Software agents: an overview

Nwana, Hyacinth S.

doi:10.1017/s026988890000789x

Cited by 1,085 publications

(504 citation statements)

References 55 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

421

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…An actor represents a physical or a software agent as well as a role or position. While we assume the classical AI definition of software agent, that is, a software having properties such as autonomy, social ability, reactivity, proactivity, as given, for instance in [46], in Tropos we define a role as an abstract characterization of the behavior of a social actor within some specialized context or domain of endeavor, and a position represents a set of roles, typically played by one agent. An agent can occupy a position, while a position is said to cover a role.…”

Section: The Key Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Security and Trust Requirements Engineering

Giorgini

Massacci

Zannone

2005

Foundations of Security Analysis and Design III

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Integrating security concerns throughout the whole software development process is one of today's challenges in software and requirements engineering research. A challenge that so far has proved difficult to meet. The major difficulty is that providing security does not only require to solve technical problems but also to reason on the organization as a whole. This makes the usage of traditional software engineering methologies difficult or unsatisfactory: most proposals focus on protection aspects of security and explicitly deal with low level protection mechanisms and only an handful of them show the ability of capturing the high-level organizational security requirements, without getting suddenly bogged down into security protocols or cryptography algorithms. In this paper we critically review the state of the art in security requirements engineering and discuss the motivations that led us to propose the Secure Tropos methodology, a formal framework for modelling and analyzing security, that enhances the agent-oriented software development methodology i*/Tropos. We illustrate the Secure Tropos approach, a comprehensive case study, and discuss some later refinements of the Secure Tropos methodology to address some of its shortcomings. Finally, we introduce the ST-Tool, a CASE tool that supports our methodology.

show abstract

Section: The Key Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Security and Trust Requirements Engineering

Giorgini

Massacci

Zannone

2005

Foundations of Security Analysis and Design III

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Application domains in which agent-based solutions are being applied and investigated fill different disciplines, such as AI, Genetics, Robotics; but agents also are considered a promising technology for the design and development of distributed systems [Nwa96]. In distributed and open systems, executable code travels with mobile agents so an agent can be considered as a mobile object enriched with other features [C+94].…”

Section: Components Vs Agentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Combining Software Components and Mobile Agents

Amor

Pinto

Fuentes

et al. 2000

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. We present a first approach that combines the mobile agent and the compositional paradigms into a new agent-based compositional model. The aim of this work is to explore the capabilities of both paradigms in improving the design and development of open and distributed systems. Our goal is to add compositional characteristics to mobile agents by defining an agent-based compositional model. We take advantage of the mobility and the composition capability by applying this model to the problem of searching software components in partially-instantiated applications, both in design and run time. That is, the abstract components of an architectural design of an application can be fulfilled with concrete ones by retrieving them from the Internet.

show abstract

“…A paradigm that fits these requirements is this of a single agent or Multi-Agent System [12]. Such systems exhibit autonomy, reactivity and pro-activeness within the social context they operate (social ability).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Producing Enactable Protocols in Artificial Agent Societies

Lekeas

Kloukinas

Stathis

2011

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. This paper draws upon our previous work [16,7] in which we proposed the organisation of services around the concept of artificial agent societies and presented a framework for representing roles and protocols using LTSs. The agent would apply for a role in the society, which would result in its participation in a number of protocols. We advocated the use of the games-based metaphor for describing the protocols and presented a framework for assessing the admission of the agent to the society on the basis of its competence. In this work we look at the subsequent question: what information should the agent receive upon entry?. We can not provide it with the full protocol because of security and overload issues. Therefore, we choose to only provide the actions pertinent to the protocols that the role the agent applied for participates in the society. We employ branching bisimulation for producing a protocol equivalent to the original one with all actions not involving the role translated into silent (τ ) actions. However, this approach sometimes results in non-enactable protocols. In this case, we need to repair the protocol by adding the role in question as a recipient to certain protocol messages that were causing the problems. We present three different approaches for repairing protocols, depending on the number of messages from the original protocol they modify. The modified protocol is adopted as the final one and the agent is given the role automaton that is derived from the branching bisimulation process.

show abstract

Software agents: an overview

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 1,085 publications

References 55 publications

Security and Trust Requirements Engineering

Security and Trust Requirements Engineering

Combining Software Components and Mobile Agents

Producing Enactable Protocols in Artificial Agent Societies

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About