Deliverable 1.3

UbiCore (Core UBIWARE Platform Design)

The main objective of the core platform is to ensure a predictable and systematic operation of the components and the system as a whole by:

• enforcing that the smart resources, while might to have own “personal” goals, act as prescribed by the roles they play in a organization and by general organizational policies,

• maintaining the “global” ontological understanding among the resources, meaning that a resource A can understand all of

  • the properties and the state of a resource B,

  • the potential and actual behaviors of B,

  • the business processes in which A and B,

  and maybe other resources, are jointly involved.

During WP1’s Year 1 (the Representation phase), the Semantic Agent Programming Language (S-APL) was developed which is a semantic tool sufficient for describing all of the following: resources’ properties, agents’ behaviors, organizational policies, business processes, ontologies, etc. Having a common language for all those ensures that any type of information in UBIWARE is semantic and facilitates intertwining those: e.g. one can easily prescribe that in a certain business process, if some properties of some resource have some certain values this must lead to some specific action taken by some agent unless prohibited by some organizational (e.g. security) policy

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.

During WP2’s Year 1 (the Sharing phase), needed mechanisms were designed for effective and efficient sharing of information between different agents, e.g. representing different resources. S-APL was used as the communication content language, which has enabled:

• One agent to query another agent for some information, using the query constructs similar to that of SPARQL but with even wider range of possible filtering conditions,

• One agent to inform another agent, i.e. to proactively push some information of any complexity,

• One agent to request another agent to perform some actions, either an atomic behavior or a complex plan involving a set of rules and atomic of complex behaviors.

As to UBIWARE 1.0 platform, the development contribution of WP2 consists of:

• A set of standard S-APL models: Communication.Listener, Communication.Informer, Communication.Follower and Communication.Believer,

• A set of enhancements to the standard RABs MessageSenderBehavior and MessageReceiverBehavior which are used for message exchange between UBIWARE agents ,

• Some modification in the behavior engine to enable implementation of the approach.

SURPAS (Smart Ubiquitous Resource Privacy and Security)

The security is often seen as an add-on feature of a system. However, in many systems (and UBIWARE is one of them), the system remains nothing more but a research prototype, without a real potential of practical use, until an adequate security infrastructure is embedded into it. The main objective of this work package is the design of the SURPAS infrastructure for policy-based optimal collecting, composing, configuring and provisioning of security measures in multi-agent systems like UBIWARE. SURPAS follows the general UBIWARE vision – configuring and adding new functionality to the underlying industrial environment on-the-fly by changing high level declarative descriptions. Regarding security, this means that SURPAS will be able of smoothly including new, and reconfiguring existing, security mechanisms, for the optimal and secure state of the UBIWARE-based system, in response to the dynamically changing environment. The optimal state is always a tradeoff between security and other qualities like performance, functionality, usability, applicability and other.

During WP3’s Year 1 (the Access phase), WP3 developed an infrastructure for semantic access control in UBIWARE, with S-APL used for specification of access control policies. Such policies may prohibit or allow an operation of a certain class to be performed by an agent of a certain class on some resource of a certain class.

As to UBIWARE 1.0 platform, the development contribution of WP3 consists of:

• Introducing into S-APL and the behavior engine the concept of a meta-rule,

• Standard S-APL models Security.SBACReasoner and Communication.Ontology.

COIN (Self-Management, Configurability and Integration)

UBIWARE aims to be a platform that can be applied in different application areas. This implies that the elements of the platform have to be adjustable, could be tuned or configured allowing the platform to run different business scenarios in different business environments. Such flexibility calls for existence of a sophisticated configuration layer of the platform. All building blocks of the UBIWARE platform, i.e. software agents, agent behaviors, resource adapters, etc, become subject to configuration. On the other hand, a flexible system should have a long lifespan. Hence, the platform should allow extensions, component replacements, and component adjustments during the operation time. This work package aims at introducing configurability as a pervasive characteristic of UBIWARE and developing the technology which will systemize and formalize this feature of the platform.

During WP4’s Year 1 (the Component phase), we developed solutions for configurability of basic UBIWARE elements such as resource adapters and Reusable Atomic Behaviors, with S-APL used as the tool for both describing the configuration and for applying it.

As to UBIWARE 1.0 platform, the development contribution of WP4 consists of:

• A set of RABs - TextTableReaderBehavior, SQLReaderBehavior, ExcelReaderBehavior, XmlReaderBehavior, XmlWriterBehavior - as a part of the general approach towards resource adaptation,

• Standard S-APL models Configurability.RABConfigurator.

FOR EYE (Context-aware GUI for Integrated Data)

This workpackage studies dynamic context-aware Agent-to-Human interaction in UBIWARE, and elaborates on a technology which we refer to as 4i (FOR EYE technology). From the UBIWARE point of view, a human interface is just a special case of a resource adapter. We believe, however, that it is unreasonable to embed all the data acquisition, filtering and visualization logic into such an adapter. Instead, external services and application should be effectively utilized. Therefore, the intelligence of a smart interface will be a result of collaboration of multiple agents: the human’s agent, the agents representing resources of interest (those to be monitored or/and controlled), and the agents of various visualization services. This approach makes human interfaces different from other resource adapters and indicates a need for devoted research. 4i technology will enable creation of such smart human interfaces through flexible collaboration of an Intelligent GUI Shell, various visualization modules, which we refer to as MetaProvider-services, and the resources of interest.

During the Project Year 1, the work in this WP developed the general principles of the 4i approach and is aimed at developing an appropriate GUI Shell. The WP development task Task T1.2_w5 for the Year 1 is concentrated on development of a simple MetaProvider for context dependent resource visualization, development of initial GUI-Shell able to communicate with the MetaProvider.