Master Thesis Defence by Ms Alina Aleksandrova
Ms Alina Aleksandrova defended her master thesis on 'Engineering data-aware commitment-based multiagent systems'
Ms Alina Aleksandrova defended her master thesis on 'Engineering data-aware commitment-based multiagent systems' at TUW on 15 October 2015.
Abstract:
Every large company nowadays represents a complex system, containing distributed units interconnected by social relations. Such systems can be modeled using the Multiagent system (MAS) approach. However, in virtually all current approaches to MAS modeling, data and processes are completely isolated. The result is that the model of the system is not in line with the implementation used at execution time, and that the system components, including their social relation, are not properly captured. In particular, in the last decade the commitment-based approach has been extensively studied to model the social relations in a MAS, and consequently to capture business contracts and interactions at a high-level of abstractions. However, to the best of our knowledge, all existing infrastructures and approaches can operate only with propositional commitments, which leads to seriously downgrade their impact and effectiveness. In this thesis, we show how to build MAS that can be specified using a simple declarative language that accounts for both data and processes. We also attack the problem of using propositional commitments and show the necessity of lifting them to first-order commitments. For this purpose, we propose different possible architectures for modeling data-aware, commitment-regulated MAS, and show a concrete implementation that combines the advantages of the standard relational technology with the well-established JADE multiagent infrastructure.