The control architecture is one of the most important part of agricultural robotics and other robotic systems. Furthermore its importance increases when the system involves a group of heterogeneous robots that should cooperate to achieve a global goal. A new control architecture is introduced in this paper for groups of robots in charge of doing maintenance tasks in agricultural environments. S...

Today’s software platforms that support the construction of agent systems in accordance with the FIPA specifications essentially provide enabling infrastructure services, and are still far away from adequately rendering support to current methodologies and theories for building agent systems, especially when social concepts play a significant role. Elsewhere, we have presented the RICA theory, ...

In this paper we describe the strategy under adoption in Telecom Italia (TI) Technology Department toward open source software. This stems from trying to create synergy among big Telco Player to increase knowledge and influence over strategic communities to the evaluation of the creation of new communities over internally developed applications. In particular here the approach and the expectati...

Software agents are the basic building blocks in many software systems especially those based on artificial intelligence methods, e.g., reinforcement learning based multi-agent systems (MASs). However, testing software agents is considered a challenging problem. This is due to the special characteristics of agents which include its autonomy, distributed nature, intelligence, and heterogeneous c...

Despite the importance of resource availability, the inclusion of availability awareness in current agentbased systems is limited, particularly in decision support settings. This article discusses issues related to availability awareness in agent-based systems and proposes that knowledge of resources’ online status and readiness in these systems can improve decision outcomes. A conceptual model...

Mobile commerce (m-commerce) has emerged as the promising approach for driving the next wave of e-commerce. A major issue facing m-commerce is the lack of flexible, adaptable, extensible, and robust architectures for mobile and pervasive application systems for m-commerce. To address this issue, our research has explored how to employ mobile agents in developing m-commerce applications. We have...

Continuations are a well established programming concept that allows capturing and resuming the current program state. They can be found in several functional programming languages (such as Scheme), in Hewitt actor model, and more recently in dynamic programming languages (such as Ruby, Smalltalk, Python, and even Javascript or Java). They have been historically applied to automaton programming...

In recent years, agent-based systems have received considerable attention in both academics and industry. The agent-oriented paradigm can be considered a natural extension to the object-oriented (OO) paradigm. Agents differ from objects in many issues which require special modeling elements but have some similarities. Although there is a well-defined OO testing technique, agent-oriented develop...

Frameworks to support Internet-based virtual enterprises are currently characterised as having fixed process models, fixed meta-data models and a fixed set of users at project inception. This paper proposes the SoBeNet architecture to support a highly dynamic, self-organised, Internet-based approach based on social interaction. The architecture is based on a multi-agent approach, Internet commu...

Multi-agent systems are based on the interaction of autonomous software components, the agents, which cooperate to achieve common goals. But such interactions, just as in human societies, can be set correctly only on the base of trust relations. This paper presents a security model founded on delegation certificates, which allows the management of security policies on the base of trust relation...