Special Issue: Engineering and Applications of Software Agents Guest Editors: Amelia Badic˘ A˘ Zoran Budimac
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Volume 40 Number 1 March 2016 Special Issue: Engineering and Applications of Software Agents Guest Editors: Amelia Badic˘ a˘ Zoran Budimac 1977 Editorial Boards Informatica is a journal primarily covering intelligent systems in the European computer science, informatics and cognitive com- Editorial Board munity; scientific and educational as well as technical, commer- Juan Carlos Augusto (Argentina) cial and industrial. Its basic aim is to enhance communications Vladimir Batagelj (Slovenia) between different European structures on the basis of equal rights Francesco Bergadano (Italy) and international refereeing. It publishes scientific papers ac- Marco Botta (Italy) cepted by at least two referees outside the author’s country. In ad- Pavel Brazdil (Portugal) dition, it contains information about conferences, opinions, criti- Andrej Brodnik (Slovenia) cal examinations of existing publications and news. Finally, major Ivan Bruha (Canada) practical achievements and innovations in the computer and infor- Wray Buntine (Finland) mation industry are presented through commercial publications as Zhihua Cui (China) well as through independent evaluations. Hubert L. Dreyfus (USA) Editing and refereeing are distributed. Each editor from the Jozo Dujmovic´ (USA) Editorial Board can conduct the refereeing process by appointing Johann Eder (Austria) two new referees or referees from the Board of Referees or Edi- Ling Feng (China) torial Board. Referees should not be from the author’s country. If Vladimir A. Fomichov (Russia) new referees are appointed, their names will appear in the list of Maria Ganzha (Poland) referees. Each paper bears the name of the editor who appointed Sumit Goyal (India) the referees. Each editor can propose new members for the Edi- Marjan Gušev (Macedonia) torial Board or referees. Editors and referees inactive for a longer N. Jaisankar (India) period can be automatically replaced. Changes in the Editorial Dariusz Jacek Jakóbczak (Poland) Board are confirmed by the Executive Editors. Dimitris Kanellopoulos (Greece) The coordination necessary is made through the Executive Edi- Samee Ullah Khan (USA) tors who examine the reviews, sort the accepted articles and main- Hiroaki Kitano (Japan) tain appropriate international distribution. The Executive Board Igor Kononenko (Slovenia) is appointed by the Society Informatika. Informatica is partially Miroslav Kubat (USA) supported by the Slovenian Ministry of Higher Education, Sci- Ante Lauc (Croatia) ence and Technology. Jadran Lenarciˇ cˇ (Slovenia) Each author is guaranteed to receive the reviews of his article. Shiguo Lian (China) When accepted, publication in Informatica is guaranteed in less Suzana Loskovska (Macedonia) than one year after the Executive Editors receive the corrected Ramon L. de Mantaras (Spain) version of the article. Natividad Martínez Madrid (Germany) Executive Editor – Editor in Chief Sando Martinciˇ c-Ipiši´ c´ (Croatia) Anton P. Železnikar Angelo Montanari (Italy) Volaricevaˇ 8, Ljubljana, Slovenia Pavol Návrat (Slovakia) [email protected] Jerzy R. Nawrocki (Poland) http://lea.hamradio.si/˜s51em/ Nadia Nedjah (Brasil) Franc Novak (Slovenia) Executive Associate Editor - Managing Editor Marcin Paprzycki (USA/Poland) Matjaž Gams, Jožef Stefan Institute Wiesław Pawłowski (Poland) Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia Ivana Podnar Žarko (Croatia) Phone: +386 1 4773 900, Fax: +386 1 251 93 85 Karl H. Pribram (USA) [email protected] Luc De Raedt (Belgium) http://dis.ijs.si/mezi/matjaz.html Shahram Rahimi (USA) Executive Associate Editor - Deputy Managing Editor Dejan Rakovic´ (Serbia) Mitja Luštrek, Jožef Stefan Institute Jean Ramaekers (Belgium) [email protected] Wilhelm Rossak (Germany) Ivan Rozman (Slovenia) Executive Associate Editor - Technical Editor Sugata Sanyal (India) Drago Torkar, Jožef Stefan Institute Walter Schempp (Germany) Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia Johannes Schwinn (Germany) + + Phone: 386 1 4773 900, Fax: 386 1 251 93 85 Zhongzhi Shi (China) [email protected] Oliviero Stock (Italy) Contact Associate Editors Robert Trappl (Austria) Europe, Africa: Matjaz Gams Terry Winograd (USA) N. and S. America: Shahram Rahimi Stefan Wrobel (Germany) Asia, Australia: Ling Feng Konrad Wrona (France) Overview papers: Maria Ganzha Xindong Wu (USA) Yudong Zhang (China) Rushan Ziatdinov (Russia & Turkey) Informatica 40 (2016) 1–1 1 Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue on ‟Engineering and Applications of Software Agents” The aim of this Special Issue is to introduce to the readers embedded devices interconnected in the Web-of-Things a selection of papers from the 3rd Workshop on and to the management of agents in the Cloud. Applications of Software Agents – WASA 2013 in the area We would like to thank all the reviewers for their of agent-based modelling and simulation. WASA’2013 restless reviewing effort and valuable feedback and all the was held in Sinaia, Romania, during October 11-13, 2013. authors who submitted their contributions to The WASA 2013 workshop was organized within the WASA’2013, as well as to this Special Issue. framework of the 17th International Conference on System Theory, Control and Computing –ICSTCC’2013. The aim of the WASA series of workshops is to contribute to the Amelia Bădică, advancement of technologies and applications of software Zoran Budimac agents' by bridging the gap between the theory and practice of software agents. 15 papers were accepted for presentation at WASA’2013. Among them, 4 papers were selected, after further extension and additional review, for inclusion in this Special Issue on “Engineering and Applications of Software Agents”. The article “AgentPlanner – agent-based timetabling system” by Rafal Tkaczyk, Maria Ganzha, and Marcin Paprzycki is in the area of applications of software agents. The authors propose an agent-based timetabling system called AgentPlanner. The system was evaluated using real data set of a department at the University of Gdansk. The results were quite encouraging, i.e. AgentPlanner outperformed the state-of-the-art timetabling software based on the genetic algorithms and it was capable of satisfactorily solving the problem of schedule adjustment. The article “Jason Interpreter, Enterprise Edition” by Dejan Mitrović, Mirjana Ivanović, Rafael H. Bordini, and Costin Bădică is in the area of engineering of software agents. This paper presents a framework that integrates Jason – an interpreter that provides a Java implementation of the AgentSpeak programming language with the Enterprise edition of the Java platform. The contribution of the paper is bridging the gap between the agent technology and modern enterprise solutions for distributed software development. The article “Expressing GMoDS Models into Object- Oriented Models Using the Event-B Language” by Marius Brezovan, Liana Stanescu and Eugen Ganea is in the area of engineering of software agents. This paper proposes a generic framework for expressing the Goal Model for Dynamic Systems (GMoDS) goal-based agent-oriented methodology for the specification of multi-agent systems, using Event-B. The mapping was achieved by adding object-oriented modelling support to Event B using the modularization plug-in of the Rodin framework. The article “HTML5-based mobile agents for Web- of-Things” by Jari-Pekka Voutilainen, Anna-Liisa Mattila, Kari Systä, and Tommi Mikkonen is in the area of applications of software agents. This paper proposes a solution based on mobile agents for operating and managing Internet-connected systems composed of gadgets, sensors and actuators. The solution is supported by two proof-of-concept experiments related to agents for 2 Informatica 40 (2016) 1–1 A. Bădică et al. Informatica 40 (2016) 3–17 3 AgentPlanner – Agent-based Timetabling System Rafał Tkaczyk Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland IT Systems Department of the Vemco Co. Ltd., Sopot, Poland E-mail: [email protected] Maria Ganzha Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland Institute of Informatics, University of Gdansk,´ Gdansk,´ Poland E-mail: [email protected] Marcin Paprzycki Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences Warsaw Management Academy, Warsaw, Poland E-mail: [email protected] Keywords: software agent, multi-agent system, timetabling, negotiations, agent-based timetabling system Received: July 24, 2015 The aim of the paper is to describe the AgentPlanner, an agent-based timetabling system. After its ini- tial implementation (described in [1]), based on results of experiments, we have modified the design (to eliminate discovered shortcomings). Here, we describe the improved AgentPlanner and compare its per- formance with the state-of-the-art, Free Timetabling Software (FET). Povzetek: Opisan je AgentPlanner, agentni sistem za urnike. 1 Introduction 2 Timetabling – related work Timetabling is a common problem, which is applied in many domains (e.g. business, industry, science, private ap- Creating a timetable is a challenging problem. On the one plications, etc.). Therefore, many scientists have consid- hand, timetables are widely used in multiple application ered it, and many solution methods have been proposed. areas. On the other, timetabling is an NP-hard problem. As Below, we summarize few most common and effective a result, many methods that solve this problem have been methods for solving the timetabling problem. Let us note, proposed (see, section 5). that our work concerns scheduling courses in a