Nowadays, having software solutions at one's disposal that enforce autonomy, robustness, flexibility and adaptability of the system to develop is completely necessary. The dynamic agents organizations that auto-adjust themselves to obtain advantages from their environment seems a more than suitable technology to cope with the development of this type of systems. These organizations could appear in emergent or dynamic agent societies, such as grid domains, peer-to-peer networks or other contexts where agents dynamically group together to offer compound services. However, although in the theoretical level technology seems to be able to allow the development of this new kind of systems, to investigate in theories, models, mechanisms, methods and tools to develop systems with reorganization capabilities that provide them with the ability to adapt themselves to environmental changes is still necessary.
The aim of this project is to provide a virtual organization with autonomy capabilities that allow it to have a dynamic response in view of potential changing situations by means of the adaptation or evolution of the organization. In this way, it will be able to detect situations of interest (e.g. operation errors) and to manage them maximising the adaptation flexibility and capacity. The organization adaptation implies, among other aspects, its norms, agreements, commitments and topologic structure. Therefore, the adaptation of the system can be carried out at different granularity levels. At a general level, the fact that environmental changes in any type of system can give rise to the need of certain adaption or reorganization is obvious. However, to determine under which situations the agent or the organization decides to modify its behaviour and to estimate when a partial or a complete change in the current organizational structure is necessary, is extremely difficult. It must be said that the stability of a multi-agent system is a crucial aspect when developing this type of systems. However, a possible reorganization can affect notably to this stability, which makes even more crucial to detect which are the conditions that give rise to the necessity of a system reorganization even at the risk of affecting its stability. Thus, to provide the developer during the system development process with precise measures that ensure that the benefits and usefulness of adapting the system is greater than not doing so is necessary. In this way, the possibility of designing and implementing suitable mechanisms to perform these measurements can be taken into account during the system development process.
The medium-term or long-term evolution of a system of this type is very complex to predict and thus, the use of simulation techniques is suggested. Concretely, the use of Agent-Based Social Simulation (i.e. ABSS) is proposed. ABSS is a research area in charge of obtaining simulations from a changing and complex environment, such application environments of the type of systems that are proposed in this project.
The objective of the present project is to advance and to provide solutions in this area, mainly in the aspects related to the reorganization of dynamic organizations of agents. With this aim the following actions are proposed:
- Definition and implementation of a multi-device support platform that allows the robust and optimised management of virtual organizations that include adaptation mechanisms.
- Development of modelling proposals that allows the definition and design of techniques and methods to reach re-organizational agreements in this type of systems.
- Definition and development of the necessary extensions, both at the methodological and tools levels, to model and develop adaptive organizations.
- Development of semantic description techniques for virtual organizations that provide the information to be used at a micro and macro levels.
- Development of methods and techniques to discover virtual organizations with specific features, together with undesirable situations and their automatic adaptation.
- Study of deliberative models oriented to the reconfiguration of virtual organizations in ubiquitous systems.
- Study and adaptation of the achieved models for their execution in light devices, in addition with their compatibility with wireless connection technologies that are more appropriate for the deployment of this type of systems.
- Study of the existing social simulation techniques and development of models in accordance with the proposed architecture for the reorganization in virtual organizations.
- Implementation of software components that support the above proposals.
- Development of case tools that allow to model virtual organizations and the different reconfiguration deliberative mechanisms proposed.
- Development of a simulation tool based on the Web3D technology to apply and evaluate the developed technology.
- Application and evaluation of the developed technology by means of software demonstrators for real study cases.
Scholarships:
PhD scholarship information at University Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid.
Call for PhD scholarship applications at University Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid.
Application form PhD scholarships at University Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid.