To predict the effects of governmental control policies regarding transportation, macro-level simulation is often used. However, macro-level simulation cannot capture the decision making of individual actors involved in a transport chain. In this paper we discuss how a micro-level simulator, called TAPAS (Transportation And Production Agent-based Simulator), which is based on agent technology c...

Software agents can be viewed as semi-autonomous entities which help people cope with the complexities of working collaboratively in a distributed information environment. This paper describes the research that DERA is carrying out into Software Agents for use in Command Systems and the collaborative work with the 16 partners of an international Coalition Agents Experiment. Specifically, the pa...

Data processing within large organisations is often complex, impeding both the traceability of data and the compliance of processing with usage policies. The chronology of the ownership, custody, or location of data — its provenance — provides the necessary information to restore traceability. However, to be of practical use, provenance records should include sufficient expressiveness by design...

A policy-based encryption scheme allows a user to encrypt a message with respect to a credential-based policy formalized as monotone boolean expression written in standard normal form. The encryption is so that only a user having access to a qualified set of credentials for the policy is able to successfully decrypt the message. An inherent property of policy-based encryption is that in additio...

This is a survey paper on Quality-of-Service(QoS) based routing. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of Quality-of-Service and its background. Second, we discuss the concepts of QoS-based routing, its objectives and main issues. After that, several types of QoS based routing algorithms are compared, and the advantages and disadvantages of each type discussed. Then, the relations betwe...

The goal of autonomic storage allocation is to achieve allocation of storage resources, their performance monitoring, and hotspot elimination by specifying comparatively high-level goals, rather than by means of low-level manual steps. The process of automation should allow specification of policies as administrator specified constraints under which the resources are managed. This paper describ...

It is well known that stochastic control systems can be viewed as Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state spaces. In this paper, we propose to apply the policy iteration approach in MDPs to the optimal control problem of stochastic systems. We first provide an optimality equation based on performance potentials and develop a policy iteration procedure. Then we apply policy iterat...

It is accepted that home care systems need to be customised and personalised for individual person. They also need to evolve over time. Besides, conflicts may occur between care services. We propose applying policy-based management in home care systems to facilitate the delivery and evolution of home care systems, and help the detection and resolution of conflicts in these systems. Motivation I...

This paper presents an engineering process for authorization policy development. This process includes formal specification, verification, testing and integration. A general architecture along with supporting toolset is described. In addition, a practical solution based on logic programming is further discussed. Finally, an example demonstrating the application of the methodology is provided.

This paper presents a new problem solving approach that is able to generate optimal policy solution for finite-state stochastic sequential decision-making problems with high data efficiency. The proposed algorithm iteratively builds and improves an approximate Markov Decision Process (MDP) model along with cost-to-go value approximates by generating finite length trajectories through the state-...