Deliverable 1.1

UbiCore (Core UBIWARE Platform Design)

The core of the UBIWARE platform has to give every resource a possibility to be smart (by connecting a software agent to it), in a sense that it would be able to proactively sense, monitor and control own state, communicate with other components, compose and utilize own and external experiences and functionality for self-diagnostics and self-maintenance. It has to enable the resources to automatically discover each other and to configure a system with complex functionality based on the atomic functionalities of the resources. It has to ensure a predictable and systematic operation of the components and the system as a whole by enforcing that the smart resources act as prescribed by their organizational roles and by maintaining the “global” ontological understanding among the resources. The latter means that a resource A can understand all of (1) the properties and the state of a resource B, (2) the potential and actual behaviors of B, and (3) the business processes in which A and B, and maybe other resources, are jointly involved

The part of the work in this work-package, reported in the first deliverable, aimed at answering the following research questions:

• How the language for roles’ scripts, developed in SmartResource project, has to evolve to enable the full spectrum of possibilities that is found in Agent Programming Languages (APLs) – to become, in addition to other benefits, a Semantic APL?

• How to implement the separation between a role’s capabilities (individual functionality), and the business processes in which this role can be involved (complex functionality)?

Semantic APL (S-APL) has been designed to meet the following requirements:

• Simple model (triples in hierarchical contexts) that allows implementing any feature found in existing APLs.

• Expressive power is even greater than in existing APLs, because of full symmetry (everything is a belief): e.g. rules upon execution can add other rules of any complexity.

• Behavior specification is done using semantic predicates (e.g. implies, existsWhile): formally defined in an ontology, language is extensible with other such predicates.

• Reusable Atomic Behaviors and their parameters are also resources that can (and should) be ontologically modelled.

• So, there is a basis for sharing all 5 ontologies: External world, Mental states of agents, Properties of agents’ bodies (available sensors and actuators), Input properties and Output properties. Therefore, there is a basis for better understanding among agents with a goal of better coordination and collaboration among them.

UbiBlog (Managing Distributed Resource Histories)

In UBIWARE, every resource is represented by a software agent. Among major responsibilities of such an agent is monitoring the condition of the resource and the resource’s interactions with other components of the system and humans. The beliefs storage of the agent will, therefore, naturally include the history of the resource, in a sense “blogged” by the agent. Obviously, the value of such a resource history is not limited to that particular resource. A resource may benefit from the information collected with respect to other resources of the same (or similar) type, e.g. in a situation which it faces for the first time while other may have faced that situation before. Also, mining the data collected and integrated from many resources may result in discovery of some knowledge important at the level of the whole ubiquitous computing system. A scalable solution requires mechanisms for inter-agent information sharing and data mining on integrated information which would allow keeping the resource histories distributed without need to copy those histories to a central repository. On one hand, an agent always needs to query its own beliefs base in order to evaluate the left sides of its behavior rules in order to identify rules that are to be executed. On the other hand, when an agent asks another agent for some information, it, in a sense, queries the belief base of that other agent. Our approach is therefore to design the external querying process so it would be almost the same as if the agent itself would query its belief base to check the conditions for executing a rule. This also means that we plan to use the Semantic Agent Programming Language (S-APL, see the previous chapter) not only as the means for prescribing the agents’ behaviors, but also as the inter-agents communication content language (to be used instead of FIPA-SL or other languages of this type). The advantages of this should be obvious as the symmetry and expressive power in the UBIWARE platform will be maximized. The agents will be able to query each other not only for some facts (present or historical) about the external world (the domain) but also, for example: query if the other agent knows a plan for achieving a certain goal; or query if the other agent knows a rule that should be applied in a particular situation.

SURPAS (Smart Ubiquitous Resource Privacy and Security)

Conventional approaches to manage and control security seem to have reached their limits in new complex environments. These environments are open, dynamic, heterogeneous, distributed, self-managing, collaborative, international, nomadic, ambient, and ubiquitous. New generation middleware such as UBIWARE will significantly advance the industrial automation towards automatic discovery, composition, orchestration, integration, invocation, execution monitoring, and coordination of industrial resources. These advanced automation techniques target physical world objects and thus put security as the core need-to-be-addressed issue. We described our long-term vision for the security and privacy management in such complex environments, SURPAS (Smart Ubiquitous Resource Privacy and Security). It aims at policy-based optimal collecting, composing, configuring and provisioning of security measures in multi-agent systems like UBIWARE. Particularly, we analyzed the security implications of UBIWARE, presented the SURPAS research framework which guides our research towards SURPAS, the SURPAS conceptual semantics and the SURPAS abstract architecture.

COIN (Self-Management, Configurability and Integration)

The need for configurable adaptation has appeared as a result of industrial cases analysis, which disclosed the problems of the static code in process industry. Minor changes in the business logic of information systems lead to maintenance breaks and involve a lot of human resources, particularly programmers for code maintenance, testers, system administrators for giving the access to the running platforms, and deployment, who launch the updated version as a product. The configurability changes the process with the anticipation of possible changes and making them a part of the functionality in the very beginning, thus giving more flexibility to the business process management. Most of the changes now go from the programmer’s level to the level of business process configuration – a descriptive script-based business logic, which can be updated dynamically in a runtime. This allows the business process manager to handle a vast number of situations without annoying the programmers and provide fast changes in response to customers needs. The configurability can be used not only for a product customization, but also for a dynamic, on the fly support and maintenance.

FOR EYE (Context-aware GUI for Integrated Data)

Now, when human becomes very dynamic and proactive resource of a large integration environment with a huge amount of different heterogeneous data, it is quite necessary to provide a technology and tools for easy and handy human information access and manipulation. Semantically enhanced context-dependent multidimensional resource visualization provides an opportunity to create intelligent visual interface that presents relevant information in more suitable and personalized for user form. Context-awareness and intelligence of such interface brings a new feature that gives a possibility for user to get not just raw data, but required information based on a specified context. Proposed resource visualization approach is meant to be used in various visual systems and especially in next-generation human-centric open environments for resource collaboration with enhanced semantic and context-based visual resource browsing. Presented 4i (FOR EYE) technology quite fits the demands of a new generation of integration systems. It is an ensemble of Platform Intelligent GUI Shell and visualization modules – MetaProviders that provide context-dependent representation view of resource data and integration on two levels. These are: information (data) integration of the resources to be visualized; and integration of resource representation views with a handy resource browsing in different dimensions. It can be considered as a new valuable extension of text-based Semantic MediaWiki to Context-based Visual Semantic MediaWiki. In the context of UBIWARE, 4i (FOR EYE) technology is a basis for Human-Resource adaptation.