Requirements for multicast capabilities have been identified in object based distributed systems for a wide range of purposes. This paper describes the design and implementation of a group invocation facility in the Advanced Networked Systems Architecture (ANSA). The design allows the construction of groups of interfaces which may be invoked as a single unit. There are options of fully transpar...

This paper reports work using a coupled agent-based model of land use change and species metacommunity model (FEARLUS-SPOMM) to explore biodiversity incentive mechanisms using adaptive control algorithms. Existing work at the Lancaster Environment Centre has shown that such algorithms can help in analysing the adaptive capabilities of climate-related policy interventions under uncertainty. In p...

This paper gives an overall overview of the AgentSpace framework, a next-generation Java mobile agent system developed on top of the ObjectSpace Voyager system. We first introduce the notion of dynamic and distributed agent-based applications and argue that the AgentSpace features are suitable to support them. The AgentSpace novelties include: flexible and dynamic association between agents, se...

It is a vital behaviour pattern of humans, the most highly developed autonomous agents, to make use of experiences accumulated in the past and to solve new problems in analogy to solutions of old, yet similar problems. This report gives an outline of our work to apply that case-based approach to an arti cial agent in the domain of Robotic Soccer simulation. We enable the online coach of a robot...

“The good news is that evidence can matter. The bad news is that it often does not.”1 If imitation is the sincerest form of fl attery, the clinicians and clinical epidemiologists who promoted evidence-based medicine in the early 1990s should feel fl attered. Evidence-based medicine now has many imitators: from evidence-based nursing,2 dentistry3 and public health4 through to evidence-based soci...

We report the results of an agent-based model to study the strategies that policy makers can apply to prevent the escalation of deviant behaviour in the aftermath of a disaster. Three policies are tested, namely: a reinforcement of the police power; an increase of the information available to the affected population and a combination of both policies. We test the effect of time in the implement...

Recent efforts to design and develop Cloud technologies focus on defining novel methods, policies and mechanisms for efficiently managing Cloud infrastructures. One key challenge potential Cloud customers have before renting resources is to know how their services will behave in a set of resources and the costs involved when growing and shrinking their resource pool. Most of the studies in this...

behaviour orthogonality We claim that our contract and policy concepts support the reasoning about extra-functional behaviour to be orthogonal to functional types. In our architecture we introduce policies and their corresponding software components (activators) as an extra level of indirection; i.e. we do not apply policy implementation components directly but rather via a policy component. Th...

It has become increasingly easy to write Web applications and other distributed programs by orchestrating invocations to remote third-party services. Increasingly, these third-party services themselves invoke other services and so on, making it difficult for the original application developer to anticipate where his/her data will end up. This may lead to privacy breaches or contractual violatio...

The paper proposes an approach for multi-agent simulation of intelligent agent teams’ collaboration and competition. This approach is for representing the complex processes ongoing in different subject domains by using various types of agent teams and their interactions. Teams can be in relations of indifference, antagonistic and non-antagonistic competing or (and) various kinds of cooperation,...