Towards formalising use case maps in Maude strategy language: application to multi-agent systems

The lack of formalism and rigor in existing multi-agents models often leads to ambiguities and different interpretations. Those weaknesses combined with the inherent complexity of multi-agents systems generate many problems in their development process. Using formal notations to specify multi-agents systems’ behavior makes it possible to produce precise description. This also offers a better support to their verification and validation process. The Maude language, based on rewriting logic, presents a rich notation supporting formal specification and implementation of concurrent systems. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility and the interest of formalizing the behavior of DIMA model’s agents with the Maude language. The elaborated formal approach captures the inherent aspects of a DIMA model. The generated Maude descriptions have been validated using the platform supporting this language. Moreover, the proposed approach is generic and extensible. It offers, in particular, the advantage of being applicable to all multi-agents systems based on DIMA architecture and presents interesting extension possibilities.

A new method is presented for the automated random generation of valid content-sensitive test data and corresponding oracle information. The process takes as input a specification of the program under test, expressed as a functional program, and produces as output test cases consisting of test data and oracle information. The test data is guaranteed to be an element of the valid input space defined by the specification. Examples of the process are presented.

Heterogeneous system design, modeling and testing requires that concepts and ideas from the diverse disciplines of Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Multi Agent Systems and Generalized System Theory be brought together under a common framework. Multi layer, hybrid, open architectures need be designed to manage distributed objects, services and modules between system components and support overall system functionality. Issues that need be addressed include, among others, individual component control, component coordination and communication, as well as overall system functionality in the presence of communication failures. This presentation considers the case of heterogeneous teams of unmanned ground - aerial robots operating in uncertain / hostile environments. It discusses aspects of distributed system architecture; it addresses fundamental control and communication problems and recommended solutions to distributed task allocation using unmanned ground - aerial vehicles; it examines asset recruitment with and without communication failures. Experimental studies and demos related to demining applications and traffic monitoring and emergency response have been conducted and they will be discussed.

There is an oft quoted saying in the space industry, “Every mission is Class A on the Launch Pad”. No matter the stated risk class of your mission, when it is time to launch, the mission must be a success. In this paper we will discuss the accuracy of this statement, and explore the strategic and tactical approaches to the Verification and Validation of four missions with distinct Risk Classifications: the Mars Science Laboratory, the Dawn mission, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), & the Terrain Relative Navigation and Employee Development (TRaiNED) projects. Each mission exemplifies one of the four specific risk classes of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) missions. At one extreme, the Mars Science Laboratory mission (Risk Class A), required extensive Verification and Validation, consisting of traditional Mission Systems Operational Readiness Tests (ORTs), Entry Descent and Landing (EDL), and the uncharted territory of sample handling verification on the surface of Mars. The Dawn mission (Risk Class B), designed to travel to two separate bodies in the Asteroid belt, and focused its V&V efforts primarily on the validation of the spacecraft. This emphasis allowed the team to weed out the difficulties inherent in a complex system, providing the project-level focus necessary to resolve system-wide issues. OCO-2 mission (Risk Class C), designed to measure carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere, took a different tack. It centered on the verification process and successfully adopted several lessons learned from its predecessor, the OCO mission. In particular, it has implemented more efficient ways of tracking requirements such as scheduling burn down plans based on verification milestones, rather than on precise dates. Finally, the TRaiNED mission (Risk Class D), a small sounding rocket mission designed to collect data to validate several Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN) models, had to compress its Verification and Validation process into a much more condensed timeframe. To maintain this tight schedule, the team tailored the V&V plan to emphasize only the processes absolutely necessary in order to meet the systems requirements. For each of these missions, we will examine both the overarching Verification and Validation processes applied, along with some specific examples of how these processes were implemented in order to bring the mission successfully through its integration and test phase. In the process of examining these missions, we will highlight the factors that separate each mission by classification and the effect classification has on mission decision-making.

Continuous support of the verification and validation processes does not only require mapping the data and information flows within the process, but also needs the link to the development of the complete process itself. It is also necessary to clearly define the dependencies between the individual activities within the validation process in order to describe the relation to the requirements. Not only the verification and validation processes themselves are being considered but also the dependency of the requirements on each other and the connection to the product architecture of ongoing development processes. The model used for this analysis is based on the network and graph theory and is compared to the common approaches on this field.

The Advanced Composites Consortium is a US Government/Industry partnership supporting technologies to enable timeline and cost reduction in the development of certified composite aerospace structures. A key component of the consortium’s approach is the development and validation of improved progressive damage and failure analysis methods for composite structures. These methods will enable increased use of simulations in design trade studies and detailed design development, and thereby enable more targeted physical test programs to validate designs. To accomplish this goal with confidence, a rigorous verification and validation process was developed. The process was used to evaluate analysis methods and associated implementation requirements to ensure calculation accuracy and to gage predictability for composite failure modes of interest. This paper introduces the verification and validation process developed by the consortium during the Phase I effort of the Advanced Composites Project. Specific structural failure modes of interest are first identified, and a subset of standard composite test articles are proposed to interrogate a progressive damage analysis method’s ability to predict each failure mode of interest. Test articles are designed to capture the underlying composite material constitutive response as well as the interaction of failure modes representing typical failure patterns observed in aerospace structures.

Privacy of user is becoming increasingly significant in constructing efficient multiagent energy management systems for multimicrogrid (MMG). As an emerging privacy-protection method, federated learning (FL) has been used to prevent data breaches in the MMG-related field. However, with the ever-growing participants, the underlying communication burden existing in FL is evident. Besides, since the neural network layers collectively determine an agent's performance, the possible difference in layer convergence speeds would cause the inconsistency problem, that is, the FL may degrade the convergence rate of those fast-convergent layers, which weakens the overall performance of the agent. To address these issues, a communication-efficient FL (CEFL) algorithm is proposed in this study. Considering the cooperative relationship among layers, a layer evaluation (LE) mechanism is developed in CEFL to evaluate layer contribution through the Shapley value (SV), a profit distribution approach for coalitions. In this way, only partial layers with the highest contributions are selected to be uploaded to the server. In addition, instead of average parameters aggregation, a communication-efficient parameter aggregation method is proposed in CEFL to update the parameters of the global model (GM), in which an aggregation model (AM) is developed to receive parameters for aggregation. The performance of the proposed CEFL is verified by the numerical analysis of MMGs with 3-8 MGs participating. Furthermore, experiments investigate the influence of the hyperparameter in the CEFL and also demonstrate performance improvements, compared with the other four state-of-the-art algorithms.

Applications of T-spherical fuzzy aczel-alsina power muirhead mean operators in identifying the most effective water purification process for commercial purpose

Dynamic architecture of multi-agent systems (MAS) is very important for the critical systems. As the existing formal specifications cannot describe the dynamic architecture of MAS, while π-calculus is specially suited for the description and analysis of concurrent systems with dynamic or evolving topology, a formal approach using π-calculus is presented to describe MAS. π-calculus can describe the interactions among agents and permit their analysis for some key properties, e.g. deadlock, bisimilarity. By constructing a MAS model in electronic commerce, the modeling process using π-calculus are illustrated.KeywordsMultiagent SystemElectronic CommerceConcurrent SystemBuyer AgentSeller AgentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Software process establishment, evaluation and improvement are key research areas in the software engineering field today. Extensive research has been carried out and many different kinds of approaches exist to improve the software process and even more efforts are underway. Verification & validation process, which is part of the broader software process activities, plays a vital role in quality and profitability of the developed product but is believed to consume major portion of the development expenses and resources. Probably, research towards improving the verification & validation process has not been as actively directed as compared to software process improvement research. This paper identifies several potential future research directions towards improving verification and validation process.

This study aims to propose the improvement of RSA to secure the digital signature. This algorithm, which is called FE-RSA, focuses on two primary challenges: security and computing efficiency. A secret key and a fake public key are selected for the implementation to provide an additional security layer. In fact, FE-RSA attempts to protect against digital signature forgery. Moreover, the other main point of FE-RSA is that although an attacker can factor the modulus, FE-RSA is still secure. In addition, 512-bit, 1024-bit, and 2048-bit key sizes across four cryptography algorithms, including RSA, Multi-Prime RSA, the application of RSA and ElGamal (RSA-ElGamal), and FE-RSA, are selected for the experiment. Performance evaluations focused on processing time for the generation and validation processes. The experimental results demonstrate that FE-RSA regularly outperforms Multi-Prime RSA and RSA-ElGamal in terms of signing and verifying speed. In the signing process, FE-RSA is approximately 92.47%, 64.50%, and 3.82% faster than RSA-ElGamal for key sizes of 512-bit, 1024-bit, and 2048-bit, respectively. However, in the verification process, this method reduces processing time by about 97.12%, 87.53%, and 34.33% for identical key sizes. Then, it implies that FE-RSA provides the most significant performance benefit in the verification process. Although the processing time required in FE-RSA is slower than that of RSA, the security is higher than that of RSA. The reason is that RSA is based on only the Integer Factorization Problem (IFP). On the other hand, FE-RSA is based on both the Discrete Logarithm Problem (DLP) and IFP. However, FE-RSA is effectively applied in situations when a specific and reliable verifier has the secret key. In fact, FE-RSA integrates enhanced computing efficiency with multi-layered security. Therefore, the proposed method is established as a viable and resilient option for digital signature systems.

Business and model-driven development of BDI multi-agent systems

Performing checks on software specifications requires testing and validation. The discrepancy in the data entry process was caused by the validation process not being optimized. One of the consequences is the process of failure when inputting data. As a result, the application can be dangerous for future system users. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the quality and accurate verification. When the testing process finds errors that were previously unknown, then the test is called a good test. One of the testing method is the black box testing method with the Equivalence Partition technique. Equivalence Partition is a technique used to reduce the number of test cases that exist during testing, by entering data on each form that is in the application in each menu, then testing and grouping based on the validity by the system functionality.

This thesis seeks to advance the study on China's Special Economic Zones (SEZs) by exploring two important issues untouched by previous researches --- the reasons for the problem of policy inconsistency, ambiguity and unpredictability in the SEZs, and the effectiveness and significance of their experimental function as a laboratory for China's ongoing industrial reform and open-door policy. The Xiamen SEZ, rarely investigated by Western scholars, is chosen as the object of this case study because of its unique suitability. It is hoped that the findings from this thesis will significantly enhance the understanding of the difficulty and complexity of the reform and openness in China in general and in the SEZs in particular. This thesis approaches the two issues from three perspectives, which reflect three most important relationships regarding the development of the SEZs --- the one between the economic reform and the Special Policy, the one between the local economic development and foreign direct investment (FDI), and the one between the SEZs and the domestic economy. It examines the enterprise reform, transformation of the local industry through utilizing FDI, and the relationship between the foreign trade reform and the price reform, in the Xiamen SEZ in its first decade of the 1980s. In particular, it includes a detailed analysis of the characteristics and effects of Taiwan investment in Xiamen in recent years and hence represents one of very few, if not the first, serious studies, at the moment, on the subject. It concludes that the policy problem in Xiamen has been caused mainly by 1) the confusion of the economic reform and the implementation of the Special Policy, 2) the increasing dominance of Taiwan capital on the local economy, and 3) the close institutional link between the SEZ and the domestic economy. Also, it finds that a decade of the reform and development in Xiamen has produced few innovative and applicable experiences which could benefit the domestic reform and open-door. Thus, the effectiveness and significance of the SEZ's experimental function has so far been very limited.

This paper is concerned with the stability of planar mechanisms supported by multiple frictional contacts against gravity. Stability of equilibrium postures is investigated under initial perturbations which may involve sliding or separation at the contacts. The frictional dynamics is formulated using the notion of contact modes, and the related problems of solution ambiguity and inconsistency are reviewed. The paper then uses the condition of strong equilibrium to eliminate ambiguities, and defines a new condition of kinematic-strong equilibrium which additionally eliminates frictional inconsistencies. It is then proven that strong equilibrium is necessary for stability of frictional equilibrium postures, and that kinematic-strong equilibrium guarantees finite-time recovery of an initially perturbed contact. The results are demonstrated on a reduced model of a rigid body having a variable center-of-mass and supported by two frictional contacts. A companion paper completes the analysis of this reduced problem by investigating the overall hybrid dynamics and deriving sufficient conditions for its stability.