Verifying that agent interactions in a multiagent system (MAS) are compliant to a given global protocol is of paramount importance for most systems, and is mandatory for safety-critical applications. Runtime verification requires a proper formalism to express such a protocol, a possibly non intrusive mechanism for capturing agent interactions, and a method for verifying that captured interactions are compliant to the global protocol. Projecting the global protocol onto agents' subsets can improve efficiency and fault tolerance by allowing the distribution of the verification mechanism. Since many real MASs are based on JADE, a well known open source platform for MAS development, we implemented a monitor agent that achieves all the goals above using the ``attribute global types'' formalism for representing protocols. Using our JADE monitor we were able to verify an extremely complex industrial MAS currently used by Ansaldo STS for allocating platforms and tracks to trains inside Italian stations

This paper presents the "Ontologica" system, a forefront project born from a joint effort between the Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and System Engineering of Genoa university and Ansaldo STS from the same city in the design of advanced information systems. The aim of the project is twofold: the adoption of ontologies to manage the Centralized Traffic Control CTC logics of a railway system; the improvement of the user interface through the exploitation of natural language queries. Being Ansaldo STS a leader in the railway and metro scope, this project aims to develop a system to be tested on a real and large dataset before being adopted in the railway stations using the CTC system. The first results we obtained are very promising and the system is currently under testing and improvement. In this paper we present the "Ontologica" rationale and architecture with some usage examples

This paper describes IndianaMAS, a multiagent system able to automatically classify and manage images, sketches, and multilingual documents in a cultural heritage domain. The latter has been formalized by means of an ontology, which enables the semantic integration of heterogeneous data from different sources, drives the agent communication with the internal and external environment, and provides an abstract and human- readable interface between the system and the user. IndianaMAS is able to expose to the world the classified data via a digital library. Modularity and reusability are the key engineering principles followed in the system design and implementation. We present the details of the IndianaMAS system and discuss how its archi- tecture can be generalized to create – with the minimal effort – systems addressing similar classification, storage, and management problems, but operating in different domains and driven by different ontologies. The concrete problems we faced and their solutions are described to share our lesson learned and, at the same time, to show the applicability and reusability of our modular approach based on ontologies, agents, and digital libraries

The operational environment can be a valuable source of information about the behavior of software applications and their usage context. Although a single instance of an application has limited evidence of the range of the possible behaviors and situations that might be experienced in the field, the collective knowledge composed by the evidence gathered by the many instances of a same application running in several diverse user environments (eg, a browser) might be an invaluable source of information. This information can be exploited by applications able to autonomously analyze how they behave in the field and adjust their behavior accordingly. Augmenting applications with the capability to collaborate and directly share information about their behavior is challenging because it requires the definition of a fully decentralized and dependable networked infrastructure whose nodes are the user machines. The nodes of the infrastructure must be collaborative, to share information, and autonomous, to exploit the available information to change their behavior, for instance, to better accommodate the needs of the users to prevent known problems. This paper describes the initial results that we obtained with the design and the development of an infrastructure that can enable the execution of collaborative scenarios in a fully decentralized way. Our idea is to combine the agent-based paradigm, which is well suited to design collaborative and autonomous nodes, and the peer-to-peer paradigm, which is well suited to design distributed and dynamic network infrastructures. To demonstrate our idea, we augmented the popular JADE agent-based platform with a software layer that supports both the creation of a fully decentralized peer-to-peer network of JADE platforms and the execution of services within that network, thus enabling JADE multiagent systems (MASs) to behave as peer-to-peer networks. The resulting platform can be used to study the design of collaborative applications running in the field.

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