Clare Grasso, Dr. Tim Finin, Dr. Yelena Yesha, Dr. Anupam Joshi, Dr. Michael Grasso

UMBC◦ Expert knowledge of agent systems at large

What could conceivably be done

UICDS Partners & Emergency Responders◦ Emergency Response domain experts

What should be done

Collaboration + Technologists◦ What is a practical to do for UICDS

Conventional Systems

Current Computing Environment

SOA, Web Services, and Multi-Agent Systems

Agent Standards

Types of Agents

Agent Systems – Success Stories

Agent R&D in Emergency Response

Agents and UICDS

Centralized◦ Vertical organization

Centralized Control

Information locked in proprietary silos

Problems with◦ Isolation

◦ Scalability

◦ Survivability

◦ Changeability

Internet and ubiquitous computing◦ Horizontal organization

Heterogeneous systems must interact

Across organizational boundaries

Operate effectively within rapidly changing circumstances

With dramatically increasing quantities of available information

◦ Collaboration

◦ Dynamicity

◦ Personalization

Web services are one type of SOA◦ Distributed Heterogeneous interoperable systems based on standards

◦ Autonomous Self-contained, Self-described, component objects

◦ Message based Client / Server Request / Response Synchronous – they are invoked

◦ Passive –advertised, discovered, invoked◦ Static Once they are deployed, the don’t tend to change

◦ Mature in design and development Based on a well understood object-oriented paradigm

Agents are another implementation of SOA◦ Distributed within and across agent platforms◦ Autonomous Self-contained, Self-described, agent-based Self-controlled- are not “invoked”

◦ Message based Peer to Peer Asynchronous - control uncoupling Data driven vs. procedure driven

◦ Active Perceive and react to their environment

◦ Dynamic Can change their behavior based on their environment

◦ Immature in design and development Much research left to be done on the agent-oriented

paradigm

1996 Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) was formed◦ 1999-2002 Specifications for heterogeneous and

interacting agent based systems were developed

Defines standards for ◦ Abstract architecture

◦ Agent life-cycle management

◦ Agent communication

◦ Message transport

Most widely used part of the standard◦ ACL – Agent Communication Language

*http://www.fipa.org/

*2005, Michal Laclav´ık, Zolt´an Balogh, Mari´an Bab´ık,LadislavHluch´y, “AgentOWL- Semantic Knowledge Model and Agent Architecture”,Computing and Informatics, Vol. 25, 2006, 419–437

Agents as Web Service Consumers◦ Any Java-based agent can access web services

Agents as Web Service Providers◦ Require a gateway / bridge translate between the two

◦ FIPA is in the process of standardizing WS interaction

Dynamic Web Services◦ Web Services can be created/destroyed dynamically

based on WSDL file

◦ Allows for dynamic composition of multiple Web Services into a new kind of service

Reactive◦ Event Driven Architecture

Workflow Oriented◦ A workflow is composed of tasks that are executed in

order specified by precedence constraints. ◦ Easy to use graphical Workflow IDEs to create agents

Cognitive – BDI (AI)◦ Modeled after human intelligence◦ Offers a higher level of abstraction The paradigm map easily to the language people use to

describe their reasoning and actions in everyday life◦ Relatively mature framework Successfully used in a number of medium to large scale

software systems

Large number of simple agents that can produce an overall intelligent behavior leading to the solution.

Job Scheduling◦ For a given number of machines and a given number of

orders, assign the operations so that 1) the machine only works on one job at a time and 2) the total time for all jobs is minimized.

Vehicle Routing◦ Minimize cost of routing based on 1) vehicle load capacity

2) maximum route length 2) all vehicles start and end their routes at the depot and 4) each customer is visited once.

Telecom Italia◦ Provides fixed and mobile telephony and broadband

services to more than 20 million customers

◦ Created a single Security Operations Centre that would monitor the entire network infrastructure

◦ Deployed agents to monitor logs from the company's firewalls, antivirus software and operating systems, routers and Intrusion Detection Systems

◦ Simple Web interface provides access to detailed security reports, and to a high-level dashboard with key risk and performance indicators displayed graphically.

◦ In a single month, they have registered as many as 120 million events, and managed 800 security incidents

DTE Energy◦ Handle massive outages based on a finite amount

of resources – including those from other states or countries

◦ Contract Net Protocol A Request-for-Proposal goes out across agent system

Self-interested agents use market-oriented mechanisms to bid. Each resource is represented by an agent that bids for that

work based on how much it would cost to accommodate that request (based on time, distance, dollar cost, etc.)

Resources with lowest bid wins until there are no more requests

John Deere◦ Centralized program ran several hours over night to

optimize production schedules for the shop floor the next day.

◦ Problem: If key resource becomes unavailable, centralized program must start from scratch. You have to re-optimize the entire shop when all you have is a local disruption.

◦ Answer: If one resource is no longer available, agents can look for a replacement and “contract” with alternative resources. If the resources are going to be delayed, agents in a supply chain can determine which way to solve the delay with the least impact.

◦ Top-down vs. Bottom-up processing

Ebay Auction Sniper

◦ Bids on your behalf in the last seconds of an auction.

◦ You just enter a maximum amount and the sniper tool will bid up to that amount in the waning seconds of the auction.

◦ If you participate in several different auctions for a single item, the sniper will bid until you win one of the auctions – canceling all other auctions in the group automatically.

DEFACTO Training Tool for Incident Commanders◦ Provide first responders and rescue personnel

with tools and techniques that will enable them to

evaluate response readiness and tactics,

measure inter-agency coordination and

improve training and decision making capability.

AAMAS’05, July 25-29, 2005, “DEFACTO: Training Tool for Incident Commanders”, Utrecht, Netherlands.

Intelligent agents assess a complex situation◦ Make on-the-fly decisions on how to proceed with

based on real-time data and events◦ Suggest the rescue actions in the form of

workflows, ◦ Responders follow the workflows to execute the

rescue plan based on real-time data and events.

Cognitive BDI / Workflow Agent Hybrids◦ Built on control structures that allow the agent to

be function-based on data rather than explicit procedural instructions Agents don’t need to be reprogrammed to react to a

changing environment.

"Agent based emergency response workflow management", Tepfenhart, W.; Jiacun Wang; Rosca, D.; INFORMS International Conference on Service Operations, Logistics and Informatics, 2009. Page(s):140 – 146

What are the gaps in UICDS that agents could fill?◦ Now that you have all that information in one place,

what else can you do with it?

Distributed information vs. distributed services

Requirements◦ Open Source◦ No additional ports to open◦ No software to install

Browser based◦ Applets◦ XML/XLST transformation Embedded JavaScript

HTTP content and forms

Texting and Text messaging

Alerts

Context agents ◦ Integrate information from multiple sources to provide

an overall context for individual incidents or a set of incidents occurring in or impacting a region.

Personal Profiling◦ Allow users to prioritize and filter information and alerts

based on their generic role in UICDS

Collaborative filtering ◦ Suggest new notifications that someone might want to

sign up for. "Responders like you also have subscribed to X and Y" or "Responders who subside to X often subscribe to Y as well."

XMPP ◦ Built in security mechanisms

◦ Can be run on top of HTTP

◦ Presence awareness

Very powerful for user interfaces