Deliverable 2.1

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 (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

In the core platform that resulted from the research during Year 1, the behavior of an agent is prescribed by a set of behavioral models written in Semantic Agent Programming Language (S-APL). So far, it remained the full responsibility of the designer to ensure the absence of conflicts between different behavior models, e.g. roles, of one agent, as well as conflicts between different agents. During WP1’s Year 2 (the Deliberation phase), the goal is to put more conflict-resolution intelligence into the platform, so that the agent would be able to resolve conflicts dynamically rather than rely on the absence of conflicts. The original plan for Year 2 included the following research questions:

• How to realize organizational policies as restrictions put on the behavior of individual agents?

• What mechanisms are needed for flexibly treating the potential (and likely) conflicts among the behavioral models (roles, policies) used by one agent?

• Is it possible and if yes then how to implements a mechanism so that agents could “see” what other agents are doing, in so creating the basis for coordination through observation in addition to traditional coordination through communication?

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

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 2 (the Integration phase), we work on the question: "How to realize the possibility of querying a set of distributed, autonomous, and, hence, inevitably semantically heterogeneous resource histories as they were one virtual database, i.e. how to collect and integrate needed pieces of information from distributed sources?"

The problem of efficient data sharing, exchange and reuse within complex systems plays a key role for usability of the UBIWARE platform and its commercial success. In this workpackage we introduce a mechanism for distributed data management within the UBIWARE platform which allows platform users to build industrial business solutions

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 2 (the System phase), we work on issues related to configuration of the system as a whole, through distributed decision making by agents representing the system components. WP will answer the following research questions:

• How a component of a system may realize the need for re-configuration of itself of the integral system, i.e. when the previous configuration of one or more components does not seem to work anymore?

• What mechanism are needed for (re-)configuration of the integral system through local decision making of and supported by communication between agents representing components of the system (i.e. with no central decision maker)?

FOR EYE (Context-aware GUI for Integrated Data)

WP5’s Year 2 elaborates on probably the most important part of 4i vision, which can be called “context provision”. Especially when considering a human, presenting information on a resource of interest alone is not sufficient - information on some “neighboring” objects should be included as well, which form the context of the resource. For example, a resource can be presented on a map thus shown in the context of objects which are spatial (geographic) neighbors of it. What is important is that in different decision-making situations, different contexts are relevant: depending on the situation the relevant neighborhood function may be e.g. physical spatial, data-flow connectivity, what-affects-what, similar-type, etc. The ability to determine what type of context in right one for the situation and collecting the information that forms the context of that type for a specific resource is central in 4i vision.

During WP5’s Year 2 (the Context-awareness phase), therefore, the following research questions are to be answered:

• What should be the architecture of MetaProvider-services so that they will be able to effectively retrieve, integrate and deliver the context information both to for presenting to humans (in a visual form) and for agents’ processing (semantic data)?

• What should be the architecture of the Intelligent GUI Shell, so that it will allow situation-dependent selection of MetaProviders (i.e. different types of context) and cross-MetaProvider browsing and integration?

MP2P (Middleware for Peer-to-Peer Discovery)

The objective of this workpackage is the design of mechanisms which will extend the scale of semantic resource discovery in UBIWARE with peer-to-peer discovery. Such mechanisms have to enable an agent:

• To discover agents playing a certain organizational role.

• To discover an agent (or agents) possessing certain needed information.

• To discover resources (through its agents) of certain type or possessing certain properties (e.g. a device in state X, or a web-resource providing some information searched for).

In all cases, existence of a central Directory Facilitator is not assumed, so the discovery is to be performed in peer-to-peer manner. This has at least two goals:

• Improving the survivability of UBIWARE-based systems. P2P is a complementary mechanism which can be utilized in an exception situation where the central Directory Facilitator became for some reason unavailable.

• Discovery across UBIWARE-based systems. There could be several UBIWARE-based agent platforms (applications) started up independently, each having own Directory Facilitator. While JADE (underlying agent framework of UBIWARE) supports communication among agents residing on different platforms, it does not provide for the cross-platform discovery.

The WP research task for the Year 2 (The Discovery phase) is - "Design of a P2P resource discovery infrastructure for UBIWARE, including related inter-agent communication protocols".