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Publications (85)
Multi-agent systems are proposed as a solution to mitigate nowadays software requirements: open and distributed architectures with dynamic and adaptive behaviour. Like any other software, multi-agent systems development process is error-prone; thus testing is a key activity to ensure the quality of the developed product. This paper sheds light on a...
Software reliability refers to the ability of a system to perform its intended function under specified conditions for a specified period of time. The first critical step in the software reliability testing process is to create a Software Operational Profile (SOP). Several methodologies for creating SOP have been proposed. Nonetheless, nearly all t...
Intelligent Embedded Systems (IES) represent a new discipline in
which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is coupled with Embedded Systems (ESs) in
order to create a new self-X-based Embedded Systems generation. Self-X capabilities,
like: self-repair, self-awareness, self-adaptation, etc. brought, for an ES,
the ability to reason about their external env...
Software reliability engineering (SRE) focus on engineering techniques for developing and maintaining software systems whose reliability can be quantitatively evaluated. Software operational profile (SOP) development is the first important step in software reliability testing process. Several approaches have proposed methodologies to generate the s...
Over the past few years, Internet of things (IoT) has become one of the most important technologies of the 21st century. Nowadays, it is possible to connect different objects to the internet via embedded devices. By means of this technology, physical objects can share and collect data with minimal human contribution. In this inter-connected world,...
In order to satisfy and meet requirements of users who interact with Web services, it is often necessary to combine and reuse existing Web services to create new Web services. The invocation of such service may be affected by various unforeseen changes. In order to adapt the composite web service to user invocations, this latter has to be dynamical...
Normative Open Multi-Agent Systems (NOMAS) are systems in which norms play a crucial role for organizing, coordinating, controlling agents’ behaviours and interactions. In addition, heterogeneous agents, in Open Multi-Agent Systems (OMAS), can work in similar or different ends. This might deviate the target system state and lead to a chaotic behavi...
Embedded systems are increasingly used in our daily life due to their importance. They are computer platforms consisting of hardware and software. They run specific tasks to realize functional and non functional requirements. Several specific quality attributes were identified as relevant to the embedded system domain. However, the existent general...
Service-oriented architecture provides the ability to combine several web services in order to fulfil a user-specific requirement. In dynamic environments, the appearance of several unforeseen events can destabilize the composite web service (CWS) and affect its quality. To deal with these issues, the composite web service must be dynamically recon...
This article describes how software quality engineering is an inevitable activity, which must be accomplished during software development process in order to avoid software failures and ensuring its quality. Embedded systems are computer platforms, which require high quality software. Many researchers interested in embedded systems have demonstrate...
This article introduces a new learner's self-assessment environment as CEHL that allows comparison of learners' programs with those elaborated by the teacher. The subjacent idea is to indirectly compare programs through their graphical representations described by ontologies. So, CEHL developed so-called S_Onto_ALPPWA which allows comparing learner...
Research accomplished in this thesis is placed in the context of agent oriented software engineering. We focus, mainly, on the controllability problem of Open Multi-Agent Systems (Open MAS). Mastering the behaviour of Open MAS is a hard task with respect to inherited characteristics like: openness, dynamic, non-determinism, heterogeneity, emergency...
In Open Multi-Agent Systems (Open MAS), no central authority can control all the agents. The agents share some features like: heterogeneity, different aims and objectives, autonomy, self-interested that conflicts individual goals and limited trust. Also, agents, in Open MAS, can enter and leave a system at any time. In order to ensure that the syst...
Normative multi-agent systems are multi-agent systems where agents are governed by norms. This recent research domain is now in full expansion. Despite the progress made in this area, various challenges remain the subject of research studies. In particular, there is a need for innovative solutions to support the implementation of this kind of multi...
In this work, we propose a new distributed dynamic planning approach based on constraint satisfaction, able to take into account the satisfaction of the constraints in all new versions of generated plans. Our approach is to generate, a new plan by each agent, whenever there is a change in its set of actions to plan caused by the unpredictable chang...
This article describes how software quality engineering is an inevitable activity, which must be accomplished during software development process in order to avoid software failures and ensuring its quality. Embedded systems are computer platforms, which require high quality software. Many researchers interested in embedded systems have demonstrate...
Dynamic composition or integration remains one of the key objectives of Web services technology. This paper aims to propose an innovative approach of dynamic Web services composition based on functional and non-functional attributes and individual preferences. In this approach, social networks of Web services are used to maintain interactions betwe...
Formal semantics provide precise specifications of the expected behavior of organizational model based on multi-agent system, allowing users to understand them and also modelers to reason about them and to prove their correctness. A first step was described to provide a formal specification framework among organization-centered multi-agent system b...
In multi-agent systems, the yellow pages service is very important for agents to be able to interact with each other. The more the number of agents is high, the more performance degradation will result, due to the overload of requests sent to central yellow pages. This issue didn’t get much attention from researchers despite its importance. The pro...
Agent technology has proved its ability and efficiency in modelling complex distributed applications. During the last two decades, several MAS development methodologies have been proposed like, for instance, Gaia, Tropos and PASSI. Although these methodologies have made significant contributions to meet several challenges in the MAS development fie...
Reorganization in Multi-Agent Systems plays a crucial role in the dynamic adaptation of the structure and the behaviour of organizations. In order to ensure consistency of the resulting organization, the reorganization process has to be controlled. This paper proposes a novel approach for controlling the reorganization process of Multi-Agent System...
With the emergence of the service oriented approach, the number of Web services is growing continuously. The selection of the "best" Web service for a particular need is a real challenge. Most proposed approaches to Web ser-vices selection focused on the description of Web services themselves and neglect their interactions. To overcome the selectio...
The measurement is an important field in the software engineering. This field studies the assignment of a value to a software attribute using metrics. In fact, the use of metrics, which are the defined measurement methods and the measurement scales, in software engineering allows among other goals to control the quality of the software products, th...
In this paper we present a novel approach for the formal specification of multi-agent system based on Agent-Group-Role (AGR) organizational model. The present work takes place in the context of approaches [1] [2], whose objectives is to support the translation of MAS organizational requirements represented by UML and extending AUML diagrams into a...
In the last decade, ubiquitous computing (UC) has become an aspiration of the computing community.
Nowadays, it is so profound that it is increasingly indistinguishable from the overall agenda of computing
research. In UC, the main objective is to provide users the ability to access services and resources anytime,
anywhere, in particular using Mobi...
In the last decade, ubiquitous computing (UC) has become an aspiration of the computing community. Nowadays, it is so profound that it is increasingly indistinguishable from the overall agenda of computing research. In UC, the main objective is to provide users the ability to access services and resources anytime, anywhere, in particular using Mobi...
In Open MAS (Open Multi Agent Systems), agents can freely join and leave systems at any time. The inherent
specificities of such systems like dynamicity, non-determinism and emergency make their target states difficult to achieve. Agents, in Open MAS, are often heterogeneous, self-interested with conflicting individual goals and limited trust. Con...
Multi-agent systems (MASs) are being increasingly used in complex and distributed applications development. Such applications should satisfy the requirements of users in terms of quality. Accordingly, it is important to assess the quality of such systems. In fact, several metrics have been proposed to assess different aspects of multi-agent systems...
Multi-agent systems (MASs) are being increasingly used in complex and distributed applications development. Such applications should satisfy the requirements of users in terms of quality. Accordingly, it is important to assess the quality of such systems. In fact, several metrics have been proposed to assess different aspects of multi-agent systems...
Organization-Based Multi-Agent Systems are receiving increasingly more attention in the field of complex and distributed systems development. Holonic Multi-Agent Systems (HMAS) are considered as well known organization allowing the construction of complex systems that are efficient in terms of use of resources, highly resilient to disturbances and...
Multi Agent Systems (MAS) are increasingly gaining importance as a powerful paradigm to designing and implementing distributed applications. However, existing multi-agent applications are developed without considering the separation of non-functional concerns from the functional ones. This makes the implementation, comprehension and maintenance of...
Our project takes place in the context of Software Engineering and Distributed Artificial Intelligence and aims to develop a generic organizational formal framework for organization-oriented specification of Real Time Multi-Agents System (RT-MAS) aspects to support the verification and validation of such system as an important discipline of Agent B...
Traceability plays an important role in the development of computing systems, specifically, the complex ones. It provides several benefits to stakeholders and developers during the different phases of the systems development life cycle, including verification & validation and maintenance. Unfortunately, there are very few works in literature addres...
This paper introduces a new learner's self-assessment environment as a computing environment for human learning (CEHL) that allows comparison of learners' C++ object-oriented programs with those elaborated by the teacher. The subjacent idea is to indirectly compare object-oriented programs through their graphical representations described by UML cl...
The learners’ assessment, the topic addressed by this thesis, is one of the most
important research areas in computer environments for human learning (CEHL).
The assessment is at the heart of any learning process. It is the means to regulate
learning. It is fundamental because it is the only way to ensure good transmission of
knowledge to the le...
Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is a promising software paradigm. Considered as a natural metaphor to modeling complex systems, MAS are applied to develop a wide range of applications. However, the developed system’s complexity is a hard obstacle to understand and maintain them. In this paper, some metrics are presented to measure the complexity of MAS....
Many aspect mining techniques have been proposed for object-oriented systems. Unfortunately, aspect mining for Multi-Agent Systems is an unexplored research area. The inherent specificities of Multi-Agent Systems (such as autonomy, pro-activity, reactivity, adaptability, etc.) make it difficult to understand, reuse and maintain their code. We propo...
The quality assurance of software is one of the most important purposes of software engineering. However, the quality concept is undergone to subjective interpretations. Consequently, several models are proposed to understand and evaluate the software quality. The ISO/IEC 25010 is the new international standard quality model. Being standard increas...
Reorganization in Multi-Agent Systems plays a crucial role in the dynamic adaptation of the structure and the behaviour of organizations. In order to ensure consistency of the resulting organization, the reorganization process has to be controlled. This paper proposes a novel approach for controlling the reorganization process of Multi-Agent System...
Reorganization in Multi-Agent Systems plays a crucial role in the dynamic adaptation of the structure and the behaviour of organizations. In order to ensure consistency of the resulting organization, the reorganization process has to be controlled. This paper proposes a novel approach for controlling the reorganization process of Multi-Agent System...
Recently, Artifact-Centric Business Processes have emerged as an approach in which processes are centred on data as a “first-class citizen”. A key challenge faced by such processes is to develop effective mechanisms that support formal specification, validation and verification of their static and dynamic behaviours i.e., the data of interest and h...
In this paper we present our approach allowing the translation of Real Time Multi-Agents Systems (RT-MAS) organizational requirements described by extended AUML (Agent UML Language) diagrams into a formal specification written in Real Time Maude language (RT-Maude). In fact, the approach is an extension of our previous work [1] that consists in ext...
Over the past few years, an exceptional interest has been taken in the area of Service-Oriented Computing. Particularly, a remarkable effort has been made in the context of Web service discovery, a very important and active research domain. In fact, the number of Web services has grown rapidly and the task of their discovery resting on standards, U...
Ubiquitous computing is an emerging paradigm for interactions between people and computers that makes the technology virtually invisible in our lives. Its aim is on the one hand, to add additional capabilities to everyday objects, allowing them to sense their environment and interact with the people and objects within it, to enhance their existing...
UCM Use Case Maps notation helps designers to capture system requirements and visualise design. UCM is mainly focused on system functionalities and they are easy to learn and understand. However, UCM suffers from a lack of standard formal semantics. This weakness can lead, in the rest of the development process, to several problems of inconsistency...
Over the last few years, several organizational models have been proposed in the literature for ensuring social order in Multi-Agent System (MAS) applications. Those models have considerably forwarded the domain by different paradigms to improving MAS development process. However, they have totally omitted real-time constraints, important aspects f...
Agent Interaction Protocols (AIP) play a crucial role in multi-agent systems development. AIP allow specifying interactions (sequences of messages) between agents. As agent-oriented development emerges, testing agent-based software is receiving increased research attention. We present, in this paper, a novel conformance testing technique for agent...
Multi-agent systems paradigm is the most appropriate one to developing complex systems. Consequently, it is used to develop real-time intelligent systems which are one of complex systems categories. In the literature, several works have been proposed for formalizing many aspects of multi-agent systems. However, the application of formal methods upo...
This paper presents a novel process for formalizing UCM notation as an executable formal specification described in the Maude language Strategy, a recent extension of Maude. The main motivation of our work is essentially to provide a sound and rigorous description of complex systems described by UCM, which can help analysts, designers and developer...
This paper presents a novel approach for learner self- Assessment. The aim of this approach is to offer to learners an evaluation tool as a CEHL (Computing Environment for Human Learning) allowing comparing their productions (C++ object-oriented programs) with those elaborated by teacher. Considered as part of our platform E-TéléTP@AALP (Environnem...
Ubiquitous computing is a recent research domain that has attracted interest from several researchers. Its main objective is allowing users to access data anytime, anywhere, in particular using Mobile Devices (MD).Applications in this domain are sensitive to the context and must be able to perceive it to adapt their behaviours to this context, taki...
Nowadays Web services have become a new focal point of all the technological market of IT. Their number has grown rapidly and the task of their discovery resting on standards, UDDI and ebXML becomes more and more difficult. These standards have their own inherent limitations; they describe only the functional aspect of Web services and prohibit the...
Ubiquitous computing is a recent research domain that has attracted interest from several researchers. Its main objective is allowing users to access data anytime, anywhere, in particular using Mobile Devices (MD).Applications in this domain are sensitive to the context and must be able to perceive it to adapt their behaviours to this context, taki...
Real-time agent based systems are characterized by their complexity in which several skills are required in all devel-opment process stages. Specially, the communication between the different development groups is a vital task. The graphical specifications play an interesting role in understanding system aspects. In this paper we propose the transf...
The use of multi-agent paradigm represents an efficient solution for developing real-time intelligent systems. Undoubtedly, the application of formal methods for developing real-time agent based systems provides several advantages. Mainly, it offers a solid basis for the verification and validation activities. In this paper, we extent a previous ap...
La composition de services Web est un problème qui a suscité un
intérêt considérable dans la communauté des chercheurs. L’utilisation de WSBPEL
2.0 (Web Services-Business Process Execution Language), le langage
standard pour la composition des services Web dans un processus métier, est
devenue incontournable. Néanmoins, la sémantique de chacune de...
A novel formal functional requirements specification approach for real-time multi-agent system is presented in this paper. The methodology of our approach consists in translating extended AUML diagrams describing RT-MAS' functional requirements into a RT-Maude specification. The proposed approach considers jointly functional, static and dynamic asp...
In this paper we present a systematic approach allowing the translation of Multi-Agents Systems’ functional requirements described by extended UML (Unified Modeling Language) use case diagrams and, AUML (Agent UML) sequence diagrams into a formal specification written in Maude language. Our approach proposes firstly, extending UML use case by using...
WS.BPEL 2.0 (Web Services Business Process Execution Language) commonly known as BPEL for short, is currently the de-facto standard language to represent the behavior of web services composition. It offers the possibility to specify the behavior of business processes in two ways: executable and abstract business processes. An abstract business proc...
Dans ce papier, nous présentons une nouvelle approche pour la spécification formelle des besoins fonctionnels des systèmes multi-agents temps réel. Cette approche se propose de combiner les avantages du formalisme de modélisation graphique Agent UML et du langage de spécification formelle RT-Maude dans une seule technique. Cette technique est basée...
To achieve the multi-agent systems' goals, agents interact to exchange information, to cooperate and to coordinate their tasks. Interaction is generally recognized as an important characteristic of multi-agent systems (MAS). The usual approaches to model agents' interactions consist of describing them as protocols [Hug04]. In the literature, severa...
Real-time multi-agent systems represent a promising area in the computer science domain. The majority of works realized in
such a domain have been developed without tacking into account the formal specification of agent model. Formalizing real time
multi-agent systems may offer a solid basis for their verification and validation. We present, in th...
Interaction is an important aspect of a multi agent system. When the information available to the agents about their selves and about their environment is uncertain and incomplete, this may create conflict in their interaction. In this case, the agents could achieve their goals by interacting using argumentation. In addition to the aptitudes of a t...
DIMA (Développement et Implémentation de systèmes Multi-Agents) multi-agent applications have been developed without regarding software development process. Formal specification and verification play a primordial role during the development of multi-agent applications. They allow producing systems of high quality. We present in this paper, a formal...
This paper presents a systematic approach supporting the translation of UML use case diagrams, describing the functional requirements of a system, into a Maude formal specification. The proposed approach also considers the static and dynamic features of object-oriented systems. The formal and object-oriented language Maude, based on rewriting logic...
Model Checking based verification techniques represent an important issue in the field of concurrent systems quality assurance. The lack of formal semantics in the existing formalisms describing multi-agents models combined with multi-agents systems complexity are sources of several problems during their development process. The Maude language, bas...
We present, in this paper, a framework supporting a formal verification of concurrent UML models using the Maude language. We consider both static and dynamic features of concurrent object-oriented systems. We focus on UML class, state and communication diagrams. The formal and object-oriented language Maude, based on rewriting logic, supports form...
We present, in this paper, a new technique supporting an automatic generation of testing sequences from Agent UML (AUML) diagrams. The considered diagrams are related to agents' interaction protocols. They are formally described using the formal specification language Maude. Starting from the Maude specifications generated automatically from the AU...
We present, in this paper, a framework supporting a formal verification of UML diagrams using the Maude language. The approach considers both static and dynamic features of object-oriented systems. We focus, in particular, on UML class, state and communication diagrams. The formal and object-oriented language Maude, based on rewriting logic, suppor...
Agents Interaction Protocols (AIPs) play a crucial role in multi-agents systems development. They allow specifying sequences of messages between agents. Major proposed protocols suffer from many weaknesses. We present, in this paper, a formal approach supporting the verification of agents' interaction protocols described by using AUML formalism. Th...
UML is widely used in the modeling and the conception of object-oriented systems. However its lack of formal semantics may generate some incoherencies in systems described using several diagrams, what induces some difficulties in the verification stages that follow the modeling of these systems. Based on rewriting logic, the formal and object-orien...
In this paper, we present a formal and systematic approach allowing translating the specification of the interactions between agents, described using AUML formalism, in a Maude specification. Based on rewriting logic, the formal and object-oriented language Maude offers an interesting way for concurrent systems formal specification and programming....
In this paper, we present a formal framework supporting the translation of UML diagrams into a formal specification based on the Maude language Our approach considers both static and dynamic aspects of object-oriented systems We consider, in particular, UML class, state and collaboration diagrams The formal and object-oriented language Maude, based...
In this paper we present a formal framework supporting the translation of interactions between agents (the interactions are described with the help of the RCA formalism) in a Maude specification. Based on rewriting logic, the formal and object-oriented language Maude supports formal specification and programming for a wide range of applications. Th...
In this paper, we present a systematic approach allowing translating the specification of the interactions between agents, described by the AUML formalism, in a Maude specification. Based on rewriting logic, the Maude language offers, through its rich notation, an interesting way for concurrent systems formal specification and programming. The main...
We present, in this paper, a formal and generic framework, called DIMA-Maude, supporting a formal description and validation of DIMA (Development and Implementation of Multi-Agents systems) agents. The framework is described using the formal and object-oriented language Maude. Based on rewriting logic, the Maude language offers an interesting way f...
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 pr...
Dans cet article, nous présentons une approche générique pour translater les descriptions des aspects dynamiques des systèmes orientés-objet, décrites en diagrammes d’états-transitions et diagrammes de collaboration d’UML, dans une spécification Maude. Le langage Maude, basé sur la logique de réécriture, offre un pouvoir d'expression assez riche po...
