SENSOR WEB INTERACTION

Ubiquitous sensing fuses the concepts of intelligent systems with ubiquitous computing in the development of novel Sensor Web applications, whereby the interaction of multiple disparate autonomous artefacts is a key requirement. In this paper, we present SIXTH, which is a middleware infrastructure for Ubiquitous Sensing that facilitates, and supports, the development and deployment of Sensor Web applications. SIXTH has been designed to be extensible, with provisions for user definable data retention policies, custom sensor data representations, and custom sensor node representations, whilst still providing a rich set of default behaviours. Within SIXTH, support is provided for the development and interaction of applications that incorporate both physical and cyber (virtual server side) sensors. With a view to supporting intelligent, in network, interaction policies, whereby sensor nodes must negotiate and coordinate their behaviour, the system has been designed to operate in conjunction with Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME). AFME is a minimised footprint intelligent agent platform designed for resource constrained devices. It is based on the standard Agent Factory platform, which was developed for desktop machines, and is representative of a class of agent systems, which are referred to as Agent Oriented Programming frameworks. The paper discusses a ubiquitous mapping application that was developed using the middleware.

An Architecture for Authentication and Authorization of Mobile Agents in E-Commerce

Agent-based e-commerce is a new technology being researched extensively by many academic and industrial organizations. The mobility and autonomy properties of agents have offered a new approach of doing business online. To fully exploit the advantages of this new technology, a secure system to authenticate and authorize mobile agents must be in place. In this chapter, an architecture to ensure a proper authentication and authorization of agents has been proposed. The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is used as the underlying cryptographic scheme. An agent is digitally signed by the Agent Factory and its signature is authenticated at hosts using the corresponding public key. Agents can also authenticate the hosts to make sure that they are not heading to a wrong place. When an agent visits a host, agent’s expiry date, host trace, and the factory’s trustworthiness are checked during the authentication process. According to the level of authentication that the incoming agent has passed, the agent will be categorized and associated with a relevant security policy during the authorization phase. The corresponding security policy will be enforced on the agent to restrict its operations at the host. The prototype has been implemented with Java.

Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution, and Roaming

Agent-based e-commerce is a promising novelty that performs tasks such as payment, mediation, interaction, and sales promotion in simple and intelligent manners. The agents can be endowed with attributes such as mobility, intelligence, and autonomy. Constructing appropriate architecture for agent systems in e-commerce is a fundamental consideration in facilitating agent-based transactions (Lee, Kang, & Lee, 1997). A practical way is to provide sites with methods to fabricate various agents according to the requirements of the clients. Due to the nature of e-commerce and the Internet, agents should be able to adapt to a changing environment automatically. Agents should therefore be able to evolve in terms of intelligence and also be able to roam so as to utilize the power of network computing (Guan & Yang, 1999; Yang & Guan, 2000). In order to meet the requirements discussed and to provide an environment for an in-depth research in e-commerce, this chapter proposes secure agent fabrication, evolution and roaming (SAFER) for e-commerce. DESCRIPTION OF SAFER Secure Agent Fabrication Evolution and Roaming (SAFER) is an infrastructure to serve agents in e-commerce and establish the necessary mechanisms to manipulate them. The goal of SAFER is to construct open and evolutionary agent systems for e-commerce. The SAFER architecture comprises different communities, as are described in Figure 1. Each community consists of the following components: Owner, Butler, Agent, Agent Factory, Community Administration Center, Agent Charger, Agent Immigration, Clearing House and Bank, which are illustrated in Figure 2. Each component will be elaborated in the following subsections.

Modeling and Programming by Commitment Rules in Agent Factory

Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP) is a relatively new programming paradigm, proposed by Yoav Shoham, which views software systems as consisting of a set of agents that interact with one another to solve problems beyond their individual capabilities. Since the inception of the paradigm, a number of AOP languages have been proposed. This chapter focuses on one such language, the Agent Factory Agent Programming Language (AFAPL), a practical rule-based language that has been applied to a wide range of problem domains including robotics, virtual and mixed reality environments, and mobile computing. AFAPL is placed in context through a general introduction to the state-of-the-art in AOP. The chapter finishes with a discussion of some future trends for AOP and some concluding remarks.