Objectives

Project objectives

This project, Agreement Technologies, AT for short, aims at developing models, frameworks, methods and algorithms for constructing large-scale open distributed computer systems. We plan to anticipate solutions for the needs of next generation computing systems where autonomy, interaction and mobility will be the key issues. The project will develop technologies to cope with the (high) dynamicity of the system topology and with semantic mismatches in the interaction, both natural consequences of the distributed and autonomous nature of the components. Also, the project will focus on security issues by developing a new concept of operating system that incorporates low-level security mechanisms and trust measures that complement the classical cryptographic methods. Trust measures are essential in open environments where interactions have to be made under uncertainty on the environment state. Most importantly, the project will concentrate on techniques that enable software components to reach agreements on the mutual performance of services. Negotiation, argumentation, decision making, knowledge modelling, virtual organisations and learning will be the sandbox techniques used by the project to build this next generation of software systems. We envisage a new programming paradigm that is based on two concepts: (1) a Normative context, that determines the rules of the game, i.e. how the interactions between agents are going to happen, and (2) a call-by-agreement interaction method that is based on a two step process: first the establishment of an agreement for action between the agents that respects the normative context, and second, the actual program call for the enactment of the action. We will also address the need for software engineering methodologies that deal with the issues raised in the project.

These objectives build upon the combined expertise of the three participant research groups: multiagent systems (MAS), learning and uncertainty in IIIA, agent-based software engineering, multiagent system architectures, inductive learning, distributed systems and planning at UPV and co-ordination, semantic web engineering, and virtual organisations at URJC. The project opens a number of new research lines that aim at producing a breakthrough in the current views on software development and web computing.