6083238
A Multiagent System Applied to the Design of Petroleum Off-Shore Platforms
This paper presents a model for cooperative multi-agents that interact in a closed environment, i.e., an environment where the rules are well known by the agents and do not change dynamically. In a computational environment where several different software agents share resources to reach their goals, the occurrence of conflicts is inevitable. Therefore it is of highest importance to have an efficient mechanism to solve such conflicts. While other models in the literature present solutions for conflict resolution based on centralized and distributed algorithms, our proposal is to solve the conflicts in a hierarchical manner. The proposed model is based on the application of Social Laws and it was inspired by the theory of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, being denominated Tri-Coord Model, that is, of Triple Coordination. We implemented a prototype based on the Tri-Coord Model, and applied to the task of oil and gas process floorplan design in a petroleum off-shore platform. In that domain the project is divided in several subsystems, with an agent being responsible for each sub-system. Our experiments indicate that the Tri-Coord Model can indeed yield a better performance in the development of a project. First, because it decreases the interruptions for accomplishment of meetings to solve conflicts related to customization of sub-system’s parameters. Second, because it removes the bottleneck associated to a centralized model for conflict resolution. Third, because through the regulator environment of Tri-Coord the agents behavior can be controlled implicitly by the environment. In that way the agents learn how to interact correctly and the independence between the environment and the agents turns the system more flexible.
5520687
Web Navigation Patterns
44575256
An X-Ray of the Brazilian e-Gov Web Sites
The digital inclusion promotes the reduction of social inequalities. Based on this principle, the Brazilian Government has been setting up an increasing number of Web access locations to render virtual support to its citizens. However, there are no guidelines for the construction and assessment of these electronic Government (e-Gov) sites. In this article we measure the web site quality in the e-Gov domain with the following proprieties: usability, accessibility, interoperability, security, privacy, information reliability, and service agility. We implemented our method, by using a checklist tool, in the evaluation of 127 Brazilian government sites (federal, state and municipal). Our method proved itself efficient in the diagnosis and identification of specific problems in the e-Gov site domain.
6652666
A method for analyzing team design activity
Design is a comples activity that has been the focus of substantial research work. Alone or in groups, dcsigncrs create, develop. refine. analyze and document their conceptualization of a product. Many research prqjects have proposed methods for observing the design activity. These methods vary from simple documentation analysis to video tape analysis. Although video tape technology has been in use for many years to record design activity. systematic methods have not been developed to analyze video data. This paper presents a method for analyzing team design activity recorded in videotapes. The purpose of the method is to reduce the subjectivity of video data analysis. Our study has been developed in the domain of cotlaborativc software design. The design activity of a multi-disciplinary group including from five to eight people was vidcotapcd and has heen analyzed. The team was involved with the design of an educational software system using the approach of decision making meetings. The analysis focused on the dynamics of the interactions among people involved in the design activity. This study is based on the belief that the interactions established among designers will provide important insights for a better understanding of design practice.
29246421
Sharing design perspectives through storytelling
Design consists of analyzing scenarios and proposing artifacts, obeying the initial set of requirements that lead from initial to goal state. Finding or creating alternative solutions, analyzing them, and selecting the best one are expected steps in the designer’s decision making process. Very often, not a sole designer, but a team of them is engaged in the design process, sharing their expertise and responsibility to achieve optimum projects. In a design team, most conflicts occur due to misunderstanding of one’s assessment of specifications and contexts. Decision explanations play a key role in teamwork success. Designers are rational agents trained to follow rational methods. Acceptable justifications include value function, requirements, constraints, and criteria. Generally, explanations are delivered in a multimedia fashion, composed of text, graphics and gestures, to provide the audience the ability to perceive what was contextually imagined. The more spatial the reasoning is, the richer the explanation channel should be. This paper presents CineADD, a design explanation generation model based on cinema techniques such as animation, scripting, editing, and camera movements. The idea is to provide designers with a tool for describing the way their projects should be visually explained, as in a movie. Designers develop their projects in an active design document environment. Rationale is captured as a design model, so explanations can be generated instead of retrieved. The captured design model serves as a base to visually reconstruct design, giving emphasis and guidance by using movie storytelling techniques. CineADD was implemented for the domain of oil pipeline layout showing the feasibility of this approach. We expect CineADD to become a commodity attachable to any intelligent CAD system.
13425018
Lithofacies recognition hybrid bench
Well offshore petroleum exploration is a risky, but very profitable task. Determining the rock formation of each layer of a given reservoir diminishes the risks of expending a great deal of money drilling dry wells. Since collecting offshore rock samples is difficult and expensive, geologists must decide upon drilling based on indirect measures called well log. Traditional statistical methods have been used to assist this task. Neural networks have also been successfully used. As an alternative fuzzy logic based systems have an extra appeal of intuitive comprehension of some uncertainties. This paper presents a hybrid tool that combines neural networks, fuzzy logic and neuro-fuzzy logic to improve human intuition when analyzing the potential of oil fields.
8265478
MIRA: A Distributed and Scalable WAN/LAN Real-Time Measurement Platform
In this paper we describe MIRA, a distributed and scalable architecture for flow-based monitoring and traffic analysis. MIRA relies on data inspection to provide advanced monitoring services such as Acceptable User Policy auditing. It is based on a low cost hardware platform that can be deployed in both LAN and WAN environments. The distributed architecture of the measurement platform is designed to provide real-time global results from a complex network. Processing rate can be seamlessly increased by the addition of new hardware elements. The MIRA architecture has been thoroughly tested in a field trial on RedIRIS, the Spanish National Research Network.
5202352
Taming Agents and Objects in Software Engineering
Agent-based software engineering has been proposed in addition to object-oriented software engineering as a means of mastering the complexity associated with the development of large-scale distributed systems. However, there is still a poor understanding of the interplay between the notions of agents and objects from a software engineering perspective. Moreover, the many facets of agent-based software engineering are rarely used in the various phases of the software development lifecycle because of the lack of a comprehensive framework to provide the software designers with a clear understanding of the use of these two key abstractions. In this context, this paper presents TAO, an evolving innovative conceptual framework based on agent and object abstractions, which are the foundations for modeling large-scale software systems. The conceptual framework allows for the characterization of large-scale software systems as organizations of passive components, the objects, and autonomous components, the agents, with each of these elements playing roles to interact with each other and to coordinate their actions in order to fulfill system goals.
13430499
A Unified Meta-Level Software Architecture for Sequential and Concurrent Exception Handling
45365979
Software Engineering for Multi-Agent Systems
6575168
An Architectural-Based Reflective Approach to Incorporating Exception Handling into Dependable Software
Modern object-oriented software is inherently complex and has to cope with an increasing number of exceptional conditions to meet the system's dependability requirements. In this context, the goal of our work is twofold: (i) to present an exception handling model which is suitable for developing dependable object-oriented software, and (ii) to provide a systematic approach to incorporating exception handling during the design stage, that is, from the architectural design stage to the detailed design stage. The proposed approach employs the computational reflection concept to achieve a clear and transparent separation of concerns between the application's functionality and the exception handling facilities. This separation minimizes the complexity caused by the handling of abnormal behavior and facilitates the task of building dependable software with better readability, maintainability and reusability.