Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Publication
    Separation of concerns in hybrid agent and component system
    Modularising requirements is a classic problem of software engineering; concerns often overlap, requiring multiple dimensions of decomposition to achieve separation. Whenever complete modularity is unachievable, it is important to provide principled approaches to the decoupling of concerns. To this end, this paper discusses the Socially Situated Agent Architecture (SoSAA) - a complete construction methodology, which leverages existing well established research and associated methodologies and frameworks in both the Agent-oriented and Component-based Software Engineering domains. As a software framework, SoSAA is primarily intended to serve as a foundation on which to build agent based applications by promoting separation of concerns in the development of open, heterogeneous, adaptive and distributed systems. While previous work has discussed the design rationale for SoSAA and illustrated its application to the construction of multiagent systems, this paper focuses on the separation of concerns issue. It highlights concerns typically addressed in the development of distributed systems, such as adaptation, concurrency, fault-tolerance. It analyses how a hybrid agent/component integration approach can improve the separation of these concerns by leveraging modularity constructs already available in agent and component systems, and sets clear guidelines on where the different concerns must be addressed within the overall architecture. Finally, this paper provides a first evaluation of the application of our framework by applying well- known metrics to a distributed information retrieval case study, and by discussing how this initial results can be projected to a typical multiagent application developed with the same hybrid approach.
      920Scopus© Citations 2
  • Publication
    Mobile multimedia : reflecting on dynamic service provision
    Delivering multimedia services to roaming subscribers raises significant challenges for content providers. There are a number of reasons for this; however,the principal difficulties arise from the inherent differences between the nature of mobile computing usage, and that of its static counterpart. The harnessing of appropriate contextual elements pertaining to a mobile subscriber at any given time offers significant opportunities for enhancing and customising service delivery. Dynamic content provision is a case in point. The versatile nature of the mobile subscriber offers opportunities for the delivery of content that is most appropriate to the subscriber's prevailing context, and hence is most likely to be welcomed. To succeed in this endeavour requires an innate understanding of the technologies, the mobile usage paradigm and the application domain in question, such that conflicting demands may be reconciled to the subscriber's benefit. In this paper, multimedia-augmented service provision for mobile subscribers is considered in light of the availability of contextual information. In particular, context-aware pre-caching is advocated as a means of maximising the possibilities for delivering context-aware services to mobile subscribers in scenarios of dynamic contexts.
      214Scopus© Citations 1
  • Publication
    From bogtrotting to herding : a UCD perspective
    This is the third year in which a team from University College Dublin has participated in the Multi Agent Contest. This paper describes the system that was created to participate in the contest, along with observations of the team’s experiences in the contest. The system itself was built using the AF-TeleoReactive and AF-AgentSpeak agent programming languages running on the Agent Factory platform. A hybrid control architecture inspired by the SoSAA strategy aided in the separation of concerns between low-level behaviours (such as movement and obstacle evasion) and higher-level planning and strategy.
      622Scopus© Citations 4
  • Publication
    Mobile multimedia : reflecting on dynamic service provision
    Delivering multimedia services to roaming subscribers raises significant challenges for content providers. There are a number of reasons for this; however, the principal difficulties arise from the inherent differences between the nature of mobile computing usage, and that of its static counterpart. The harnessing of appropriate contextual elements pertaining to a mobile subscriber at any given time offers significant opportunities for enhancing and customising service delivery. Dynamic content provision is a case in point. The versatile nature of the mobile subscriber offers opportunities for the delivery of content that is most appropriate to the subscriber's prevailing context, and hence is most likely to be welcomed. To succeed in this endeavour requires an innate understanding of the technologies, the mobile usage paradigm and the application domain in question, such that conflicting demands may be reconciled to the subscriber's benefit. In this paper, multimedia-augmented service provision for mobile subscribers is considered in light of the avail- ability of contextual information. In particular, context-aware precaching is advocated as a means of maximising the possibilities for delivering context- aware services to mobile subscribers in scenarios of dynamic contexts.
      691Scopus© Citations 1
  • Publication
    Sensor Web Interaction
    Ubiquitous sensing fuses the concepts of intelligent systems with ubiquitous computing in the development of novel sensor web applications, whereby the interaction of multiple disparate autonomous artefacts is a key requirement. In this paper, we present SIXTH, which is a middleware infrastructure for Ubiquitous Sensing that facilitates, and supports, the development and deployment of Sensor Web applications. SIXTH has been designed to be extensible, with provisions for user definable data retention policies, custom sensor data representations, and custom sensor node representations, whilst still providing a rich set of default behaviours. Within SIXTH, support is provided for the development and interaction of applications that incorporate both physical and cyber (virtual server side) sensors. With a view to supporting intelligent, in network, interaction policies, whereby sensor nodes must negotiate and coordinate their behaviour, the system has been designed to operate in conjunction with Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME). AFME is a minimised footprint intelligent agent platform designed for resource constrained devices. It is based on the standard Agent Factory platform, which was developed for desktop machines, and is representative of a class of agent systems, which are referred to as Agent Oriented Programming frameworks. The paper discusses a ubiquitous mapping application that was developed using the middleware.
      1096Scopus© Citations 27