for AOSE methodologies evaluation [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cernuzzi, Luca Carlo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This study focuses on the analysis and evaluation of agent-oriented methodologies. Different studies have been proposed for the evaluation of agent-oriented methodologies adopting specifics types of evaluation and criteria. The present work proposes to adopt the Profile Analysis technique for comparing evaluations carried out by different authors (perhaps using different evaluation frameworks) with the aim of improving the acceptability of agent-oriented methodologies evaluation in the agent community. To exemplify the proposal, we present the application of the Profile Analysis technique on a case study.

2008 - Supporting Location-Aware Services for Mobile Users with the Whereabouts Diary [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Mamei, Marco; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Modern handheld devices provided with localization capabilities could be used to automatically create a diary of user's whereabouts, and use it as a complement of the user profile in many applications. In this paper we present the Whereabouts diary, an application/service to log the places visited by the user and to label them, in an automatic way, with descriptive semantic information. In particular, Web-retrieved data and the temporal patterns in which places are visited can be used to define such meaningful semantic labels. In this paper, we describe the general idea at the basis of our service and discuss our implementation and the associated experimental results. In addition, we illustrate an application that can fruitfully exploit the whereabouts diary as a supporting service, and discuss areas for future work.

2008 - The LAICA Project: An ad-hoc middleware to support Ambient Intelligence [Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; DE MOLA, Francesco; Ferrari, Luca; Leonardi, Letizia; Quitadamo, Raffaele; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Our everyday environments are going to be disseminated of devices and sensors that exhibit some degree of autonomy and that collaborate to support users in their activities. This envisions a not-so-far future called "Ambient Intelligence", i.e., environments that show a certain degree of intelligence. Useful abstractions for Ambient Intelligence are represented by software agents, since they are autonomous and capable of acting on behalf of their owners. In the context of the LAICA project we have exploited the agent paradigm to model devices and sensors, and have developed an ad-hoc middleware to orchestrate all the involved components. This paper discusses the adoption of agents in Ambient Intelligence, and explains the design and implementation of the middleware.

2007 - A Simple Model and Infrastructure for Context-aware Browsing of the World [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, Gabriella; Rosi, Alberto; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2007 - Agent-Oriented Software Engineering VII [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
L., Padgham; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This book collected revised and expander versions of the papers presented at the 7th workshop on agent-oriented software engineering.

2007 - Autonomic communication learns from nature [Articolo su rivista]
Bicocchi, N.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Autonomic communication focuses on distributed systems and management of network resources at both the infrastructure level and the user level. It is distinct from autonomic computing, which is more oriented toward application software and management of computing resources, although both share the same goals. Autonomic communication research probes into fundamental rethinking of communication, networking, and distributed computing paradigms, to deal with the complexities and dynamics of modern networks. Many researchers, including the authors, are looking to self-organization in nature, such as in colonies of insects for lessons they can apply to self-organizing autonomic communication networks.

2007 - Coordination in the Sensor’s Continuum [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Castelli, Gabriella; Rosi, Alberto; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The imminent mass deployment of pervasive computing technologies, together with the increasing access of participatory web tools, will soon make available an incredible amount of information about the physical and social worlds and their processes. This opens up the possibility of exploiting all such information space for the provisioning of pervasive context-aware services, for facilitating users in gathering information about the world, coordinating with it, and coordinating with each other via the mediation of an information space.In this paper we present our current research work in this direction, in particular with regard to self- organized data aggregation, data representation and access middleware infrastructure. Due to the unpredictable density of such information spaces, we will also outline the continuum abstraction.

2007 - Editorial by the program committee co-chairs [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Di Marzo Serugendo, G.; Martin-Flatin, J. -P.; Jelasity, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2007 - Epoca - Eccellenza nei Processi Organizzativi e nella Corporate Analysis [Spin Off]
Macri', Diego Maria; Vignoli, Matteo; Bisi, Olmes; Bertolotti, Fabiola; Mattarelli, Elisa; Zambonelli, Franco; U., Cantarelli; E., Lodolo; G., Nigro; F., Pavoncelli; V., Poliandri; M., Storchi; P., Veroni
abstract

2007 - Infrastructures for the Environment of Multiagent Systems [Articolo su rivista]
M., Viroli; T., Holvoet; A., Ricci; K., Schelfthout; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The notion of environment is receiving an increasing attention in the development of multiagent applications. This is witnessed by the emergence of a number of infrastructures providing agent designers with useful means to develop the agent environment, and thus to structure an effective multiagent application. In this paper we analyse the role and features of such infrastructures, and survey some relevant examples. We endorse a general viewpoint where the environment of a multiagent system is seen as a set of basic bricks we call environment abstractions, which (i) provide agents with services useful for achieving individual and social goals, and (ii) are supported by some underlying software infrastructure managing their creation and exploitation. Accordingly, we focus the survey on the opportunities that environment infrastructures provide to system designers when developing multiagent applications.

2007 - Journal of Agent-oriented Software Engineering: Member of the Editorial Board [Direzione o Responsabilità Riviste]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2007 - Landslide Monitoring with Sensor Networks: a Case for Autonomic Communication Services [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
A., Rosi; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; A., Manzalini
abstract

Abstract. Wireless sensor networks can be a very useful technology for monitoring remote and hostile environments. In this paper, we firstly report on our experience with landslide monitoring, and analyze the issues and the challenges we had to face in programming and deploying a suitable and useful wireless sensor network infrastructure. Following, we discuss how, within the CASCADAS project, we are contributing to the development of a novel component-based framework to facilitate the design and development of autonomic and situation-aware communication services for the use in modern network scenarios. Such a framework can become a useful tool to facilitate the development of easy-to-deploy, robust, and flexible sensor-network-based monitoring systems and, in particular, of landslide monitoring systems.

2007 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics): Preface [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Padgham, L.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2007 - Middleware for Pervasive Computing: Introduction to the Special Issue [Articolo su rivista]
M., Kumar; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

We introduce the paper to the special issue.

2007 - Middleware for pervasive computing [Articolo su rivista]
Kumar, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2007 - Pervasive Pheromone-Based Interaction with RFID Tags [Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Despite the growing interest in pheromone-based interaction to enforce adaptive and context-awarecoordination, the number of deployed systems exploiting digital pheromones to actually coordinate the activitiesof situated autonomous agents is still very limited. In this paper, we present a simple, low-cost and generalpurposeimplementation of a pheromone-based interaction mechanism for pervasive environments. This isrealized by making use of RFID tags to store digital pheromones, and by having humans or robots spread/sensepheromones by properly writing/reading RFID tags populating the surrounding physical environment. Weexemplify and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach via an application for object-tracking. This applicationallows robots and humans to find "forgotten-somewhere" objects by following pheromones trails associatedwith them. In addition, we sketch further potential applications of our approach in pervasive computingscenarios, discuss related work in the area, and identify future research directions.

2007 - Proceedings of the First International Conference on Self-adaptive and Self-organizing Systems [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
G., Di Marzo; M., Jelasity; J. P., Martin Flatin; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This book represents the proceedings of the first international conference on self-adaptive and self-organizing systems.

2007 - Programming Modular Robots with the TOTA Middleware [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Modular robots represent a perfect application scenario for multiagent coordination. The autonomous modules composing the robot must coordinate their respective activities to enforce a specific global shape or a coherent motion gait. Here we show how the TOTA (“Tuples On The Air”) middleware can be effectively exploited to support agents’ coordination in this context. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples, spread across the robot, to guide the agents’ activities in moving and reshaping the robot. Three simulated examples are presented to support our claims.

2007 - Self-organizing Spatial Regions for Sensor Network Infrastructures [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This paper focuses on sensor networks as shared environmental infrastructures, and presents an approach to enable a sensor network to self-partition itself, at pre-defined energy costs, into spatial regions of nodes characterized by similar patterns of sensed data. Such regions can then be used to aggregate data on a per-region basis and to enable multiple mobile users to extract information at limited and pre-defined costs.

2007 - Self-organizing knowledge networks for pervasive situation-aware services [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Baumgarten, M.; Bicocchi, N.; Kusber, R.; Mulvenna, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Adapting to current context of usage is of fundamental importance for pervasive computing services. As the technology for acquiring contextual information is increasingly available and as it is producing growing amounts of data, there is the need for tools to organize such data before delivering it to services. This produces a sort of "knowledge networks " representing comprehensive knowledge related to a "situation " in an expressive yet manageable way. In this paper, also with the help of a simple case study, we motivate the need for situation-awareness and for knowledge networks, introduce a reference architecture for knowledge networks, and exemplify a prototype implementation thereof. Finally, current and future research directions are discussed.

2007 - Self-organizing services for browsing the world: Challenges and directions [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.
abstract

The imminent mass deployment of pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags, together with the increasing participation of the Web community in feeding geo-located information within tools such as Google Earth, will soon make available an incredible amount of information about the physical and social worlds and their processes. Overall, both the above trends contribute to the forming of a decentralized infrastructure that, by accumulating and making available in a ubiquitous way detailed digital information about the surrounding world, opens up the possibility of conceiving innovative context-aware services for "browsing the world" around us, as well as of enhancing the quality and effectiveness of current ICT services via context-awareness and dynamic personalization. However, this will also introduce a dramatic complexity increase in data and service management, making impossible for humans to stay in the control loop and directly manage the configuration and functioning of these systems, and compulsory calling for unsupervised self-organizing approaches at both the data and the service level. On the one hand, proper self-organizing approaches must be defined for processing and aggregating large amounts of data into a meaningful and manageable "world model" to be made available to services. On the other hand, proper distributed computing models and infrastructures must be defined to enable services to exploit such information to self-organize their distributed and context-aware activities at the best. In this talk, after having introduced my general vision of future pervasive computing scenarios, I try to identify the key research challenges that should be faced towards the effective provisioning of self-organizing and context-aware services in such scenarios, and will sketch some possibly promising research directions currently being investigated within the "Agents and Pervasive Computing Group" of the Universita di Modena e Reggio Emilia. © 2007 IEEE.

2007 - Supporting situation-aware services with virtual macro sensors [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Next-generation communication services will be required to adapt their behavior to the specific characteristics of the physical and social environment in which they will be invoked. The technology to acquire contextual information will be increasingly available, e.g., in the form of highly-pervasive sensor networks infrastructure. Indeed, such infrastructure can lead to the production of overwhelming amounts of information, difficult to be managed and interpreted by services. This calls for proper solutions to enable services to extract meaningful general-purpose data from distributed sensors in a compact way. The approach presented in this paper relies on a simple algorithm to let a sensor network self-organize a virtual partitioning in correspondence of spatial regions characterized by similar sensing patterns, and to let distributed aggregation of sensorial data take place on a per-region basis. This makes it possible for services to gather information about the surrounding world as if it was generated by a limited number of virtual macro sensors, independently of the actual structure and density of the underlying sensing infrastructure.

2007 - The Service Ecosystem: Dynamic Self-Aggregation of Pervasive Communication Services [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Quitadamo, Raffaele; Zambonelli, Franco; Cabri, Giacomo
abstract

The continuous growth in ubiquitous computing andnetwork connectivity in our everyday environmentscalls for a deep rethinking of traditional communicationservice architectures. In pervasive scenarios, manuallyconfiguring communication service/protocols isbecoming mostly unthinkable, due to the highheterogeneity of devices and services, and to thedecentralized and embedded nature of the involvedentities. The next step is towards the“componentization” of communication services, i.e.services implemented and exposed by softwarecomponents, rather than static protocol/service layers.Stack layering is likewise expected to be replaced by thedynamic and flexible aggregation of such components.Canonical software engineering models for componentcomposition and syntactic service interfaces can hardlytackle the openness and dynamicity of such envisionedpervasive communication services. Therefore, thispaper proposes an innovative ecology-inspiredcomposition model for pervasive services. The key ideais to exploit semantics as an overlay for serviceaggregation rather than a mere additional descriptionof a static service.

2007 - Towards Self-organizing Virtual Macro Sensors [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, Nicola; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The future mass deployment of pervasive and dense sensor network infrastructures calls for proper mechanisms to enable extracting general-purpose data from them at limited costs and in a compact way. The approach presented in this paper relies on a simple algorithm to let a sensor network self-organize a virtual partitioning in correspondence of spatial regions characterized by similar sensed patterns, and to let distributed aggregation of sensorial data take place on a per-region basis. This makes it possible to perceive the network as if it were composed of a limited number of virtual macro sensors, a feature which promises to be very suitable for a number of incoming usage scenarios.

2007 - Ubiquitous Browsing of the World [Capitolo/Saggio]
Castelli, Gabriella; Rosi, Alberto; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2007 - Urban Traffic Control with Co-Fields [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Camurri, Marco; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Traffic control can be regarded as a multiagent application in which car-agents and traffic-light-agents need to coordinate with each other to optimize the traffic flow and avoid congestions. Environment abstractions naturally suit this scenario in that agents actions are mainly driven by traffic-related information that are distributed across the environment both at a practical and conceptual level. In this context we present traffic-control mechanisms on the basis of our Co-Fields model and discuss some experimental results we obtained in simulations that validate our proposal

2006 - A Survey of Autonomic Communications [Articolo su rivista]
Dobson, S; Denazis, S; Fernandez, A; Gaiti, D; Gelenbe, E; Massacci, P; Nixon, P; Saffre, F; Schmidt, N; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Autonomic communications seek to improve the ability of network and services to cope with unpredicted change, including changes in topology, load, task, the physical and logical characteristics of the networks that can be accessed, and so forth. Broad-ranging autonomic solutions require designers to account for a range of end-to-end issues affecting programming models, network and contextual modeling and reasoning, decentralised algorithms, trust acquisition and maintenance---issues whose solutions may draw on approaches and results from a surprisingly broad range of disciplines. We survey the current state of autonomic communications research and identify significant emerging trends and techniques.

2006 - ACM TAAS: Member of the Editorial Board [Direzione o Responsabilità Riviste]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2006 - Agent-oriented Software Engineering VI [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
J. P., Muller; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This book contains revised and expanded version of the papers appeared at the sixth international workshop on agent-oriented software engineering.

2006 - Agents and Ambient Intelligence: the LAICA Experience [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
L., Ferrari; Cabri, Giacomo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Ambient intelligence generally refers to scenarios of computationally enriched environments enabling us both to better interact with the physical world and to integrate in the physical world smart functionalities. In this context, multiagent systems are a natural paradigm to develop and deploy dynamic and situation-aware ambient intelligence services.Here we present and discuss our experience in the development of agent-based ambient intelligent services for the city of Reggio Emilia, as performed in the context of the LAICA project.

2006 - Augmenting the Physical Environment Through Embedded Wireless Technologies [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Emerging pervasive computing technologies such as sensor networks and RFID tags can be embedded in our everyday environment to digitally store and elaborate a variety of information about the surrounding. By having application agents access in a dynamic and wireless way such distributed information, it is possible to enforce a notable degree of context-awareness in applications, increase the capabilities of interacting with the physical world, and eventually give a concrete meaning to the abstract concept of agent situatedness. This paper discusses how both sensor networks and RFID tags can be used to that purpose, outlining the respective advantages and drawbacks of these technologies. Then, to ground the discussion, it presents a multiagent application for physical object tracking, facilitating the finding of forgot-somewhere objects in an environment.

2006 - Case studies for self-organization in computer science [Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; R., Menezes; R., Tolksdorf; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Self-organization is bound to greatly affect computer science. The simplicity and yet power of self-organized models will allow researchers to propose efficient solutions to problems never before thought possible to be addressed efficiently. The published works in the field clearly demonstrate the potential of this approach. This paper first reviews a number of interesting self-organization phenomena found in nature, then it discusses their potential applicability in several computer science application scenarios.

2006 - Dealing with adaptive multi-agent organizations in the Gaia methodology [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cernuzzi, Luca Carlo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Changes and adaptations are always necessary after the deployment of a multiagent system (MAS), as well as of any other type of software systems. Some of these changes may be simply perfective and have local impact only. However, adaptive changes to meet changed situations in the operational environment of the MAS may have global impact on the overall design. In this paper, we analyze the issue of continuous design change/adaptation in a MAS organization, and the specific problem of how to properly model/design a MAS so as to make it ready to adaptation. Following, the paper focuses on the Gaia methodology and analyzes - also with the help of an illustrative example - its suitability in supporting and facilitating adaptive changes in MASS organizations, and its advantages and limitations with this regard over a number of different agent-oriented methodologies.

2006 - Engineering Self-organizing Systems, Third International Workshop [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
S., Brueckner; G., Di Marzo; D., Hales; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This book contains revised and expanded versions of the papers presented at the third international workshop on engineering self-organizing systems.

2006 - Field-Based Coordination for Pervasive Multiagent Systems [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

More and more, software systems involve autonomous and distributed software components that have to execute and interact in open and dynamic environments, such as in pervasive, autonomous, and mobile applications. The requirements with respect to dynamics, openness, scalability, and decentralization call for new approaches to software design and development, capable of supporting spontaneous configuration, tolerating partial failures, or arranging adaptive reorganization of the whole system.Inspired by the behaviour of complex natural systems, scientists and engineers have started to adjust their mechanisms and techniques for self-organization and adaption to changing environments. In line with these considerations, Mamei and Zambonelli propose an interaction model inspired by the way masses and particles in our universe move and self-organize according to contextual information represented by gravitational and electromagnetic fields. The key idea is to have the components’ actions driven by computational force fields, generated by the components themselves or by some infrastructures, and propagated across the environment. Together with its supporting middleware infrastructure – available with additional information under http://www.agentgroup.unimore.it – this model can serve as the basis for a general purpose and widely applicable approach for the design and development of adaptive distributed applications.

2006 - Intelligent Person-Centric Services for Smart Environments: 'Where are you?' [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Chris, Nugent; Matthias, Baumgarten; Maurice, Mulvenna; David, Craig; Zambonelli, Franco; Mamei, Marco; Bicocchi, Nicola; Kevin, Curran
abstract

This paper introduces novel techniques for person-centric services in pervasive spaces. These are focused on the support of independent living spaces for people with mild cognitive impairment, for example. We demonstrate from a technical perspective, how such services could be realised based on the emerging concepts of a distributed network of knowledge, facilitating dynamically composable and flexible service provision that engenders service continuity - beyond the home for example.

2006 - Knowledge Networks [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
M., Mulvenna; K., Curran; C., Nugen; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

For future network scenarios to exhibit autonomic behaviour, both networks and application components and services need to be aware of their computational and environmental context, and must tune their activities accordingly. In this position paper, we propose an abstract architecture for knowledge networks that addresses the key issues of how both physical contextual knowledge and social knowledge from the users of communication networks can be used to form a knowledge space in support of autonomic agents dealing with network elements and applications. We discuss that the availability of raw contextual data is not enough to achieve meaningful autonomic behaviours. Rather, contextual information should be properly organised into 'networks of knowledge', to be exploited by both network and application components as the basic 'nervous system' in which situational stimuli reify into digital knowledge, and by means of which components can properly orchestrate their activities in a globally meaningful way. Here we firstly discuss the fundamental role of knowledge networks, and try to sketch what actual form and position such knowledge networks could assume. Then, we analyse some simple scenarios of use, showing how it is possible for the components of an autonomic communication system to build such knowledge networks autonomously; and, at the same time, to exploit them for orchestrating their activities in a type of stigmergy-based knowledge-rich system. Eventually, we sketch a rough research agenda and discuss the relations with other research areas.

2006 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (includeing subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics): Preface [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Brueckner, S.; Di Marzo Serugendo, G.; Hales, D.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2006 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics): Preface [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Muller, J. P.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2006 - Making Tuple Spaces Physical with RFID Tags [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; R., Quaglieri; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a tuple-based distributed memory realized with the use of RFID technology. The key idea - rooted in a more general scenario of pervasive and mobile computing - is that our everyday environments will be soon pervaded by RFID-tagged objects. By accessing in a wireless way the re-writable memory of such RFID tags according to a tuple-based access model, it is possible to enforce mobile and pervasive coordination and improve our interactions with the physical world. An application example is presented to outline the potential of the approach

2006 - Mechanisms of self-organization in pervasive computing [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bicocchi, N.; Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

The mass deployment of sensors and pervasive computing systems expected in the next few years, will require novel approaches to program and gather information from such systems. Suitable approaches will be general purpose, independent of a specific scenario and sensor deployment, and able to adapt autonomically to different scales and to a number of unforeseen circumstances. This paper focuses on the requirements and issues of upcoming pervasive computing scenario, and surveys current research initiatives to deal with them. In particular researches addressing data retrieval and aggregation, macro-programming, and data integration in pervasive computing infrastructures will be detailed. Overall, the paper illustrates our ideas on collecting information from both sensor systems and Web resources and on linking them together in overlay knowledge network offering applications comprehensive and understandable information about their computational environment.

2006 - Message from the program chair and vice chairs [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Conti, M.; Bisdikian, C.; Indulska, J.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2006 - PerCom 2006 special issue [Articolo su rivista]
M., Conti; R., Chatwick; R., Bisiak; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

We introduce a selection of the best papers from the PERCOM 2006 Conference.

2006 - Programming modular robots with the TOTA middleware [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Modular robots represent a perfect application scenario for multiagent coordination. The autonomous modules com- posing the robot must coordinate their respective activities to enforce a specic global shape or a coherent motion gait. Here we show how the TOTA (\Tuples On The Air") mid- dleware can be eectively exploited to support agents' co- ordination in this context. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples, spread across the robot, to guide the agents' activities in moving and reshaping the robot. Three simulated examples are presented to support our claims.

2006 - Self-Maintaining Overlay Data Structures for Pervasive Autonomic Services [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Overlay data structures are a powerful mechanism to provide application components with context-information and to let them interact in dynamic-network scenarios like mobile ad-hoc networks and pervasive computing. These overlays can be propagated across a network in order to support components’ context awareness and coordination activities. We present a modeling framework and some autonomic algorithms to create overlay data structures that are able to self-maintain their intended distribution under a number of circumstances. The paper presents some experiments and performance measures to validate our approach and to show its scalability.

2006 - Self-Management and the Many Facets of ‘Non-self’ [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The difficulties in dealing with increasingly complex information systems that have to operatein dynamic operational environments calls for self-management properties or, more ingeneral, for the integration of “self-*” features (e.g., self-configuration, self-adaptation, selfhealing)in software and information systems.The common perspective of nearly all “self-*” approaches is that of considering humanbeings as “non-self” from the information system perspective (Figure 1-a). Indeed, one of thevery common goals of all approaches is to move humans out-of-the-loop, by makinginformation systems able to perform in an autonomous way all that kind of (costly and oftentoo complex to bear) human activity related to configuring and maintaining informationsystems so as to have them properly working under all conditions. However, beside thiscommon perspective, a number of diverse conceptions co-exist for what should be actuallyconsidered “self” and what, beside humans, “non-self”.

2006 - Self-maintained distributed data structures for field-based coordination in dynamic networks [Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Field-based coordination is a promising approach to orchestrating the activities of components in a widerange of application scenarios. To implement such an approach, one can rely on distributed tuples injected into a network and then propagated to form field-like distributed data structures to be sensed by application components. Moreover, to gain the full benefits from such an approach, it is important to enable the distributed tuples to preserve their structures despite the dynamics of the network. In this paper, we show how a variety of self-maintained distributed tuples for field-based coordination can be easily programmed in the Tuples On The Air (TOTA) middleware. Several examples clarify the approach, and a case study is detailed throughout the paper to ground the discussion. Eventually, performance data are presented to verify the effectiveness of the approach. Copyright

2006 - Self-organizing approaches for large-scale spray multiagent systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Large-scale multiagent systems will be the key software technology driving several future application scenarios. We envision a future in which clouds of microcomputers can be sprayed in an environment to provide, by spontaneously networking with each other, an endlessly range of futuristic applications. Beside this vision, similar kind of large-scale spray multiagent systems will be employed in several other scenarios ranging from ad-hoc networks of embedded and mobile devices to worldwide distributed computing. All of these scenarios present strong commonalities from the application development point of view, and new approaches and methodologies will be likely to apply, to some extent, to all of them. In particular, we argue that the issues related to the design and development of such spray multiagent systems call for novel approaches exploiting self-organization as first-class tools. With this regard, we survey a number of research projects around the world trying to apply self-organization to large-scale multiagent systems. Finally, we attempt at defining a rough research agenda that - in the long run - should integrate these ideas to develop a general and more assessed methodology for large-scale spray multiagent systems crosscutting several application domains.

2006 - The UbiMedic Framework to Support Medical Emergencies by Ubiquitous Computing [Articolo su rivista]
DE MOLA, Francesco; Cabri, Giacomo; N., Muratori; Quitadamo, Raffaele; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This paper investigates the feasibility ofemploying the Software Agent technology in the highlydynamic and variable context of healthcare emergencycoordination and decision-support domain. We introduce thedesign of an agent-based middleware tailored to therequirements of such context and propose a framework,called UbiMedic, for the implementation and deployment ofservices, like monitoring services, communications andremote medical measurements in injured people. From theanalysis of the framework, we are able to identify some of themajor technical requirements it should meet as well aschallenges to be addressed for effective use in commercialapplications. We choose software agents as the key enablingtechnology because they offer a single, general framework inwhich large-scale, distributed real-time decision-supportapplications can be implemented more efficiently.

2006 - The W4 model and infrastructure for contextaware browsing the world [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Castelli, G.; Mamei, .; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2006 - Theory and practice of field-based motion coordination in multiagent systems [Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Enabling and managing coordination activities between autonomous, possibly mobile, computing entities in dynamic computing scenarios challenges traditional approaches to distributed application development and software engineering. This paper specifically focuses on the problem of motion coordination, and proposes field-based coordination as a general framework to model and engineer such coordinated behaviors. The key idea in field-based coordination is to have agents' movements driven by computational force fields, generated by the agents themselves and/or by some infrastructure, and propagated across the environment. This paper shows that field-based approaches enable the definition of adaptive and effective motion coordination schemes, which can be modeled and tested by making use of a dynamical systems formalism, and which can be easily implemented either above existing middleware infrastructures or by making use of novel middleware specifically conceived for field-based coordination.

2006 - Towards Autonomic and Situation-Aware Communication Services: the CASCADAS Vision [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
A., Manzalini; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The complexity of modern networks raises several challenges in the design and development of communication services. The unbearable costs in configuration and management call for autonomic approaches, in which services are able to self-configure and self-adapt their activities without human intervention. The need for ubiquity of service provisioning calls for the capability of services of adapting their behavior depending on the current situation in which they are used. In this paper, after having discussed the need for innovative approaches facilitating the development and execution of autonomic and situation-aware services, we analyze the key features that should underly such a general approach, propose an architecture centered around the abstraction of "autonomic communication elements", and sketch the main research thrusts to be pursued for the realization of the vision

2006 - Towards Self-organizing Knowledge Networks for Smart World Infrastructures [Articolo su rivista]
M., Baumgarten; Bicocchi, Nicola; K., Curran; Mamei, Marco; M. D., Mulvenna; C. D., Nugent; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Current society is witnessing an age of computing ubiquity where the digital world is not longer limited to closed work, home or social environments but increasingly envelops every aspects of private and social life and their surroundings. However, if computing power is to serve us, and the converse is to be denied, then individual components and their rich panoply of services must be able to operate without significant intrusion. To achieve this, such services would require a high degree of supporting knowledge, including knowledge about the social, computational, and physical environments in which they are situated, as well as self-knowledge about their own functioning. While this provides the knowledge with which they can, eventually, manage and configure themselves it does also makes them more self-aware or in short it makes them smarter. However, in order to get ‘smarter’, the environment, its entities and services need some form of properly represented, well correlated and widely accessible repositories, which leads to the concept of knowledge networks which is the focus of this work.

2006 - Uncoupling Coordination: Tuple-based Models for Mobility [Capitolo/Saggio]
Cabri, Giacomo; L., Ferrari; Leonardi, Letizia; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This chapter focuses on tuple-based (Linda-like) coordination models as middleware services for mobile and pervasive computing systems. After having introduced the basic concepts of tuple-based coordination, the chapter discusses the suitability of tuple-based models for mobility and introduces a simple taxonomy of tuple-based middleware models for mobile systems. Then, on the basis of the introduced taxonomy, the chapter presents several proposals – both industrial and academic – that have been made in the area. Eventually, the paper outlines open research issues and promising research directions in the area of tuple-based coordination models for mobile computing systems.

2005 - A study of some multi-agent meta-models [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
C., Bernon; M., Cossentino; M. P., Gleizes; P., Turci; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Several agent-oriented methodologies have been proposed over the last few years. Unlike the object-oriented domain and unfortunately for designers, most of the time, each methodology has its own purposes and few standardization works have been done yet, limiting the impact of agent design on the industrial world. By studying three existing methodologies - ADELFE, Gaia and PASSI - and the concepts related to them, this paper tries to find a means to unify their metamodels. Comparing a certain number of features at the agent or system level (such as the agent structure, its society or organization, its interactions capacities or how agents may be implemented) has enabled us to draw up a first version of a unified meta-model proposed as a first step toward interoperability between agent-oriented methodologies.

2005 - Agent Hell [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, F.; Luck, M.
abstract

2005 - Comparative analysis of agent-oriented methodologies based on assessment profiles [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cernuzzi, L.; Serafini, O.; Sanchez, R.; Chelli, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2005 - Dealing with Adaptive Multiagent Organizations in the Gaia Methodology [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cernuzzi, Luca Carlo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Changes and adaptations are always necessary after the deployment of a multiagent system (MAS), as well as of any other type of software systems. Some of these changes may be simply perfective and have local impact only. However, adaptive changes to meet changed situations in the operational environment of the MAS may have global impact on the overall design. In this paper, we analyze the issue of continuous design change/adaptation in a MAS organization, and the specific problem of how to properly model/design a MAS so as to make it ready to adaptation. Following, the paper focuses on the Gaia methodology and analyzes – also with the help of an illustrative example – its suitability in supporting and facilitating adaptive changes in MASs organizations, and its advantages and limitations with this regard over a number of different agent-oriented methodologies.

2005 - Emergence and control of macro-spatial structures in perturbed cellular automata, and implications for pervasive computing systems [Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; A., Roli; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Predicting the behavior of complex decentralized pervasive computing systems before their deployment in a dynamic environment, as well as being able to influence and control their behavior in a decentralized way, will be of fundamental importance in the near future. In this context, this paper describes the general behavior observed in a large set of asynchronous cellular automata when external perturbations influence the internal activities of cellular automata cells. In particular, we observed that stable macrolevel spatial structures emerge from local interactions among cells, a behavior that does not emerge when cellular antomata are not perturbed. Similar sorts of macrolevel behaviors are likely to emerge in the context of pervasive computing systems and need to be studied, controlled, and possibly fruitfully exploited. On this basis, the paper also reports the results of a set of experiments, showing how it is possible to control, in a decentralized way, the behavior of perturbed cellular automata, to make any desired patterns emerge.

2005 - Engineering Societies in the Agents World V [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
M. P., Gleizes; A., Omicini; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This book contains revised and expanded versions of the papers presented at the fifth international workshop on engineering societies in the agents' world.

2005 - Field-Based Motion Coordination in Pervasive Computing Scenarios [Capitolo/Saggio]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Enabling and ruling coordination activities in mobile computing scenarios challenge traditional approaches to distributed application development and software engineering. This chapter focuses on Distributed Motion Coordination, i.e., the problem of coordinating the movements of a group of "agents" (e.g., mobile devices, users carrying on those devices, mobile robots and sensors) and focuses on the idea of field-based approaches to model and engineer such coordinated behaviors.

2005 - Foreword [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Abachi, H.; Abderazek, M.; Abramson, M.; Ajlouni, N.; Anderson, C.; Arabnia, H. R.; Joshua, R.; Bartz-Beielstein, T.; Bedi, P.; Blackwell, T.; Branke, J.; Di Caro, G.; Castillo, O.; Crone, S. F.; Demetriou, G. A.; Ducatelle, F.; Ekel, P. Ya.; El Baida, R.; Farooq, M.; De La Fuente, D.; Girija, P. N.; Hassan, H.; He, Z.; Holmes, D. E.; Jacquenet, F.; Kato, H.; Lamonica, P. M.; Lee, C.; Li, K. -C.; Li, X.; Liuzzi, R. A.; Matson, E.; McDonald-Maier, K. D.; Melin, P.; Menezes, R.; Mittu, R.; Mun, Y.; Neagu, N.; Ying-Lie, O.; Olivas, J. A.; Pisan, Y.; Ribeiro, E.; Roach, C.; Rybski, P.; Saha, S.; Stahlbock, R.; Toet, A.; Tolksdorf, R.; Ugur, A.; Usmani, Z.; Vasikarla, S.; Wood, A.; Xiong, N.; Zambonelli, F.; Zhang, X.; Zhang, Y.; Zobaa, A. F.
abstract

2005 - Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing: Member of the Editorial Board [Direzione o Responsabilità Riviste]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

2005 - Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence: Preface [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Gleizes, M. -P.; Omicini, A.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2005 - Motion coordination in the Quake 3 Arena environment: A field-based approach [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This paper focuses on the problem of orchestrating the movements of bot agents in the videogame Quake 3 Arena. Since the specific patterns of movement that one may wish to enforce may be various, and serve different purposes (have bots meet somewhere, move in formation, or surrounding human players), a general and flexible approach is required. In this paper we discuss how the Co-Fields coordination model can be effectively exploited to this purpose. The key idea in Co-Fields is to model the agents' environment by means of application-specific computational force fields, leading agents' activities to a globally coordinated and adaptive motion behavior. The Co-Fields model is described both in general terms and in the specific Quake 3 Arena implementation, and several application examples are presented to clarify it. Also, the paper outlines the general applicability of the approach besides the Quake scenario and in areas such as mobile computing and mobile robots.

2005 - Multi-agent systems as computational organizations: The Gaia methodology [Capitolo/Saggio]
Zambonelli, F.; Jennings, N. R.; Wooldridge, M.
abstract

The multi-agent system paradigm introduces a number of new design/development issues when compared with more traditional approaches to software development and calls for the adoption of new software engineering abstractions. To this end, in this chapter, we elaborate on the potential of analyzing and architecting complex multi-agent systems in terms of computational organizations. Specifically, we identify the appropriate organizational abstractions that are central to the analysis and design of such systems, discuss their role and importance, and show how such abstractions are exploited in the context of the Gaia methodology for multiagent systems development. © 2005, Idea Group Inc.

2005 - Pervasive pheromone-based interaction with RFID tags [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Despite the growing interest in pheromone-based interaction to enforce adaptive and context-aware coordination, the number of deployed systems exploiting digital pheromones to coordinate the activities of application agents is very limited. In this paper, we present a real-world, low-cost and general-purpose, implementation of pheromone-based interaction. This is realized by making use of RFID tags to store digital pheromones, and by having humans and robots to spread/sense pheromones by properly writing/reading RFID tags populating the surrounding environments. We exemplify and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach via an application for object-tracking. This application allows robots and humans to find "forgot-somewhere" objects by following pheromones trails associated with them. In addition, we sketch further potential applications of our approach in pervasive computing scenarios.

2005 - Physical Deployment of Digital Pheromones Through RFID Technology [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pheromone-based multiagent interaction has received a growing attention in the past few years. Still, so far, the number of deployed systems exploiting pheromones for coordinating activities of distributed agents/robots situated in physical environments has been very limited. In this context, this paper presents a real-world, low- cost and general-purpose, implementation of pheromone interaction, realized by making use of RFID tags technology. Humans and robots can spread/sense pheromones by properly writing/reading RFID tags that are likely to populate our everyday environments. The proposed solution is tested and evaluated via an application for object-tracking, allowing robots and humans to find "forgot-somewhere" objects. The application works by letting objects spread digital pheromones trails that can be tracked afterwards. The paper presents several experiments to assess the effectiveness of our approach, outlines its limitations, and sketches further potential application scenarios.

2005 - Physical deployment of digital pheromones through RFID technology [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

We describe and evaluate a system for enforcing stigmergic interactions in the physical world by deploying pheromones in RFID tags.

2005 - Process models for agent-based development [Articolo su rivista]
Cernuzzi, Luca Carlo; M., Cossentino; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

A great deal of research in the area of agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) focuses on proposing methodologies for agent systems, i.e., on identifying the guidelines to drive the various phases of agent-based software development and the abstractions to be exploited in these phases. However, very little attention has been paid so far to the engineering process subjacent to the development activity, disciplining the execution of the different phases involved in the software development. In this paper, we focus on process models for software development and put these in relation with current researches in AOSE. First, we introduce the key concepts and issues related to software processes and present the various software process models currently adopted in mainstream software engineering. Then, we survey the characteristics of a number of agent-oriented methodologies, as they pertain to software processes. In particular, for each methodology, we analyze which software process model it (often implicitly) underlies and which phases of the process are covered by it, thus enabling us to identify some key limitations of currently methodology-centered researches. On this basis, we eventually identify and analyze several open issues in the area of software process models for agent-based development, calling for further researches and experiences.

2005 - Programming stigmergic coordination with the TOTA middleware [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Stigmergic coordination has received a growing attention in the past few years. In fact, by decoupling interacting agents via the mediation of an active environment, stigmergy promotes the definition of robust and adaptive multiagent systems. However, beside a large amount of scientific studies, the problem of defining usable and general-purpose tools to program stigmergy-coordinated multiagent systems is still open. In this context, this paper shows how the TOTA middleware can be effectively exploited to support a variety of stigmergy-based coordination activities. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on a simple API for injecting tuple-based information in a network. have it propagate and/or evaporate accordingly to application-specific policies, and have it locally sensed by application agents. Application examples are presented to show that TOTA can promote a simple programming of a variety of different types of stigmergic interactions, in a variety of operational environments.

2005 - Self-Maintaining Overlay Data Structures for Autonomic Distributed Computing [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In our research, we developed a general framework to model and implement overlay data structures in dynamic network environments. Overlay data structures can be defined by means of a couple (C,P). The content C can be an arbitrary data structure representing the information carried on by the data structure. The propagation rule P determines how the overlay data structure should be distributed and propagated across the network. This includes determining the "scope" of the overlay (i.e. the distance at which it should be propagated and possibly the spatial direction of propagation) and how such propagation can be affected by the presence or the absence of other data structures in the system. In addition, the propagation rules can determine how the content should change while it is propagated. Overlay data structure are not necessarily distributed replicas: by assuming different values in different nodes, they can be effectively used to build a distributed overlay data structure expressing some kind of contextual information. In addition, we realized highly scalable, autonomic maintenance mechanisms to let the overlay data structures preserve its intended distribution (C,P) despite network contingencies

2005 - Self-organization in distributed systems engineering: Introduction to the Special Issue [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; O. F., Rana
abstract

This is the short introduction to the special issue.

2005 - Self-organizing spatial shapes in mobile particles: The TOTA approach [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Vasirani, M; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

We present a programming approach to let a multitude of simple mobile computational particles (i.e. sorts of tiny mobile robots) to selforganize their respective locations to assume a coherent global formation (i.e. shape). The problem has a variety of applications in mobile robotics, modular robots, sensor networks, and computational self-assembly. Here we show how the TOTA (Tuples On The Air) middleware can be effectively exploited to enable self-organization of spatial shapes in mobile particles with minimal capabilities. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples, spread across the network, to drive particles' movements and activities. Several experiments are reported showing the effectiveness of the approach.

2005 - Spatial computing: An emerging paradigm for autonomic computing and communication [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Mamei, Marco
abstract

Emerging distributed computing scenarios call for novel autonomic approaches to distributed systems development and management. In this position paper we analyze the distinguishing characteristics of those scenarios, discuss the inadequacy of traditional paradigms, and elaborate on primary role of space in modern distributed computing. In particular, we show that spatial abstractions promise to be basic necessary ingredients for a novel spatial computing paradigm, acting as a unifying framework for autonomic computing and communication. On this base, we propose a preliminary spatial computing stack to frame the key concepts and mechanisms of spatial computing. Eventually, we try to sketch a research agenda in the area.

2005 - Spatial computing: The TOTA approach [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Spatial abstractions promise to be basic necessary ingredients for a novel spatial computing approach to distributed systems development and management, suitable to tackle the complexity of modem distributed computing scenarios and promoting self-organization and self-adaptation. In this paper, we analyze the key concepts underlying spatial computing and show how they can be organized around a sort of spatial computing stack, in which a variety of apparently very diverse mechanisms and approaches can be properly framed. Following, we present our current research work on the TOTA middleware as a representative example of a general-purpose approach to spatial computing. In particular, we discuss how TOTA can be exploited to support the development and execution of self-organizing and self-adaptive spatial computing applications.

2005 - Spray Computers: Explorations in Self-Organization [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; Gleizes, M; Mamei, Marco; Tolksdorf, R.
abstract

We envision a future in which clouds of microcomputerscan be sprayed in an environment to provide, byspontaneously networking with each other, an endlesslyrange of futuristic applications. However, beside thevision, spraying may also act as a powerful metaphorfor a range of other scenarios that are already underformation, from ad-hoc networks of embedded andmobile devices to worldwide distributed computing.After having detailed the different spray computersscenarios and their applications, this paper discussesthe issues related to the design and development ofspray computer applications, issues which call for novelautonomic approaches exploiting self-organization asfirst-class tools. Finally, this paper presents the keyresearch efforts being taken in the area and attempt atdefining a rough research agenda.

2005 - The LAICA Project: Supporting Ambient Intelligence via Agents and Ad-Hoc Middleware [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; L., Ferrari; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Users' environments are going to be disseminated of intelligent devices and sensors that coordinate each other to help users in their activities. This leads to what is called "ambient intelligence", i.e., environments that exhibits a certain degree of intelligence. Software agents are the natural candidates for this kind of task, thanks to their autonomy and the capability to act on behalf of their owners, resulting thus appropriate in the ambient intelligence area. In this position paper, we discuss the use of agents in ambient intelligence, and sketch the relevant aspects of the LAICA project. In particular, we focus on the design of a middleware for ambient intelligence that connects several kinds of agents and other distributed components.

2004 - Agent design from the autonomy perspective [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
M., Cossentino; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The design and development of multiagent systems can take advantage of a 'multi-perspectives' approach to system design, separately focusing and the design and evaluation of one (or of a few) specific features of the system-to-be. In this paper, we introduce the basic concepts underlying the multi-perspectives approach. Then, we take a specific look at agent autonomy and try to sketch a new specific perspective to deal with it.

2004 - Agent hell: A scenario of worst practices [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; M., Luck
abstract

A little confusion goes a long way—too far—with software-based agents. Engineering discipline is the solution.

2004 - Best papers from EUMAS 2003: The 1st European workshop on multi-agent systems [Articolo su rivista]
D'Inverno, M; Sierra, C; Zambonelli, Franco; Luck, M; Willmott, S.
abstract

We introduce the best papers of EUMAS

2004 - Challenges and research directions in agent-oriented software engineering [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; A., Omicini
abstract

Agent-based computing is a promising approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, despite the great deal of research in the area, a number of challenges still need to be faced (i) to make agent-based computing a widely accepted paradigm in software engineering practice, and (ii) to turn agent-oriented software abstractions into practical tools for facing the complexity of modern application areas. In this paper, after a short introduction to the key concepts of agent-based computing ( as they pertain to software engineering), we characterise the emerging key issues in multiagent systems (MASs) engineering. In particular, we show that such issues can be analysed in terms of three different scales of observation'', i.e., in analogy with the scales of observation of physical phenomena, in terms of micro, macro, and meso scales. Based on this characterisation, we discuss, for each scale of observation, what are the peculiar engineering issues arising, the key research challenges to be solved, and the most promising research directions to be explored in the future.

2004 - Co-Fields: A Physically Inspired Approach to Motion Coordination [Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract

This work focuses on the problem of coordinating the movements of autonomous agents in a distributed environment. The term agent can refer not only to software components but also to any autonomous real-world entity with computing and networking capability, such as a PDA, a robot, or a modern car. The goals of these coordinated movements can include letting the agents meet somewhere, distribute themselves according to specific spatial patterns, or simply move in the environment without interfering with each other. To achieve this goal, we take inspiration from the physical world-that is, from the way particles in the universe move and globally self-organize according to the contextual information represented by fields.

2004 - Engineering Self-organizing Systems, First International Workshop [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
G., Di Marzo; A., Karageorgos; O., Rana; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Revised papers of the first ESOA workshop.

2004 - Experiencing AUML in the Gaia methodology [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cernuzzi, L.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

In the last few years a great number of AOSE methodologies have been proposed, some of which centered on organizational aspects to better capture the behavior of agents societies. Those methodologies may be considered very useful for modeling open systems composed of a great number of interacting autonomous agents. Gaia exploits organizational abstractions to provide clear guidelines for the analysis and design of complex and open Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). However, the notation of the Gaia methodology is probably less powerful (and perhaps less acceptable for industry solutions) than others (like AUML). In this perspective, this aims at performing a preliminary exploration towards the potential application of the AUML notation into the Gaia methodology: it explores the above issues using an application example and pays specific attention to the problem of modeling the complexity of open MAS and emergent behaviors.

2004 - Experiments of morphogenesis in swarms of simple mobile robots [Articolo su rivista]
Mamei, Marco; M., Vasirani; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In this paper, we focus on the problem of having a multitude of very simple mobile robots self-organize their relative positions so as to obtain a variety of spatial configurations. The problem has a variety of applications in mobile robotics, modular robots, sensor networks, and computational self-assembly. The approach we investigate in this paper attempts at minimizing the local capability of robots and at verifying how and to what extent a variety of global shapes can be obtained by exploiting simple self-organizing algorithms and emergent behaviors. Several experiments are reported showing the effectiveness of the approach.

2004 - Field-based Motion Coordination In Quake 3 Arena [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Quake 3 Arena (Q3A) belongs to the kind of firstperson shooter computer games. The player controls a character (bot) fighting against other artificial bot agents. The aim of this paper is to present an approach to the problem of coordinating the movements of a set of Q3A bots. The goals of bots’ coordinated movements can be various: letting them to meet somewhere, distribute accordingly to specific spatial patterns, surround an enemy, or simply move in the environment without interfering with each other. To achieve our goal, we take inspiration from the physical world, i.e., from the way particles in our universe move and globally self-organize accordingly to that contextual information which is represented by gravitational and electro-magnetic fields. In our approach, contextual information is expressed in the form of Co-Fields: distributed data structures implementing the field concept. Each agent of the system can generate and propagate across the Q3A environment specific distributed data structures, conveying application-specific information. Agents can locally perceive these data structures and move e.g. following the fields’ gradient.

2004 - Location-based and content-based information access in mobile peer-to-peer computing: The TOTA approach [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Mobile peer-to-peer computing calls for suitable middleware and programming models to provide dynamic access to information and resources in dynamic network environments. In particular, location-based access and content-based access to information appear two very useful mechanisms. Here we present how both these two kinds of information access can be realized via TOTA (Tuples On The Air), a novel middleware that relies on spatially distributed tuples for supporting uncoupled and adaptive interactions between application agents. The TOTA middleware takes care of both propagating tuples across a network on the basis of application-specific rules and of adaptively re-shaping the resulting distributed structures accordingly to changes in the network structures. In particular, the effectiveness of our model will be tested in providing means for both location-based and content-based access to information.

2004 - MAS as complex systems: A view on the role of declarative approaches [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Omicini, A.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

The ever growing complexity of software systems calls for new forms of understanding and conceptual tools. It has been argued that some "Laws of Complexity" exist, which govern the behaviour of complex systems of any sort, from natural to artificial ones. Along this line, in this paper we draw from the most recent findings of evolutionary biology to develop an original view over Multiagent Systems (MAS). A schema for a "layered", hierarchical view of MAS is introduced, aimed at providing computer scientists and engineers with a powerful conceptual framework for MAS observation/modelling/construction. We first introduce the three levels of the hierarchy in general, and then show how they impact on current proposals for methodologies of agentoriented analysis and design. Finally, we exploit the hierarchy to provide an overall organised view over declarative approaches to MAS, by using as a reference those presented in the other contributions in this book. On the one hand, a hierarchical view allows the many different approaches to be distinguished, classified and possibly compared. On the other hand, it makes it possible to reveal the richness and diversity of declarative models and technologies for MAS, as well as to show the multiplicity of ways in which they impact on MAS modelling and engineering.

2004 - Open Directions in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; A., Omicini
abstract

2004 - PE-WASUN'04 - Proceedings of the First ACM International Workshop on Performance Evaluation of Wireless Ad Hoc, Sensor, and Ubiquitous Networks: Foreword [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ould-Khaoua, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2004 - Pattern Formation in Mobile Computational Particles with Minimal Capabilities [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
M., Vasirani; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Over the next decades, MEMS and nano-sensors will be everywhere. In this perspective, we envision the possibility of exploiting these technologies to build sorts of multicellular computational organisms, made up of millions of interacting autonomous computational particles, capable of assembling and dynamically re-assembling themselves into a variety of complex shapes (as the T1000 robot in the Terminator 2 movie). From a software perspective, the critical task is to identify appropriate (self)organization principles and programming methodologies for controlling the overall behavior of such complex systems. In particular, our goal is to study how and to which extent a group of mobile autonomous particles with the only capability of locally interacting with wireless links can be programmed to coordinate their respective movements to create variety of global shapes.

2004 - Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Performance Evaluation of Wireless, Ad-hoc, Sensor, and Actuator Networks [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
M., Ould Khaoua; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Articles for the first PE-WASUN workshop.

2004 - Programming Pervasive and Mobile Computing Applications with the TOTA Middleware [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Pervasive computing calls for suitable middleware and programming models to deal with large software systems dived in dynamic mobile network environments. Here we present the programming model of TOTA (“Tuples On The Air”), a novel middleware for supporting adaptive context-aware activities in pervasive computing scenarios. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples, propagated across a network on the basis of application-specific rules, for both representing contextual information and supporting uncoupled interactions between application components. As shown with the help of a case study scenario, TOTA promotes a simple programming model and can effectively facilitate access to distributed information, navigation in complex networks, and achievement of complex coordination tasks in a fully distributed and adaptive way.

2004 - Role-based Approaches for Agent Development [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; L., Ferrari; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Roles seem to be a suitable concept for the development of agent-based systems. We have compared different approaches based on roles for agent development. This paper illustrates the used evaluation criteria and reports the lesson learned.

2004 - Role-based approaches for engineering interactions in large-scale multi-agent systems [Capitolo/Saggio]
Cabri, Giacomo; L., Ferrari; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This chapter discusses how the concept of role can be exploited in engineering large-scale multi-agent systems, in order to support the development of the applications and to simplify the related tasks. A role can be considered as a stereotype of behavior common to different classes of agents. Role-based approaches can give several advantages, the most important of which is the separation of concerns between different issues (for instance, algorithmic ones and interaction-related ones), which is very useful to simplify the development of large-scale agent-based applications. A survey of different approaches shows the advantages and the peculiarities of introducing roles in agent-based application development. Moreover, we present in detail the BRAIN framework, developed at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, which is an approach based on roles to support agent developers during their work.

2004 - Self-Maintained Distributed Tuples for Field-based Coordination in Dynamic Networks [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Field-based coordination is a very promising approach for a wide range of application scenarios in modern dynamic networks. To implement such an approach, one can rely on distributed tuples injected in a network and propagated to form a distributed data structure to be sensed by application agents. However, to gain the full benefits from such a coordination approach, it is important to enable the distributed tuples to preserve their structures despite the dynamics of the network. In this paper, we show how a variety of self-maintained distributed tuple structures for field-based coordination can be easily programmed in the TOTA middleware. Several examples clarify the approach, and performance data is presented to verify its effectiveness.

2004 - Self-organization in multi agent systems: A middleware approach [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Self-organization in multi agent systems requires two main building blocks: adaptive and uncoupled interaction mechanisms and context-awareness. Here we show how the middleware TOTA (Tuples On The Air) supports self-organization by providing effective abstractions for the above two building-blocks. TOTA relies on spatially distributed tuples for both supporting adaptive and uncoupled interactions between agents, and context-awareness. Agents can inject these tuples in the network, to make available some kind of contextual information and to interact with other agents. Tuples are propagated by the middleware, on the basis of application specific patterns, defining sorts of computational fields, and their intended shape is maintained despite network dynamics, such as topological reconfigurations. Agents can locally sense these fields and rely on them for both acquiring contextual information and carrying on distributed self-organizing coordination activities. Several application examples in different scenarios show the effectiveness of our approach.

2004 - Spatial computing and self-organization [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Here we discuss the role of "space" in modern distributed computing, and analyze how spatial abstractions promise to be basic necessary ingredients for novel approaches, based on self-organization, to engineer distributed systems.

2004 - Spray Computers Frontiers of Self-Organization for Pervasive Computing [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; M., Gleizes; Mamei, Marco; R., Tolksdorf
abstract

We envision a future in which clouds of microcomputers can be sprayed in an environment to provide, by spontaneously networking with each other, an endlessly range of futuristic applications. However, beside the vision, spraying may also act as a powerful metaphor for a range of other scenarios that are already under formation, from ad-hoc networks of embedded and mobile devices to worldwide distributed computing. After having detailed the different spray computers scenarios and their applications, this paper discusses the issues related to the design and development of spray computer applications, issues which call for novel approaches exploiting self-organization and emergent behaviors as first-class tools. Finally, this paper presents the key research efforts being taken in the area and attempt at defining a rough research agenda.

2004 - Spray computers: Frontiers of self-organization [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.; Gleizes, M. -P.; Mamei, M.; Tolksdorf, R.
abstract

The two different approaches to self-organization in spray-computers are discussed. Direct engineering approaches to self-organization aim at defining distributed algorithm to lead a system to a final coherent global state. The method enables engineers to achieve a specific robust self-organized behavior. The reverse engineering approaches to self-configuration aim at achieving complex coordinated behaviors in spray computers by recreating the conditions enabling complex coordinated behaviors. The approach allows to rely on the results from other disciplines to explore a variety of complex coordiantion phenomena to be exploited in spary computers.

2004 - Spray computers: Frontiers of self-organization for pervasive computing [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; M., Gleizes; Mamei, Marco; R., Tolksdorf
abstract

We envision a future in which clouds of microcomputers can be sprayed in an environment to provide, by spontaneously networking with each other, an endlessly range of futuristic applications. However, beside the vision, spraying may also act as a powerful metaphor for scenarios such as ad-hoc networks and P2P computing. In this paper we: detail the different spray computers scenarios and their applications; discuss the issues related to the design and development of spray computer applications, calling for novel approaches exploiting self-organization and emergent behaviors as first-class tools; present the key research efforts being taken in the area; try to define a research agenda.

2004 - Theory and Practice of Field-based Motion Coordination in Multiagent Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Enabling and managing coordination activities between autonomous, possibly mobile, computing entities in dynamic computing scenarios challenges traditional approaches to distributed application development and software engineering. This paper specically focuses on the problem of motion coordination, and proposes eld-based coordination as a general framework to model and engineer such coordinated behaviors. The key idea in eld-based coordination is to have agents' movements driven by computational force elds, generated by the agents themselves and/or by some infrastructure, and propagated across the environment. This paper shows that eld-based approaches enable the denition of adaptive and effective motion coordination schemes, which can be modeled and tested by making use of a dynamical systems formalism, and which can be easily implemented either above existing middleware infrastructures or by making use of novel middleware specically conceived for eld-based coordination.

2004 - Towards a Paradigm Change in Computer Science and Software Engineering [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; H. V. D., Parunak
abstract

In this paper, we identify and analyze a set of characteristics that increasinglydistinguish today’s complex software systems from "traditional" ones. Several examples indifferent areas show that these characteristics are not limited to a few application domains but arewidespread. Then, we discuss how these characteristics are likely to impact dramatically the veryway software systems are modeled and engineered. In particular, we appear to be on the edge of aradical shift of paradigm, about to change our very attitudes in software systems modeling andengineering.

2004 - Virtual visits to cultural heritage supported by web-agents [Articolo su rivista]
M. E., Bonfigli; Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The integration between information technologies and culturalheritage can impact on everyday life, both from the point of view ofinstitutions and of users. The cultural heritage community haverecently been attracted by the chance offered by informationtechnology, and, in particular, by the possibility of making culturalinformation available to a wide range of people. Museums,exhibitions and cultural institutions can now supply new services toaccess cultural information, and this calls for suitable infrastructuresand tools. In such a context, this paper proposes a Web-basedapplication that enables virtual visits to access cultural informationtailored on the basis of user profiles and devices. The application isclosely integrated within the Web; it also permits one group to buildup virtual visits that can be attended by different people interested inthe same subject. The application is based on an infrastructureexploiting innovative technologies such as active proxy servers andmobile agents; it grants a high degree of flexibility and is particularlysuitable for an improved promulgation of cultural information.

2003 - A Survey on Coordination Middleware for XML-Centric Applications [Articolo su rivista]
P., Ciancarini; R., Tolksdorf; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This paper focuses on coordination middleware for distributed applicationsbased on active documents and XML technologies. First, the paperintroduces the main concepts underlying active documents and XML, andidentifies the strict relations between active documents and mobile agents(“document agents”). Then, the paper goes into details about the problemof defining a suitable middleware architecture to support coordination activitiesin applications including active documents and mobile agents, byspecifically focusing on the role played by XML technologies in that context.A simple taxonomy is introduced to characterize coordination middlewarearchitectures depending on the way they exploit XML documents insupporting coordination. The characteristics of several middleware infrastructuresare then surveyed and evaluated, also with the help of a simple example scenario in the area of distributed workflow management. Thisanalysis enables us to identify the advantages and the shortcomings of thedifferent approaches, and the basic requirements of a middleware for XMLcentricapplications.

2003 - A programmable event-based-middleware for pervasive mobile agent organizations [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Gazzotti, M.; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This paper firstly introduces a conceptual framework for the effective design and development of distributed pervasive applications based on mobile agents. The framework, based on the definition of active organizational contexts, promotes an engineered and modular approach to application design by introducing the notion of active organizational contexts. Then, the paper describes the architecture and the implementation of a re-configurable event-based micro-kernel implementing active organizational context, suitable as a supporting middleware for pervasive applications based on mobile agents. An application example in the area of urban traffic control shows the effectiveness of the approach.

2003 - BRAIN: A framework for flexible role-based interactions in multiagent systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Agent-based approaches in application development seem to meet the requirements of adaptability, scalability, decentralization, and flexibility imposed by complex software systems. In open applications, interactions among agents are one of the most important issues that must be faced carefully. In this paper we propose the BRAIN framework, which aims at supporting the different phases of the development of interactions in agent-based applications, relyingon the concept of role to model agent interactions. Roles carrydifferent advantages in modeling interactions and, consequently, in exploiting derived infrastructures to support multiagent systems. Besides the interaction model, the BRAIN framework includesXRole, an XML-based notation to express roles in an interoperableway, and Rolesystem, an interaction infrastructure that implements the proposed model. An application example shows the advantages of our approach in application engineering.

2003 - Co-fields: Towards a unifying approach to the engineering of swarm intelligent systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract

Swarm intelligent systems, in which the paths to problem solving emerge as the result of interactions between simple autonomous components (agents or ants) and between them and their environment, appear very promising to develop robust and flexible software application. However, the variety of swarm-based approaches that have been proposed so far still lacks a common modeling and engineering methodology. In the attempt to overcome this problem, this paper presents a general coordination methodology in which swarm's components are simply driven by abstract computational force fields (Co-Fields), generated either by agents, or by the environment. By having agents be driven in their activities by such fields, globally coordinated behaviors can naturally emerge. Although this model still does not offer a complete engineering methodology, it can provide a unifying abstraction for swarm intelligent systems and it can also be exploited to formalize these systems in terms of dynamical systems whose behavior can be described via differential equations. Several example of swarm systems modeled with Co-Fields are presented to support our thesis.

2003 - Developing Adaptive and Context-aware Applications in Dynamic Networks [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Suitable programming models and associated supporting infrastructures are required to deal with large software systems dived in complex and dynamic network environments. Here, with the aid of a case study scenario, we discuss the inadequacies of current approaches in dealing with such scenarios. Then we sketch the key characteristics of TOTA (Tuples On The Air), as a novel proposal to deal with the above inadequacies. TOTA relies on tuple-based information to be spatially diffused in the network and to be exploited by application agents so as to achieve context-awareness and consequently to effectively coordinate with each other despite the network dynamics.

2003 - Developing Multiagent Systems: the Gaia Methodology [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; N., Jennings; M., Wooldridge
abstract

Systems composed of interacting autonomous agents offer a promising software engineering approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, this multiagent system paradigm introduces a number of new abstractions and design/development issues when compared with more traditional approaches to software development. Accordingly, new analysis and design methodologies, as well as new tools, are needed to effectively engineer such systems. Against this background, the contribution of this article is twofold. First, we synthesize and clarify the key abstractions of agent-based computing as they pertain to agent-oriented software engineering. In particular, we argue that a multiagent system can naturally be viewed and architected as a computational organization, and we identify the appropriate organizational abstractions that are central to the analysis and design of such systems. Second, we detail and extend the Gaia methodology for the analysis and design of multiagent systems. Gaia exploits the aforementioned organizational abstractions to provide clear guidelines for the analysis and design of complex and open software systems. Two representative case studies are introduced to exemplify Gaia's concepts and to show its use and effectiveness in different types of multiagent system.

2003 - Dissipative Cellular Automata as Minimalist Distributed Systems: A Study on Emergent Behaviors [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Roli, A.; Mamei, Marco
abstract

This paper describes the behavior observed in a class of cellular automata that we have defined as "dissipative", i.e., cellular automata for which the external environment can somehow inject "energy" to dynamically influence the evolution of the automata. In this class of cellular automata, we have observed that stable macro-level global structures emerge from local interactions among cells. Since dissipative cellular automata express characteristics strongly resembling those of open distributed systems, we expect that similar sorts of macro-level behaviors are likely to emerge in real world systems of the same nature and need to be studied, controlled, and possibly fruitfully exploited. A preliminary set of experiments reporting two ways of indirectly controlling the behavior of DCA are reported and discussed w.r.t. the possibility of applying similar sort of indirect control on open distributed systems.

2003 - Distributed Motion Coordination with Co-Fields: A Case Study in Urban Traffic Management [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract

Coordinating the activities of distributed autonomous entities challenges traditional approaches to distributed coordination and calls for new paradigms and supporting middleware. This paper focuses on the problem of orchestrating the movements of mobile autonomous agents in a large-scale distributed systems, and proposes an approach that takes inspiration from physics. Our idea is to have the movements of agents driven by force fields, generated by the agents themselves and propagated via some infrastructure. A globally coordinated and self-organized behavior in the agent's movements can then emerge due to the interrelated effects of agents following the shape of the fields and dynamic fields re-shaping. The approach is presented and its effectiveness described with regard to a concrete case study in the area of urban traffic coordination.

2003 - Distributed algorithms and systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2003 - Engineering Societies in the Agents' World III [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
Petta, P.; Tolksdorf, R.; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This book contains revised and expanded versions of the papers presented at the international workshop on engineering societies in the agents' world.

2003 - Implementing Role-based Interactions for Internet Agents [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Large-scale decentralized environments, such as the Internet, achieve advantages in exploiting software agents for applications, thanks to their autonomy in carrying out tasks. In such a scenario, interactions among agents are an issue that must be faced in an appropriate way. In the BRAIN framework interactions among agents are fruitfully modeled on the basis of roles, which define a set of capabilities and expected behavior. This approach achieves several advantages, such as agent-oriented features, separation of concerns and reuse of solutions and experiences. In this paper we propose an interaction infrastructure, called Rolesystem, which relies on the aforementioned role-based interaction model. This infrastructure allows agents to dynamically assume roles and interact accordingly. An application example and comparison with other approaches show the effectiveness of our approach.

2003 - Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (Subseries of Lecture Notes in Computer Science): Preface [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Petta, P.; Tolksdorf, R.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2003 - Location-dependent services for mobile users [Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Several approaches for the provisioning of servicesto mobile users aim at supporting service availability from anyplace and at any time. However, most scenarios also require theenforcement of context-awareness, to dynamically adapt servicesdepending on the context in which they are requested. In thispaper, we focus on the problem of adapting services dependingon the users’ location, whether physical (in space) or logical(within a specific distributed group/application). To this end, wepropose a framework to model users’ location via a multiplicityof local and active service contexts. First, service contextsrepresent the mean to access to services available within aphysical locality. This leads to an intrinsic dependency ofservice provisioning on the users’ physical location. Second, thebehavior of service contexts can be tuned depending on who isrequesting what service. This enables adapting services to thelogical location of users (e.g., a request can lead to differentbehaviors for users belonging to different groups/applications).The paper firstly describes the framework in general terms,showing how it can facilitate the design of distributedapplications involving mobile users as well as mobile agents.Then, it shows how the MARS coordination middleware,implementing service contexts in terms of programmable tuplespaces, can be used to develop and deploy applications andservices coherently with the above framework. A case study isintroduced and discussed through the paper to clarify ourapproach and to show its effectiveness.

2003 - Methodologies and Software Engineering for Agent Systems: the Agent-oriented Software Engineering Handbook [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
F., Bergenti; M. P., Gleizes; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

A collection of papers in the area from leading researchers in the field.

2003 - Preface [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Petta, P.; Tolksdorf, R.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2003 - Programmazione ad Oggetti in Java: dai Fondamenti a Internet [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
Cabri, Giacomo; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Questo libro presenta i principi e le principali tecniche per la programmazione in linguaggio Java, partendo dai fondamenti della programmazione ad oggetti fino ad arrivare alla programmazione per applicazioni Internet e Web. Il volume, che si fonda sull'esperienza pluriennale degli autori nell'ambito dell'insegnamento di tali materie presso la facoltà di Ingegneria, non intende però in alcun modo essere un semplice "manuale" di uso in Java. Esso si pone l'obbiettivo di presentare e chiarire - attraverso il linguaggio Java - concetti fondamentali per il progetto e lo sviluppo di applicazioni software moderne (quali ad esempio i concetti di interazioni client-server, la gestione dei flussi di dati, la programmazione grafica, le interazioni basate su eventi, la gestione delle strutture dati complesse, il multi-threading, la programmazione di rete e dei servizi web). Per questo motivo il libro non presenta i dettagli e le specifiche di tutte le classi di libreria Java ma fornisce, tramite esempi accuratamente selezionati, i concetti che permetteranno poi a chiunque, sfogliando un qualunque manuale specialistico di Java, di gestire qualsiasi libreria di classi Java, per quanto complessa. La destinazione naturale di questo libro è nell'ambito di moduli di informatica per corsi di laurea di primo livello in facoltà a orientamento scientifico-tecnologico, da fruirsi a seguito di un esame di base di fondamenti di informatica. La lettura del libeo infatti richiede una conoscenza pregressa minima di tecniche di programmazione, e nello specifico di tecniche di programmazione in linguaggio C.

2003 - Programming Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing Applications with TOTA Middleware. [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract

Pervasive computing calls for suitable programmingmodels and associated supporting infrastructures todeal with large software systems dived in complex anddynamic network environments. Here, with the aid of acase study scenario, we discuss the inadequacies ofcurrent approaches in dealing with pervasivecomputing applications. Then we present TOTA (TuplesOn The Air): our proposal to solve the aboveinadequacies. TOTA relies on tuple-based informationto be spatially diffused in the network on the basis ofsome application-specific propagation rule, to beexploited by application agents to achieve contextawarenessand to effectively coordinate with each other.Finally related approaches in this area are presented.

2003 - Programming coordinated motion patterns with the TOTA middleware [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract

In this paper, we present TOTA (Tuples On The Air), a novel middleware to coordinate the movements of a large number of autonomous components (i.e. agents) in a ubiquitous computing scenario. The key idea in TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples for both representing contextual information and supporting uncoupled and adaptive interactions between application components. The TOTA middleware takes care both of propagating tuples across a network on the basis of application-specific rules and of adaptively re-shaping the resulting distributed structures accordingly to changes in the network structures. Application agents - via a simple API - can locally sense such distributed structures to achieve context-awareness and to effectively coordinate their movements.

2003 - Role-based interaction infrastructures for Internet agents [Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

With no doubt the Internet will achieve advantages in exploiting software agents for applications, thanks to their autonomy in carrying out tasks. In such a scenario, appropriated methodologies are needed to manage the interactions among agents. The BRAIN framework proposes an interaction model based on roles, each one composed by a set of capabilities and an expected behavior. The achieved advantages are agent-oriented features, separation of concerns and reuse of solutions and experiences. In this paper we present two interaction infrastructures, Rolesystem and RoleX, which rely on the above mentioned role-based interaction model. These infrastructures allow agents to assume roles and to interact. An application example and the comparison with other approaches show the effectiveness of our approach.

2003 - Software Engineering for Large Agent Systems: Research and Practical Issues [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
Fabricio Garcia, A.; Lucena, C.; Zambonelli, Franco; Castro, J; Omicini, A.
abstract

This collects revised and expanded versions of the papers presented at the workshop on software engineering for large-scale agent systems.

2003 - Tuples On The Air: A Middleware for Context-Aware Computing in Dynamic Networks [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract

We present TOTA (“Tuples On The Air”), a novelmiddleware for supporting adaptive context-awareapplication in dynamic network scenarios. The key ideain TOTA is to rely on spatially distributed tuples forboth representing contextual information andsupporting uncoupled and adaptive interactionsbetween application components. The middlewarepropagates tuples across a network on the basis ofapplication-specific patterns and adaptively re-shapesthe resulting distributed structures accordingly tochanges in the network scenario. Applicationcomponents can locally “sense” these structures andexploit them to acquire contextual information andcarry on complex coordination activities in an adaptiveway. Several examples show the effectiveness of theTOTA approach.

2003 - What can cellular automata tell us about behavior of large multi-agent systems? [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Mamei, Marco; A., Roli
abstract

This paper describes the behavior observed in a class of cellular automata that we have defined as dissipative, i.e., cellular automata for which the external environment can somehow inject energy to dynamically influence the evolution of the automata. In this class of cellular automata, we have observed that stable macro-level global structures emerge from local interactions among cells. Since dissipative cellular automata express characteristics strongly resembling those of open multi-agent systems, we expect that similar sorts of macro-level behaviors are likely to emerge in multiagent systems and need to be studied, controlled, and possibly fruitfully exploited. A preliminary set of experiments reporting two ways of indirectly controlling the behavior of dissipative cellular automata are reported and discussed w.r.t. the possibility of applying similar sort of indirect control on large multi-agent systems.

2002 - A Physically Grounded Approach to Coordinate Movements in a Team [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract

Focuses on the problem of coordinating the movements of a cooperative team in an environment, and proposes an approach that takes inspiration from the laws of physics. The idea is to have the movements of team members driven by abstract force fields, generated by team members themselves and propagated via some embedded infrastructure. A globally coordinated and self-organized behavior in team members' movements emerges due to the interrelated effects of team members following the shape of the fields and of dynamic fields re-shaping. A case study in the area of warehouse management is introduced to exemplify the proposed approach.

2002 - Abstractions and infrastructures for the design and development of mobile agent organizations [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Internet applications can take advantage of a paradigm based on autonomous and mobile agents. However, suitable abstractions and infrastructures are required for the effective engineering of such applications. In this paper, we argue that a conceptual framework for context-dependent coordination, supported by an infrastructure based on programmable media, can promote a modular and easy to manage approach to the design and development of mobile agent applications in terms of computational organizations. The MARS coordination infrastructure is presented as an implementation of a coordination infrastructure promoting context-dependent coordination. A case study in the area of workflow management is introduced to clarify the concepts presented.

2002 - Cooperative information agents: Best papers of CIA 2001 - Guest editors' introduction [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Klusch, M.; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Here we introduce the special issue of CIA on Cooperative Information Agents.

2002 - Coordination Middleware for XML-Centric Applications [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ciancarini, P.; Tolksdorf, R.; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This paper analyses the possible approaches to coordinate documents and processes by using XML as a coordination language.

2002 - Emergence of macro spatial structures in dissipative cellular automata [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Roli, A.; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This paper presents a new class of cellular automata, namely dissipative cellular automata, that exhibit peculiar emergent behaviors with potentially interesting applications.

2002 - Engineering mobile agent applications via context-dependent coordination [Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The design and development of Internet applications requiring dynamic and possibly mobile access to Internet resources can take advantage of an approach based on autonomous mobile agents. However, mobility introduces peculiar issues related to the modeling and management of the agents' coordination activities. This paper introduces context-dependent coordination as a framework for the design and development of Internet applications based on mobile agents, and shows how it can be supported by a proper coordination infrastructure. Context-dependent coordination is centered on the notion of programmable coordination media, as the software abstraction via which an agent in an Internet site can access to local resources and coordinate with local agents. Programmability stems from the fact that the behavior of the media can be fully configured to influence agents' coordination activities. This enables local administrators to configure coordination media so as to enact site-dependent coordination policies, and mobile agents to configure the accessed coordination media to obtain an application-dependent behavior of the media themselves. Several application examples shows that exploiting context-dependent coordination promotes a clear separation of concern in design and development, and can make applications more modular and easier to be maintained. The MARS system is assumed as an exemplar coordination infrastructure to clarify the concepts expressed and to show their actual implementation.

2002 - From Design to Intention: Signs of a Revolution [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Van Dike Parunak, H.
abstract

We are on the edge of a revolutionary shift of paradigm, pioneered by the multi-agent systems community, and likely to change our very attitudes in software systems modeling and engineering.

2002 - MOMIS: Exploiting agents to support information integration [Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; Guerra, Francesco; Vincini, Maurizio; Bergamaschi, Sonia; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Information overloading introduced by the large amount of data that is spread over the Internet must be faced in an appropriate way. The dynamism and the uncertainty of the Internet, along with the heterogeneity of the sources of information are the two main challenges for today's technologies related to information management. In the area of information integration, this paper proposes an approach based on mobile software agents integrated in the MOMIS (Mediator envirOnment for Multiple Information Sources) infrastructure, which enables semi-automatic information integration to deal with the integration and query of multiple, heterogeneous information sources (relational, object, XML and semi-structured sources). The exploitation of mobile agents in MOMIS can significantly increase the flexibility of the system. In fact, their characteristics of autonomy and adaptability well suit the distributed and open environments, such as the Internet. The aim of this paper is to show the advantages of the introduction in the MOMIS infrastructure of intelligent and mobile software agents for the autonomous management and coordination of integration and query processing over heterogeneous data sources.

2002 - Modeling Role-based Interactions for Agents [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Software agents, thanks to their autonomy in carryingout tasks, are fruitfully exploited in large-scaledistributed environments, such as the Internet. In such ascenario, interactions among agents are an issue thatmust be faced in an appropriate way. This paperproposes an interaction model based on roles, being arole a set of capabilities and an expected behavior.Modeling interactions by roles can simplify the designof the agent-based applications. A notation based onXML is adopted to support the definition and theexploitation of roles at different phases of theapplication development. Finally, an applicationexample shows the effectiveness of the approach.

2002 - Separation of Concerns in Agent Applications by Roles [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

In the development of agent applications, interactions are an important issue, which must be faced with appropriate methodologies and tools. A separation of concerns between the agents and their interaction needs is helpful in the designing and the implementation phases of the life cycle. In this paper we propose XRole, a system that helps in dealing with interactions. It is based on the definition of roles, which are intended as intermediaries between the application needs and the environment needs. XRole is realized by exploiting the interesting features of the XML language. An application example shows the effectiveness of the approach.

2002 - Signs of a Revolution in Computer Science and Software Engineering [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; V., Parunak
abstract

Several characteristics distinguish today's complex software systems from "traditional" ones. Examples in different areas show that these characteristics, already the focus of agent-oriented software en-gineering research, influence many application domains. These char-acteristics will impact how software systems are modeled and engi-neered. We are on the edge of a revolutionary shift of paradigm, pio-neered by the multi-agent systems community, and likely to change our very attitudes in software systems modeling and engineering.

2002 - Software engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems-SELMAS'2002 [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Lucena, C.; Garcia, A.; Castro, J.; Omicini, A.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Objects and agents are abstractions that exhibit points of similarity, but the development of agent-based software poses other challenges to software engineering since software agents are inherently more complex entities. In addition, a large-scale multi-agent system needs to satisfy multiple stringent requirements such as reliability, security, interoperability, scalability, reusability, and maintainability. This workshop brought together researchers and practitioners to discuss the current state and future direction of research in software engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems. A particular interest was to understand those issues in the agent technology that difficult and/or improve the production of large-scale distributed systems.

2002 - The Cloak of Invisibility: Challenges and Applications [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; Mamei, Marco
abstract

Is it possible to create a cloak of invisibility—a flexible artifact that canmake anything inside it invisible and preserve invisibility despite mobilityand deformation? Exploring the algorithmic and technologicalchallenges involved reveals tantalizing information.

2002 - XRole: XML Roles for Agent Interaction [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Engineering interactions is a very importantissue in the design and development of Internetapplications. The wideness, the opennessand the uncertainty of the Internet environmentcall for appropriate methodologies. Inthis paper we propose XRole, a system thathelps in dealing with such a kind of interactionsin a modular and effective way. XRole isbased on the definition of roles, intended asintermediaries between the application needsand the environment needs. XRole is implementedexploiting the XML language. An applicationexample in the agent-negotiationarea shows the effectiveness of the approach.

2001 - Cooperative Information Agents, Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
Klusch, M.; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Proceedings of the international workshop on cooperative information agents.

2001 - Cooperative information agents V: 5th international workshop, CIA 2001 Modena, Italy, september 6-8, 2001 proceedings [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Klusch, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2001 - Coordination infrastructures for mobile agents [Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The mobile agent technology is gaining more and more interest in the distributed systems community. In this context, suitable coordination models are needed to handle the coordination, both among mobile agents and between agents and Internet resources. This paper presents two coordination infrastructures that follow two different coordination models: Aglets, based on the message-passing coordination model, and Mobile Agent Reactive Spaces (MARS), based on the Linda-like one. These two approaches are compared in detail, and a mobile-agent application in the area of auction-based negotiation is used to evaluate the pros and cans of the Aglets and MARS solutions in a concrete field. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

2001 - Coordination of Internet Agents: Models, Technologies, and Applications [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
Omicini, A.; Zambonelli, Franco; Klusch, M.; Tolksdorf, R.
abstract

A collection of original papers on the theme of coordination for Internet agents.

2001 - Deadlock-free incremental replay of message-passing programs [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco; Netzer, Rhb
abstract

To support incremental replay of message-passing applications. processes must periodically checkpoint and the content of some messages must be logged, to break dependencies of the current slate of the execution on past events. This paper shows that known adaptive logging algorithms are likely to introduce deadlocks in replay, and we introduce a new algorithm that: (i) prevents deadlocks in replay and (ii) enables the tuning of its behavior to meet specific user needs.

2001 - Developing Mobile Agent Organizations: A Case Study in Digital Tourism [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Mobile agents are a useful paradigm for the development of complex Internet applications. However, the effective development of mobile agent applications requires suitable models and infrastructures. This paper proposes an organizational approach to the design and development of mobile agent applications and describes an infrastructure designed to support such approach. The approach models the Internet as a multiplicity of local and active organizational contexts, intended as the places where coordination activities of application agents occur and are ruled. The MARS coordination infrastructure supports the development of mobile agent applications by implementing organizational contexts in terms of programmable tuple spaces. An application example related to the use of mobile agents to access and organize tourist information is introduced and discussed through the paper to clarify our approach and to show its effectiveness.

2001 - Engineering Mobile-Agent Applications via Context-dependent Coordination [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Mobility introduces peculiar coordination problems in agent-based Internet applications. First, it suggests the exploitation of an infrastructure based on a multiplicity of local interaction spaces. Second, it may require coordination activities to be adapted both to the characteristics of the execution environment where they occur and to the needs of the application to which the coordinating agents belong. This paper introduces the concept of context-dependent coordination based on programmable interaction spaces. On the one hand, interaction spaces associated to different execution environments may be independently programmed so as to lead to differentiated, environment-dependent, behaviors. On the other hand, agents can program the interaction spaces of the visited execution environments to obtain an application-dependent behavior of the interaction spaces themselves. Several examples show how an infrastructure for context-dependent coordination can be exploited to simplify the design of Internet applications based on mobile agents. In addition, the MARS coordination infrastructure is presented as an example of a system in which the concept of context-dependent coordination has found a clean and efficient implementation.

2001 - Engineering infrastructures for mobile organizations [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Mamei, Marco; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Mobile application components can be effectively and uniformly modeled in terms of autonomous agents moving across different contexts during execution. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual framework based on the definition of programmable organizational contexts, which can promote an engineered approach to application design and that, if is supported by a proper programmable coordination infrastructure, can make applications more modular and easy to maintain. On this base, the paper analyses several issues related to the implementation of programmable coordination infrastructures for mobility. In addition, the paper introduces a preliminary proposal for the modeling of programmable coordination infrastructures in terms of a general-purpose event-based infrastructure. Finally, the paper sketches open issues and promising research directions.

2001 - Mobile Agent Coordination for Distributed Network Management [Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Mobile agents are a promising technology to face the problems raised by the increasing complexity and size of today networks. In particular, in the area of network management, mobile agents can lead to a fully distributed paradigm, which can overcome the limitation of the traditional centralised approaches. A basic requirement for the management of a complex network is to define high-level and flexible models to coordinate the accesses to the resources - data and services - provided by the network nodes. On this base, the paper describes the MARS coordination architecture for mobile agents. MARS is based on the definition of programmable tuple spaces associated to the network nodes: mobile agents can access to the local resources and services via the tuple space, thus adopting a standard and high-level interface. The network administrator - via mobile agents - can dynamically program the behaviour of the tuple space in response to the agents accesses, thus leading to a flexible network model. Several examples show the effectiveness of the MARS approach in supporting network management activities.

2001 - Mobile Devices to Assist Cultural Visits [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bonfigli, E.; Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Traditional visits to environments interesting from a cultural point of view are based on technologies that do not permit flexibility and modification to the visit itself on the basis of the visitors’ profile. Software agents running on personal mobile devices can overcome such limitations and lead to personalised visits. The innovative technology based on mobile agents seems to well fit this scenario, where the agents on the mobile devices can interact with fixed HW/SW infrastructures. This paper proposes the reuse of several concepts from the mobile agent technology in the design of distributed applications based on mobile devices. In particular, coordination issues are addressed, and reactive tuple spaces are proposed as coordination means: thanks to their openness and flexibility, they well suit a scenario composed by mobile entities.

2001 - Organisational abstractions for the analysis and design of multi-agent systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.; Jennings, N. R.; Wooldridge, M.
abstract

The architecture of a multi-agent system can naturally be viewed as a computational organisation. For this reason, we believe organisational abstractions should play a central role in the analysis and design of such systems. To this end, the concepts of agent roles and role models are increasingly being used to specify and design multi-agent systems. However, this is not the full picture. In this paper we introduce three additional organisational concepts-organisational rules, organisational structures, and organisational patterns-that we believe are necessary for the complete specification of computational organisations.We view the introduction of these concepts as a step towards a comprehensive methodology for agent-oriented systems. © 2001 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

2001 - Organizational Rules as an Abstraction for the Analysis and Design of Multi-agent Systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Jennings N., R; Wooldridge, M.
abstract

A new methodology for the analysis and design of multiagent systems, based on the central concepts of organizations and organizational rules.

2001 - Parallel object allocation via user-specified directives: A case study in traffic simulation [Articolo su rivista]
A., Corradi; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Predefined and automatic approaches to allocation cannot always achieve satisfactory results, due to the very different behaviours in the dynamic need of resources of parallel applications. This paper presents the approach adopted in the Parallel Objects (PO) environment to let users drive object allocation in parallel/distributed architectures. A set of high-level directives permits users to specify the allocation needs of application objects; a dynamic load-balancing tool - part of the environment run-time support - uses the user-level allocation directives to tune its behaviour. This paper presents the PO implementation of an application example in the field of traffic simulation. The goal is to show the ease of use and the flexibility of the allocation directives, together with the effectiveness of the approach in improving the performances of dynamic object-oriented parallel applications. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

2001 - Preface [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Klusch, M.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2001 - Supporting information integration with autonomous agents [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Bergamaschi, Sonia; Cabri, Giacomo; Guerra, Francesco; Leonardi, Letizia; Vincini, Maurizio; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The large amount of information that is spread over the Internet is an important resource for all people but also introduces some issues that must be faced. The dynamism and the uncertainty of the Internet, along with the heterogeneity of the sources of information are the two main challanges for the today’s technologies. This paper proposes an approach based on mobile agents integrated in an information integration infrastructure. Mobile agents can significantly improve the design and the development of Internet applications thanks to their characteristics of autonomy and adaptability to open and distributed environments, such as the Internet. MOMIS (Mediator envirOnment for Multiple Information Sources) is an infrastructure for semi-automatic information integrationthat deals with the integration and query of multiple, heterogeneous information sources (relational, object, XML and semi-structured sources). The aim of this paper is to show the advantage of the introduction in the MOMIS infrastructureof intelligent and mobile software agents for the autonomous management and coordination of the integration and query processes over heterogeneous sources.

2001 - Web-Assisted Visits to Cultural Heritage [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The wide access to cultural heritage is gaining more and more interest from the information technology community. Museums, exhibitions and cultural places are becoming enterprises that supply new services to access cultural information, and this calls for suitable infrastructures and tools. In such a context, this paper proposes a distributed application to enable virtual visits, based on an infrastructure exploiting innovative technologies such as active proxy servers and mobile agents. Such application is integrated within the Web and permits to build up virtual visits that can be attended by groups of people interested in the same subject. Such visits are tailored on the basis of users' profiles and devices, and can be enhanced by the availability of distributed services. This grants a high degree of flexibility and autonomy for our application.

2001 - XML dataspaces for the coordination of Internet agents [Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This article presents MARS-X, a programmable coordination architecture for autonomous and mobile Internet agents. In MARS-X, mobile Internet agents coordinate through programmable XML dataspaces, accessed by agents in a Linda-like fashion. Therefore, MARS-X enforces open and uncoupled interactions and, via XML, it offers a high degree of standard interoperability. These properties suit very well the characteristics of both mobile Internet agents and the Internet environment itself lit addition, coordination in MARS-X is made more flexible and secure by the capability of programming the behavior of the XML dataspaces by reaction to the agents' accesses. An application example related to the management of on-line academic courses shows the suitability and effectiveness of the MARS-X architecture.

2000 - A Web Infrastructure for People and Agent Interaction and Collaboration [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Internet pervasive services call for flexible supports to enable a wide degree of collaboration. On the one hand, many people are connected to the Internet and surf the Web not only to retrieve information, but also to carry out several kinds of different tasks via online services. On the other hand, the Internet is likely soon to be populated by software agents that will act on behalf of users, and that are “intelligent” enough to achieve better results without boring their users. In this paper, we present a Web-based modular architecture that permits interaction and collaboration among people and agents, leading to a more fruitful exploitation of the capabilities offered by the Internet. A negotiation application based on auctions is used to show the advantages of the proposed architecture

2000 - Agent for Information Retrieval:Issues of Mobility and Coordination [Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Internet pervasive services call for flexible supportsto enable a wide degree of collaboration. On the onehand, many people are connected to the Internet andsurf the Web not only to retrieve information, but also tocarry out several kinds of different tasks via the on-lineservices. On the other hand, the Internet is likely to besoon populated by software agents that will act in behalfof users, “intelligent” enough to achieve the better resultwithout boring their users. In this paper we present aWeb-based modular architecture that permitsinteraction and collaboration among people and agents,leading to a more fruitful exploitation of the capabilitiesoffered by the Internet. A negotiation application basedon auctions is used to show the advantages of theproposed architecture.

2000 - Auction-based agent negotiation via programmable tuple spaces [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Auctions are proposed as a distributed negotiation mean, particularly useful in multiagent systems where both cooperative and self-interested agents compete for resources and services. The aim of this paper is to show how auction mechanisms on the Internet can be easily implemented by using programmable tuple spaces. Tuple spaces are shared repositories of information that follow the Linda model; the addition of programmability permits to adapt the tuple space behaviour to the application-specific requirements via reactions. In the implementation of auctions, programmable reactivity is exploited to uncouple the actual auction mechanisms from the selling and bidding policies of the attending agents.

2000 - Context-dependency in Internet-agent Coordination [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The design and development of Internet applications can take advantage of a paradigm based on autonomous and mobile agents. However, mobility introduces peculiar coordination problems in multiagent-based Internet applications. First, it suggests the exploitation of an infrastructure based on a multiplicity of local interaction spaces. Second, it may require coordination activities to be adapted both to the characteristics of the execution environment where they occur and to the needs of the application to which the coordinating agents belong. In this context, this paper introduces the concept of context-dependent coordination based on programmable interaction spaces. On the one hand, interaction spaces associated to different execution environments may be independently programmed so as to lead to differentiated, environment-dependent, behaviors. On the other hand, agents can program the interaction spaces of the visited execution environments to obtain an application-dependent behavior of the interaction spaces themselves. Several examples show how a model of context-dependent coordination can be effectively exploited in Internet applications based on mobile agents. In addition, several systems are briefly presented that, to different extent, define a model of context-dependent coordination.

2000 - Coordination and access control in open distributed agent systems: The TuCSoN approach [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cremonini, M; Omicini, A; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Coordination and access control are related issues in open distributed agent systems, being both concerned with governing interaction between agents and resources. In particular, while coordination deals with enabling interaction and making it fruitful, access control is meant to control interaction to make it harmless. We argue that this twofold facet has to be supported by a system in a uniform and decentralised manner. To this end, we describe how the application of the TuCSoN tuple-based coordination model over a hierarchical topology is well-suited in this context. On the one hand, policies can be enforced by means of a single mechanism based on tuples and can be scoped to manage access to groups of distributed resources. On the other hand, agents can interact along a hierarchical infrastructure by applying a standard tuple-based communication template. This makes TuCSoN a single coherent framework for the design and development of Internet-based multiagent systems, which takes coordination as the basis for dealing with network topology and access control in a uniform way.

2000 - Engineering Societies in the Agents' World, First International Workshop [Monografia/Trattato scientifico]
A., Omicini; R., Tolksdorf; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Revised paper of the first ESAW workshop.

2000 - MARS: A Programmable Coordination Architecture for Mobile Agents [Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Mobile agents offer much promise, but agent mobility and Internet openness make coordination more difficult. Mobile Agent Reactive Spaces, a Linda-like coordination architecture with programming features, can handle a heterogeneous network while still allowing simple and flexible application design.

2000 - Mobile-agent coordination models for Internet applications [Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Internet applications face challenges that mobile agents and the adoption of enhanced coordination models may overcome. Each year more applications shift from intranets to the Internet, and Internee-oriented applications become more popular. New design and programming paradigms can help harness the Web's potential. Traditional distributed applications assign a set of processes to a given execution environment that, acting as local-resource managers, cooperate in a network-unaware fashion. In contrast, the mobile-agent paradigm defines applications as consisting of network-aware entities-agents-which. can exhibit mobility by actively changing their execution environment, transferring themselves during execution. The authors propose a taxonomy of possible coordination models for mobile-agent applications, then use their taxonomy to survey and analyze recent mobile-agent coordination proposals, Their case study, which focuses on a Web-based information-retrieval application, helps show that the mobility of application components and the distribution area's breadth can create coordination problems different from those encountered in traditional distributed applications.

2000 - Multiagent Systems Engineering: the Coordination Viewpoint [Capitolo/Saggio]
Ciancarini, P.; Omicini, A.; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

We present the viewpoint of coordination languages on the issue of handling multi agent interactions.

2000 - Parallel Objects Migration: a Fine-Grained Approach to Load Distribution [Articolo su rivista]
A., Corradi; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Migration is a fundamental mechanism for achieving load balancing and locality of references in parallel and distributed applications. This paper presents the migration mechanisms implemented in the Parallel Objects (PO) programming environment, which assumes a fine granularity in allocation and reallocation of objects. In fact, a PO object can dynamically distribute its components onto several nodes depending on its dynamic need for resources, and the migration mechanisms implemented in PO allow object components to migrate independently of each other. This paper describes how the PO environment can exploit the migration mechanisms via an embedded load- balancing policy, possibly driven by user-defined allocation hints, and evaluates the effectiveness of the approach in several application examples.

2000 - Preface [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Omicini, A.; Tolksdorf, R.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

2000 - Ruling agent motion in structured environments [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
M., Cremonini; A., Omicini; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The design and development of cooperative Internet applications based on mobile agents require appropriate modelling of both the physical space where agents roam and the conceptual space of mobile agent interaction. The paper discusses how an open, Internet-based, organisation network can be modelled as a hierarchical collection of locality domains, where agents can dynamically acquire information about resource location and availability according to their permissions. It also analyses the issue of how agent motion can be ruled and constrained within a structured environment by means of an appropriate coordination infrastructure.

2000 - XML Dataspaces for Mobile Agent Coordination [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

This paper presents MARS-X, a programmable coordinationarchitecture for Internet applications based on mobile agents. InMARS-X, derived from the MARS coordination architecture,agents coordinate through programmable XML dataspaces,accessed by agents in a Linda-like fashion. This suits very wellthe characteristics of the Internet environment, because MARS-Xenforces open and uncoupled interactions and offers all theadvantages of XML in terms of standard interoperability. Inaddition, coordination in MARS-X is made more flexible andsecure by the capability of programming the behaviour of theXML dataspaces in reaction to the agents' accesses. Anapplication example related to the management of on-lineacademic courses shows the suitability and the effectiveness ofthe MARS-X architecture.

1999 - A proxy-based framework to support synchronous cooperation on the web [Articolo su rivista]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Owing to its widespread diffusion and ease of use, the Web is an attractive platform to support distributed cooperative work. The paper presents an object-oriented proxy-based framework to support synchronous cooperation on the Web. The framework implements the general-purpose mechanisms of a proxy server. Specific application-dependent functionalities have to be implemented in a module to be installed in the proxy-framework. This leads to the implementation of an extensible proxy-framework, which facilitates the development of specific cooperative services. The paper presents and evaluates several applications enabling different cooperative Web activities, to confirm the effectiveness of our proposal in terms of reusability, usability and performance. Copyright

1999 - Building mobile agent applications in HiMAT [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cremonini, M.; Omicini, A.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

An engineered approach to the design of mobile agent applications requires appropriate abstractions for both the space where agents move and the conceptual space of mobile agent interaction. The paper introduces the HiMAT framework for mobile agent applications, which models the Internet as a collection of hierarchical domains, where programmable coordination media rule mobile agent's interaction within each domain and locally to each node. This provides the designers of mobile agent systems with a single, coherent framework enabling them to effectively deal with network topology, authentication, authorisation and coordination in a uniform way.

1999 - Coordination Technologies for Internet Agents [Articolo su rivista]
P., Ciancarini; A., Omicini; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Since Internet applications are intrinsically interactive and collaborative, the definition and development of an appropriate coordination model, and its integration in forthcoming Internet programming languages, is a key issue to build applications including mobile entities. We sketch the main features that such a model should present. Then, we survey and discuss some coordination models for Internet programming languages, eventually outlining open issues and promising research directions.

1999 - Coordination for Internet Application Development [Articolo su rivista]
A., Omicini; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The adoption of a powerful and expressive coordination model represents a key-point for the effective design and developmentof Internet applications. In this paper, we present the tucson coordination model for Internet applications based on network-aware and mobile agents, and show how the adoption of tucson can positively benefit the design and development of such applications, firstly in general terms, then via a tucson-coordinated sample application.

1999 - Coordination in context: Authentication, authorisation and topology in mobile agent applications [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cremonini, M.; Omicini, A.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

1999 - Deadlock prevention in incremental replay of message-passing programs [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

To support incremental replay of message-passing applications, processes must periodically checkpoint and must log some of the messages. The paper shows that known adaptive logging algorithms are likely to introduce deadlocks in replay and presents a new algorithm that prevents deadlocks and achieves better performance.

1999 - Design and Implementation of a Programmable Coordination Architecture for Mobile Agents [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Reggiani, G.; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The paper describes the design and the Java implementation of a coordination architecture for mobile agents, based on an object oriented Linda-like tuple space model, compliant with the Sun's JavaSpaces specifications. Moreover, unlike Linda and JavaSpaces, the proposed architecture integrates a reactive model: the behaviour of the tuple spaces can be programmed by installing reactions which are triggered by the accesses of mobile agents to the tuple spaces. Reactions can increase the coordination flexibility and ease agent programming as shown via an application example in the network management area

1999 - Diffusive load balancing policies for dynamic applications [Articolo su rivista]
Corradi, A; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

To evaluate a set of local dynamic load-balancing strategies inspired by diffusion and characterized by different scopes of locality, the authors compare the effect of application dynamicity on performance.

1999 - Efficient logging algorithm for incremental replay of message-passing applications [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, Franco; Netzer Robert, H. B.
abstract

To support incremental replay of message-passing applications, processes must periodically checkpoint and the content of some messages must be logged, to break dependencies of the current state of the execution on past events. The paper presents a new adaptive logging algorithm that dynamically decides whether to log a message based on dependencies the incoming message introduces on past events of the execution. The paper discusses the implementation issues of the algorithm and evaluates its performances on several applications, showing how it improves previously known schemes.

1999 - Exploiting biased load information in direct-neighbour load balancing policies [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Massively parallel architectures require distributed load balancing policies based on local load information only. This may sometime limit their effectiveness. The paper presents a class of direct-neighbour load balancing policies that aim to overcome the limits of locality by introducing biases in the load information exchanged between the system nodes. This permits load information to keep into account a more global view of the system. The efficiency of the presented policies is evaluated in dependence of the characteristics of the system load. Experimental results show that the transmission of biased load information provides high efficiency unless the dynamicity of the load becomes too high, in which case it is preferable to exploit non-biased load information. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

1999 - Modelling network topology and mobile agent interaction: an integrated framework [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cremonini, Marco; Omicini, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The HiMAT model is introduced for the design and development of mobile agent applications. HiMAT derives from two models for mobile agents, MA and TuCSoN. By extending and integrating these two models, HiMAT provides a unique, coherent framework enabling mobile agent system designers to effectively deal with topology, authentication, authorization and coordination.

1999 - Multi-agent systems on the internet: Extending the scope of coordination towards security and topology [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cremonini, M.; Omicini, A.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

The Internet is rapidly becoming the privileged environment for today’s Multi-Agent Systems. This introduces new issues in MAS’ design and development, from both a conceptual and a technological viewpoint. In particular, the dichotomy between the openness of the execution environment and the need for secure execution models makes governing agents’ interaction a really complex matter, especially when mobile agents are involved. If coordination is managing the interaction, then the issue of agent coordination is strictly related with the issues of topology (how the space where agents live and possibly move is modelled and represented), authentication (how agents are identified), and authorisation (what agents are allowed to do). To this end, we first discuss the TuCSoN model for the coordination of Internet agents, then show how it can be extended to model the space where agents live and interact cis a hierarchical collection of loccility domains, where programmable coordination media cire exploited to rule agent interaction and to support intelligent agent exploration. This makes TuCSoN result in a single coherent framework for the design and development of Internet-based MAS, which takes coordination as the basis for dealing with network topology, authentication and authorisation in a uniform way.

1999 - Network Management based on Mobile Agents using Programmable Tuple Spaces [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Today networks are rapidly increasing both in size and in complexity, and their management requires new paradigms and new tools. In fact, centralised approaches suffer of several limits with regard to flexibility and scalability. Even traditional distributed solutions do not completely solve the problems. Instead, mobile agents can be exploited to realise a fully distributed, scalable and flexible network management model. In this context, an appropriate coordination model is required to develop effective network management applications. This paper proposes the MARS coordination architecture, based on programmable Linda-like tuple spaces. Tuples can be exploited both to access network resources and to let agents interact. Moreover, the programmability of the tuple spaces increases flexibility and permits the definition of application specific policies to rule the accesses of mobile agents to local network resources and services. This paper shows, by mean of several examples, how MARS can be employed to support network management.

1999 - Supporting Cooperative WWW Browsing: a Proxy-based Approach [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The paper presents a system for synchronous cooperative browsing that permits users within a workgroup to share information and cooperate toward a common goal. The system implementation is based on a Java proxy, to achieve portability without requiring modification neither to browsers nor to servers. In addition, the paper shows that the implemented system defines a general framework for interactive multi-user WWW applications.

1999 - Tuple centres for the coordination of internet agents [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Omicini, Andrea; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The paper presents the TuCSoN coordination model for Internet applications based on network-aware (possibly mobile) agents. The model is based on the notion of tuple centre, an enhanced tuple space whose behaviour can be extended according to the application needs. Every node of a TuCSoN environment provides its local communication space, made up of a multiplicity of independently-programmable tuple centres. This makes it possible to embed global system properties into the space of components' interaction, thus enabling flexible cooperation over space and time between agents, and permitting to easily face many issues critical to Internet applications, such as heterogeneity and dynamicity of the execution environments.

1998 - Analysis and Evaluation of Distributed Checkpoint Algorithms to Avoid Roll-Back Propagation [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Checkpointing is a very well known mechanism to achieve fault tolerance. In distributed applications where processes can checkpoint independently of each other, a local checkpoint is useful for fault tolerance purposes only if it belongs to at least one consistent global checkpoint. In this case, execution can be restarted from it without needing to rollback the execution in the past. The paper exploits a theoreticalframeworkthatfacilitatesthe definition and analysis of distributed checkpoint algorithms to avoid rollback propagation. Several distributed algorithms are presented which avoid roll-back propagation by forcing additional checkpoints in processes. The effectiveness of the algorithms is evaluated in several testbed applications, showing their limited capability of bounding the number of additional checkpoints.

1998 - Co-ordination of mobile information agents in TuCSoN [Articolo su rivista]
Omicini, A; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The increasing need to access and elaborate dynamic and heterogeneous information sources distributed over the Internet calls for new models and paradigms for application design and development. The mobile agent paradigm promotes the design of applications where agents roam through Internet sites to locally access and elaborate information and resources, possibly co-operating with each other. Focuses on mobile agent co-ordination, and presents the TuCSoN co-ordination model for Internet applications based on mobile information agents. TuCSoN exploits a notion of local tuple-based interaction space, called a tuple centre. A tuple centre is a tuple space enhanced with the capability of programming its behaviour in response to communication events. This enables properties to be embedded into the interaction space, and a mobile agent to be designed independently of the peculiarities of the information sources. Several issues critical to Internet applications can then be charged on tuple centres transparently to agents. The effectiveness of the TuCSoN model is first shown by means of an application example in the area of Internet information retrieval, then discussed in the context of workflow management and electronic commerce.

1998 - Distributed checkpoint algorithms to avoid roll-back propagation [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Checkpointing is a very well known mechanism to achieve fault tolerance. In distributed applications, a local checkpoint is useful for fault tolerance purposes only if can belong to at least one consistent global checkpoint and then, execution can be restarted from it without needing to roll back the execution in the past. The paper introduces a theoretical framework that facilitates the definition and the analysis of distributed checkpoint algorithms to avoid roll backpropagation. On this base, several algorithms are presented and evaluated in a set of testbed applications.

1998 - High-level management of allocation in a parallel objects environment [Articolo su rivista]
A., Corradi; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The diffusion of parallel architectures is currently limited by the lack of tools to exploit efficiently all available resources with few programming efforts. This is specially a problem in the allocation area. The paper presents a set of allocation tools (ACL) implemented within an object-oriented parallel programming environment. ACL defines a set of directives that permit users to specify the allocation needs of his/her applications without any knowledge of the architecture details. ACL directives drive the run-time support by tuning its general-purpose behaviour to the specific allocation needs of the applications. The effectiveness of the ACL approach is confirmed by testbed applications. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

1998 - How to coordinate Internet applications based on mobile agents [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The paper surveys the possible coordination models for mobile agent applications and evaluates them in the context of a widely distributed application in the area of WWW information retrieval. The analysis outlines the advantages and the drawbacks of each coordination model and shows how reactivity of the coordination media can provide the degree of flexibility and adaptability required by mobile agent applications

1998 - How to improve local load balancing policies by distorting load information [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.
abstract

The paper focuses on local load balancing policies for massively parallel architectures and introduces a new scheme for load information exchange between neighbor nodes. The idea is to distort the exchanged load information to let the policy keep into account a more global view of the system and overcome the limits of the local scope. The presented scheme has been integrated into two variants of a direct-neighbor policy and evaluated in dependence of the characteristics of the system load. Experimental results show that the transmission of distorted load information provides high efficiency unless the dynamicity of the load becomes too high, in which case it is preferable to exploit non-distorted load information.

1998 - On the effectiveness of different diffusive load balancing policies in dynamic applications [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Corradi, Antonio; Leonardi, L.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

The paper presents and evaluates a set of local dynamic load balancing strategies inspired to diffusion and characterised by different scopes of locality. The paper shows that policies with a very limited scope suit well highly dynamic applications; slowly dynamic applications, instead, can take advantage of diffusion policies with enlarged scope.

1998 - On the effectiveness of distributed checkpoint algorithms for domino-free recovery [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.
abstract

The paper focuses on fault-tolerant distributed computations where processes can take local checkpoints without coordinating with each other. Several distributed online algorithms are presented which avoid rollback propagation by forcing additional local checkpoints in processes. The effectiveness of the algorithms is evaluated in several application examples, showing their limited capability of bounding the number of additional checkpoints.

1998 - Reactive Tuple Spaces for Mobile Agent Coordination [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The paper surveys several coordination models for mobile agent applications and outlines the advantages of uncoupled coordination models based on reactive blackboards. On this base, the paper presents the design and the implementation of the MARS system, a coordination tool for Java-based mobile agents. MARS defines Linda-like tuple spaces that can be programmed to react with specific actions to the accesses made by mobile agents.

1998 - Strategies and protocols for highly parallel Linda servers [Articolo su rivista]
A., Corradi; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The tuple space abstraction is a powerful and general coordination model for parallel and distributed programming, However, this model is based on the abstraction of a global space, difficult to implement in distributed memory parallel systems with high-performance and scalability. The paper discusses the possible distribution strategies to implement a tuple space server and proposes a new replication policy suitable for massively parallel systems. The proposed strategy achieves scalability by organising the system in a hierarchical way and by integrating coherence protocols of limited overhead. Moreover, the chosen organisation encourages the presence of multiple tuple spaces each with a constrained scope. The paper describes and analyses a transputer-based implementation: the hierarchical organisation of the tuple space makes the access time proportional to the locality of the references and bounded by the logarithm of the system size.

1998 - The impact of the coordination model in the design of mobile agent applications [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, G.; Leonardi, L.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

The paper introduces a taxonomy of the possible coordination models for mobile agent applications and evaluates their impact in the design of a widely distributed application in the area of information retrieval. The analysis outlines the advantages of uncoupled coordination models and points out the need for coordination models based on reactive blackboards.

1998 - The impact of the coordination model in the design of mobile agent applications [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

1997 - An object-oriented approach to structured parallel programming [Articolo su rivista]
Corradi, A; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

Several kinds of parallel applications tend to employ regular patterns for communication between and internally to their components. Once the most commonly used patterns-such as pipelines, farms and trees-are identified (both in terms of their components and their communication), an environment can make them available as high-level abstractions to use in writing applications. This can lead to a structured style of parallel programming. The paper shows how this structured approach can be accommodated within an abject-oriented environment: on the one hand, a class library provides the patterns; on the other hand, programmers can define new patterns by exploiting inheritance. Several examples illustrate the approach and show that it can improve the usability of a parallel programming environment without sacrificing efficiency.

1997 - HPO: A programming environment for object-oriented metacomputing [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Corradi, A.; Leonardi, L.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

Metacomputing is an emergent paradigm that makes it possible to distribute applications over a heterogeneous set of computing systems to exploit all available resources. The paper presents the HPO environment for object oriented metacomputing. The HPO programming model is based on the object oriented paradigm and defines architecture independent and portable applications. The HPO support makes it possible to distribute applications over a network of heterogeneous architectures. The paper describes this approach via several examples and evaluates its achieved performances. © 1997 IEEE.

1997 - High-level directives to drive the allocation of parallel object-oriented applications [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Corradi, Antonio; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The paper presents the Abstract Configuration Language (ACL) implemented within the Parallel Objects object-oriented parallel programming environment. ACL defines a set of directives that allow users to specify the allocation needs of his/her application components without being aware of the architectural details. ACL directives drive the allocation decisions of the run-time support, by adapting its general-purpose behaviour to follow applications particular allocation needs. The effectiveness of the ACL approach in increasing the performances of parallel applications is confirmed by a testbed application.

1997 - How to achieve modularity in distributed object allocation [Articolo su rivista]
Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The paper focuses on language constructs for driving the allocation of parallel object-oriented applications onto a target architecture. The paper analyses the issues that arise in the definition of these constructs and presents the solutions adopted in several systems and programming environments, by discussing their capability of enforcing the principle of modularity. Open issues and future directions of research are outlined.

1997 - Integration of automated and user-level tools toward efficient parallel objects allocation [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Corradi, Antonio; Leonardi, L; Zambonelli, F
abstract

Automated allocation tools do not achieve the same efficiency for all kinds of applications. A parallel programming environment should integrate high-level tools to permits users to easily adapt the behaviour of the automated allocation tools to the peculiar application needs. The paper faces this problem and presents a set of high-level directives to specify the allocation needs of the components of parallel applications based on the active object model. The allocation directives can drive the allocation decisions of the automated tools, by tuning their general-purpose behaviour to the peculiar application needs.

1997 - Performance comparison of load balancing policies based on a diffusion scheme [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Corradi, A.; Leonardi, L.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

In the area of load balancing policies for massively parallel architectures, several load balancing policies can be inspired from the idea of diffusion: the paper defines a few basic strategies with different scope of locality and evaluates them depending on the properties of the system load.

1996 - Experience of adaptive replication in distributed file systems [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Cabri, Giacomo; A., Corradi; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

The paper focuses on distributed file systems and presents a system to transparently manage file replication through a network of workstations. The system integrates an adaptive file replication policy that is capable of reacting to changes in the patterns of access to the file system by dynamically creating or deleting replicas. The paper evaluates the efficiency of the system in several situations and shows its effectiveness

1996 - Experiences on porting a Parallel Objects environment from a transputer network to a PVM-based system [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Zambonelli, F.; Pugassi, M.; Leonardi, L.; Scarabottolo, N.
abstract

Parallel Objects is a powerful model for distributed/parallel Object-Oriented programming. Goal of this paper is to present the approach adopted in porting the support of the Parallel Objects environment, originally implemented for a massively parallel architecture, onto the PVM environment, which is nowadays a de-facto standard in the design of distributed applications on heterogeneous networks of computers.

1996 - Object-Oriented Heterogeneous Computing: An Approach Based on Primitives [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Corradi, A.; Leonardi, L.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

1995 - Scalable Tuple space model for structured parallel programming [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Corradi, Antonio; Zambonelli, Franco; Leonardi, Letizia
abstract

The paper proposes and analyzes a scalable model of an associative distributed shared memory for massively parallel architectures. The proposed model is hierarchical and fits the modern style of structured parallel programming. If parallel applications are composed of a set of modules with a well-defined scope of interaction, the proposed model can induce a memory access latency time that only logarithmically increases with the number of nodes. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the model with a transputer-based implementation.

1994 - Dynamic load distribution in massively parallel architectures: The parallel objects example [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Corradi, A.; Leonardi, L.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

The paper presents the mechanisms for dynamic load distribution implemented within the support for the Parallel Objects (PO for short) programming environment. PO applications evolve depending on their dynamic need of resources, enhancing application performance. The goal is to show how dynamic load distribution can be successfully applied on a massively parallel architecture.

1994 - The benefits of migration in a parallel objects programming environment [Relazione in Atti di Convegno]
Ciampolini, A.; Corradi, A.; Leonardi, L.; Zambonelli, F.
abstract

The paper addresses dynamic allocation of objects in a distributed object-oriented (OO for short) programming environment, in particular Parallel Objects (PO for short). Intrinsic dynamicity of OO programming makes it difficult to foresee the behaviour of distributed applications and their consequent need of resources. In the Parallel Objects environment newly created objects are allocated on the basis of the current load; moreover, already allocated objects can migrate to achieve better load balancing. The paper presents the dynamic load balancing implemented in the PO environment, with the goal of showing the benefits of migration compared with the remote creation.

1992 - Load Balancing Strategies for Massively Parallel Architectures [Articolo su rivista]
A., Corradi; Leonardi, Letizia; Zambonelli, Franco
abstract

We show that local load balancing strategies for massively parallel architectures outperforms global strategies based on the diffusion of global load information.

Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

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