Information sharing within or cross enterprise is the core need of each enterprise to fully benefit from the state of the art technologies. On one hand, it allows utilizing the resources efficiently, and on the other hand, it expedites the processes of enterprise. Healthcare information is more complex and has diverse dimensions. Sharing this information by integrating various healthcare information systems is a great challenge. HL7 is renowned healthcare standard that provides specification for standardization of information exchanged among healthcare applications. To make these systems truly interoperable, it provides transportation specification for message exchanges named as web service profiles. This paper discusses the technical details including architecture, design and implementation of web service component that implement HL7 Web Service Basic Profile (HL7 WS-BP). This component is part of the transportation subsystem of the HLH project recently in progress at NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (NUST SEECS), Pakistan.

Disaster management systems are complex applications due to their distributed and decentralized nature. Various components execute in parallel with high need of coordination with each other. In such applications, interaction and communication issues are difficult to model and implement. In this paper, we have proposed agent-based Earthquake Management System (EMS) which is modeled and analyzed using formal approach. Traditionally, such systems undergo through various transformations starting from requirement models and specification to analysis, design and implementation. A variety of formal approaches are available to specify systems for analyzing their structure and behavior; however, there are certain limitations in using these techniques due to their expressiveness and behavior requirements. We have adopted combination of Pi-calculus and Pi-ADL formal languages to model EMS from analysis to design. The formal approach helps to enhance reliability and flexibility of the system by reducing the redundant information. It reduces chances of errors by explicitly mentioning working flow of information. Additionally, a prototype application is presented as proof of concept in EMS context. We have also evaluated our formal specification by using ArchWare and ABC tools; also, comparison of prototype application with major existing techniques is highlighted.

Earthquake is a natural phenomenon which has resisted the major efforts to tackle it. The major problems in earthquake management are inefficient communication, complex interaction as well as lack of coordination and prompt service delivery in advent of earthquake. Software agent based systems are more suitable alternative to the available technologies. In this paper, a formal approach is used in the designing and modeling of an agent-based earthquake management system using pi-calculus. Pi-calculus is justified for this work because of its capability to model concurrent and parallel systems. This approach facilitates in removing redundancy in information flow, low chances of errors in system development as well as understanding the execution paths for generating test cases. The services from the system are expected to be more reliable, autonomous, and adaptive in performing timely relief operations.

Precise information of network topology is important for both network management and network analysis. In this paper we describe an efficient algorithm for discovering the multi-hop IP and MAC layer topology of the network. The proposed algorithm for subnet guessing probes hosts that have high probability of being active. Efficient probing mechanisms are also used to ensure fewer blockages from the devices. Our algorithm only needs SNMP to be configured only on routers, switches and network printers not the end nodes. We have implemented and tested the algorithm at NUST Institute of Information Technology, Pakistan and Communication technologies, Japan and it has accurately discovered the network topology.

Optical burst switching realizes all-optical communication by dividing data transmission system into control plane and data plane. In order to implement control plane two controlling mechanisms such as distributed and centralized control and reservation models have been presented in literature. Both of the architectures have pros and cons associated such as distributed model lacks efficient resource utilization while centralized model is nonscalable. In order to overcome these, a new hybrid control and reservation mechanism has been presented by the authors. The proposed model is based on clustering technique where each cluster consists of cluster head and member nodes. Cluster head performs major functionalities in the network such as path establishment, routing and resource management, fault management, etc., while member nodes perform data switching functionality. In order to implement the architecture, a signaling protocol is also presented. In this paper, we discuss different scenarios required for the implementation of the proposed hybrid model. These scenarios detail the message dialogs exchange between different network nodes and between different software modules during lightpath establishment, data transmission, and connection teardown operations. The goal of efficient resource utilization is achieved through centralized control of network resources while scalability is achieved through dividing the network into multiple domains. Finally, the simulation section shows the mechanism of designing the multidomain architecture, network bandwidth utilization comparison and reduction in end-to-end data transmission latency.

The supply chain plays a vital role in the procurement, delivery and manufacturing of raw materials as well as supply of finished products in a network of business processes. The major challenges facing the system are efficient coordination and prompt production planning in meeting and sometimes exceeding customers' expectations. Agent-based approach to modelling such business processes has much recompense especially in a virtual enterprise where business entities are distributed over dispersed geographical locations. This model takes advantage of core agent's features and adds autonomous and flexible properties to supply chain system, thus making it proactive and responsive to better compete and efficiently collaborate in creating custom er-centred products. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent system framework for a Virtual Enterprise (VE) involved in the manufacturing of products and capture the logic of the production planning with a simple decision tree. This approach relatively simplifies the transformation of the complex logic property of the system to a declarative programming language and facilitates implementation. Also, the agents collaboratively get product order from customers, plan and execute the production processes as well as coordinate the prompt delivery of the finished products. This makes the system akin to a digital ecosystem and invariably gives such business enterprise an edge over its counterparts in the highly competitive market place.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have specific constraints and stringent requirements in contrast to traditional wired and wireless computer networks. Among these specific requirements, energy-efficiency is the most prominent. Sensor motes have finite amount of energy supply. In most WSN applications, hundreds or thousands of motes are deployed in an area (e.g., behind enemy lines or foliage) and there is no provision for battery recharging. Therefore, a fundamental constraint on WSN applications and services is to extend the network's lifetime by making the batteries run longer. In this paper we propose an energy-efficient time synchronization protocol, referred as ETSP, which gives significant improvement in energy consumption over existing time synchronization schemes. We first evaluate the existing reference broadcast synchronization (RBS) and time-sync protocol for sensor networks (TPSN), which are two prominent examples of receiver-receiver and sender-receiver synchronization methods. This performance analysis demonstrates that combination of RBS and TPSN can work better than using these techniques separately. In the proposed ETSP protocol, we identify conditions to toggle between RBS and TPSN based on a threshold value. We experimentally and mathematically derive an optimal value of the switching threshold for different sensor motes. In this way we effectively reduce the number of transmissions which results in saving energy. Moreover, we assess the performance of our protocol on the bit error traces collected over a real WSN test bed to cater for retransmissions overload for the time synchronization protocols under consideration.

The virtual enterprises are models for distributed manufacturing where activities ranging from product design to actual production are carried out amongst geographically dispersed entities. Communication, collaboration and competition are some of the emerging issues in this form of production. To address these challenges in such distributed systems, we adopt the use of software agents, which are intelligent, collaborative, reactive and mobile entities. Although there is significant literature on implementation of virtual enterprises, there are fewer contributions that address flexibility and reliability of such systems. In this paper, we present formal model of agent-based supply chain management (SCM) in a virtual enterprise involved in product manufacturing. Our model is presented at different levels of abstraction and formalism. A decision tree is used to capture the logic of production planning based on the requirement specification. This is subsequently transformed to a declarative programming language for systempsilas instantiation. The pi-calculus notation is adopted for lower level modeling of the SCM. We propose a model which is useful for the development of flexible software systems and support of virtual enterprises and distributed production. Also, the proposed framework is formalized to enhance the reliability of system specifications.

The introduction of Ontology Web Language (OWL) which is a W3C standard for providing explicit semantics for establishing and sharing ontologies on the World Wide Web, has made it easier to embed semantics with web data. Similarly FIPA Semantic Language is the core of the agent platforms due to its high expressive power. Ontology plays an important role in the knowledge representation, reuse and communication between web services. Similarly in an Multi-agent system ontology also plays an important role, where the messages exchanged between agents should conform to an Ontology so that they could be understood. In this paper we will introduce a technology enabling bidirectional interoperability between FIPA compliant software agents and the Web services published in OWL. This is an extension of previous work in which we proposed the development of semantic translations in such a way that the agents can communicate with web services in an efficient manner. We will also describe and discuss the implementation in which a FIPA complaint software agent will invoke and use a web service published in OWL. Our goal for this paper is to show how a FIPA complaint agent can invoke and use the web services published on the World Wide Web by the help of ontological transformations.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a Grid-enabled physics analysis environment for handheld and other resource-limited computing devices as one example of the use of mobile devices in eScience. Handheld devices offer great potential because they provide ubiquitous access to data and round-the-clock connectivity over wireless links. Our solution aims to provide users of handheld devices the capability to launch heavy computational tasks on computational and data Grids, monitor the jobs status during execution, and retrieve results after job completion. Users carry their jobs on their handheld devices in the form of executables (and associated libraries). Users can transparently view the status of their jobs and get back their outputs without having to know where they are being executed. In this way, our system is able to act as a high-throughput computing environment where devices ranging from powerful desktop machines to small handhelds can employ the power of the Grid. The results shown in this paper are readily applicable to the wider eScience community.

Application development on handheld devices using software agent technology is becoming more and more popular around the world. Escalation in the use of lightweight devices and PDA's leads us to create a concrete base for future nomadic applications, positioned in a changing environment. However, constrained characteristics of handheld devices serve as the main hindrance towards achieving this goal. This paper presents the architecture of context aware FIPA complaint multi agent system for the lightweight devices called SAGE-Lite, which are capable of providing fault tolerance through the mechanism of object persistence. Agents existing on lightweight devices can communicate and provide services via Bluetooth and the communication with the server is done via WAP. Since agents communicate via sending and receiving ACL messages, this architecture will minimize communication latency with in the platform. This framework allows implementing agent-based applications like business applications or e-commerce applications on these resource-constrained devices.

Policy based ontology work is gaining wide attention in semantics related research community. Mobile agents using policy based framework exhibit more adaptive and flexible behavior. Policies which are rule based statements consisting of conditions and actions have some limitations such as interoperability, policy definitions, as well as representation. We have presented the policy based ontology infrastructure for efficient runtime operations of mobile agents and policy related issues. The proposed architecture is illustrated with example scenario in domain of earthquake management system.

The escalating popularity of multi-agent systems makes it one of the promising technologies that provide the environment for developing collaborative intelligent software systems. We have proposed the light weight and fault tolerant architecture for multi-agent systems. SAGE-Lite is a lightweight context aware multi-agent system which senses the capabilities of the light-weight devices and reacts accordingly. Agents existing on lightweight devices can communicate and provide services via Bluetooth and the communication with the server is done via WAP. The intelligence may be pretty minimal but often will include some degree of learning from past experience. This paper addresses the issues of wireless environment and gives the detailed design of lightweight architecture context-aware light-weight multi-agent system of SAGE-Lite and its evaluation. The main objective is to allow light weight agents to participate in flexible communicating environment. As the system is based on the latest FIPA specifications, agent uses the FIPA-ACL for communication and bit-efficient protocol for encoding and decoding of ACL message

Learn about projects on participant-environment interaction, the leveraging of information from mobile sensors, user authentication, and urban computing navigation.

In Grids scheduling decisions are often made on the basis of jobs being either data or computation intensive: in data intensive situations jobs may be pushed to the data and in computation intensive situations data may be pulled to the jobs. This kind of scheduling, in which there is no consideration of network characteristics, can lead to performance degradation in a Grid environment and may result in large processing queues and job execution delays due to site overloads. In this paper we describe a Data Intensive and Network Aware (DIANA) meta-scheduling approach, which takes into account data, processing power and network characteristics when making scheduling decisions across multiple sites. Through a practical implementation on a Grid testbed, we demonstrate that queue and execution times of data-intensive jobs can be significantly improved when we introduce our proposed DIANA scheduler. The basic scheduling decisions are dictated by a weighting factor for each potential target location which is a calculated function of network characteristics, processing cycles and data location and size. The job scheduler provides a global ranking of the computing resources and then selects an optimal one on the basis of this overall access and execution cost. The DIANA approach considers the Grid as a combination of active network elements and takes network characteristics as a first class criterion in the scheduling decision matrix along with computations and data. The scheduler can then make informed decisions by taking into account the changing state of the network, locality and size of the data and the pool of available processing cycles.

Grid Computing has made substantial advances in the past decade; these are primarily due to the adoption of standardized Grid middleware. However Grid computing has not yet become pervasive because of some barriers that we believe have been caused by the adoption of middleware centric approaches. These barriers include: scant support for major types of applications such as interactive applications; lack of flexible, autonomic and scalable Grid architectures; lack of plug-and-play Grid computing and, most importantly, no straightforward way to setup and administer Grids. PhantomOS is a project which aims to address many of these barriers. Its goal is the creation of a user friendly pervasive Grid computing platform that facilitates the rapid deployment and easy maintenance of Grids whilst providing support for major types of applications on Grids of almost any topology. In this paper we present the detailed system architecture and an overview of its implementation.

Teamwork among software agents is an emerging research area in the agent community as researchers are incorporating new architectures in multi-agent systems to facilitate coordination and collaboration among agents. We have proposed an efficient teamwork strategy for software agents which are deployed to work on distributed machines. This architecture is conceptualized from Honey Bee teamwork strategy and named after it as Honey Bee teamwork architecture. Also an abstract mapping is done between the honey bee and software agents working mechanisms. We have classified and discussed the proposed approach in context of two case studies and evaluation is made to exhibit its efficient behavior.