Holger Billhardt

Rey Juan Carlos University | URJC · Centre for Intelligent Information Technologies (CETINIA)

The emerging field of \emph{value awareness engineering} claims that software agents and systems should be value-aware, i.e. they must make decisions in accordance with human values. In this context, such agents must be capable of explicitly reasoning as to how far different courses of action are aligned with these values. For this purpose, values...

Due to technological advances, Internet of Things (IoT) systems are becoming increasingly complex. They are characterized by being multi-device and geographically distributed, which increases the possibility of errors of different types. In such systems, errors can occur anywhere at any time and fault tolerance becomes an essential characteristic t...

A cooperative is a business entity with the primary objective of providing benefits, services, and goods to its members, who both own and exercise democratic control over it. In the context of a cooperative, a fleet typically consists of vehicles owned by self-concerned individually rational owners who prioritize their own efficiency and the fairne...

Fog and edge computing paradigms increase the performance of IoT systems compared to those based exclusively on conventional cloud computing. Basically, they propose to move software services that process information to a nearby place where IoT data is collected instead of at the core of the network. The computing continuum concept goes a step furt...

One of the main problems that local authorities of large cities have to face is the regulation of urban mobility. They need to provide the means to allow for the efficient movement of people and distribution of goods. However, the provisioning of transportation services needs to take into account general global objectives, like reducing emissions a...

When it comes to urban fleet simulation, there are many factors which determine the quality of the outcome. Without real-world data on which to ground the setup, the results are not guaranteed to be useful. In addition, the coordination mechanisms for agents must be flexible and give the chance to agents to act following their own interests, as mos...

The regulation of mobility and traffic for the transportation of goods and the movement of people is one of the key issues local authorities are faced with, especially in large urban areas. The aim is to provide efficient mobility services that allow people the freedom to move within their cities as well as to facilitate the distribution of goods....

With the world population highly increasing, efficient methods of transportation are more necessary than ever. On the other hand, the sharing economy must be explored and applied where possible, aiming to palliate the effects of human development on the environment. In this paper we explore demand-responsive shared transportation as a system with t...

In recent years many novel applications have appeared that promote the provision of services and activities in a collaborative manner. The key idea behind such systems is to take advantage of idle or underused capacities of existing resources, in order to provide improved services that assist people in their daily tasks, with additional functionali...

Vehicle-sharing systems—such as bike-, car-, or motorcycle-sharing systems—have become increasingly popular in big cities in recent years. On the one hand, they provide a cheaper and environmentally friendlier means of transportation than private cars, and on the other hand, they satisfy the individual mobility demands of citizens better than tradi...

Prolonged focused work periods decrease efficiency with related decline of attention and performance. Therefore, emergency fleet break scheduling should consider both area coverage by idle vehicles (related to the fleet's target arrival time to incidents) and vehicle crews' service requirements for breaks to avoid fatigue. In this paper, we propose...

Agreement technologies refer to a novel paradigm for the construction of distributed intelligent systems, where autonomous software agents negotiate to reach agreements on behalf of their human users. Smart Cities are a key application domain for agreement technologies. While several proofs of concept and prototypes exist, such systems are still fa...

In the last years, many novel applications have appeared that promote the provision of services or activities in a collaborative way. Examples of such proposals are collaborative transportation services (uber, glovo, amazon flex, etc.), crowdsourcing, exchange help services among citizens, and others. The intrinsic idea behind such systems is to ta...

Vehicle sharing systems are becoming increasingly popular. The effectiveness of such systems depends, among other factors, on different strategic and operational management decisions and policies, like the dimension of the fleet or the distribution of vehicles. It is of foremost importance to be able to anticipate and evaluate the potential effects...

Urban mobility efficiency is of utmost importance in big cities. Taxi vehicles are key elements in daily traffic activity. The advance of ICT and geo-positioning systems has given rise to new opportunities for improving the efficiency of taxi fleets in terms of waiting times of passengers, cost and time for drivers, traffic density, CO2 emissions,...

Open fleets offer a dynamic environment where the fleet is continually rebuilt ad-hoc since vehicles can enter or leave the fleet anytime, and the only immutable entity is the item to be delivered. Therefore, we need to be able to define a changeable delivery plan capable of adapting to such a dynamic environment. Hence, we propose Open Fleet Manag...

The increase of population in big cities has produced several problems related to mobility of humans in the city, such as congestions, CO2 emissions, etc. Lately, governments are trying to mitigate this situation by promoting the use of greener means of transportation such as electrical vehicles or bikes. In this paper, we focus on station-based bi...

Nowadays, transportation is a critical sector of our lives, not only for the movement of people, but also to be capable to move goods around the world. Although providing such services can be seen as a very tiny problem in our society, behind it, there is a complex sector that requires sophisticated models and specific software to analyse a vast am...

Bike-sharing systems are becoming very popular in big cities. They provide a cheap and green mean of transportation used for commuting and leisure. Being a shared limited resource, it is common to reach imbalanced situations where some stations have either no bikes or only empty slots, thus decreasing the performance of the system. To solve such si...

Many challenges in today's society can be tackled by distributed open systems. This is particularly true for domains that are commonly perceived under the umbrella of smart cities, such as intelligent transportation, smart energy grids, or participative governance. When designing computer applications for these domains, it is necessary to account f...

Nowadays, systems are growing in power and in access to more resources and services. This situation makes it necessary to provide user-centered systems that act as intelligent assistants. These systems should be able to interact in a natural way with human users and the environment and also be able to take into account user goals and environment in...

E-Tourism applications require reliable means for sharing and reusing information and the possibility to add intelligence and inferred knowledge. In this paper, we focus on developing an ontology or common vocabulary for the tourism domain and, in particular, to represent resources from Croatia. We evaluate some of the most popular ontology develop...

The quality of service and efficiency of labour utilization in emergency service fleets, such as police, fire departments, and emergency medical services (EMS), depends, among other things, on the efficiency of work break scheduling. The workload of such fleets usually cannot be forecasted with certainty and its urgency requires an immediate respon...

The quality of service and efficiency of labour utilization in emergency service fleets, such as police, fire departments, and emergency medical services (EMS), depends, among other things, on the efficiency of work break scheduling. The workload of such fleets usually cannot be forecasted with certainty and its urgency requires an immediate respon...

Smart Cities require reliable means for managing installations that offer essential services to the citizens. In this paper we focus on the problem of evacuation of smart buildings in case of emergencies. In particular, we present a proposal for an evacuation guidance system that provides individualized evacuation support to people in case of emerg...

Nowadays, vehicles of modern fleets are endowed with advanced devices that allow the operators of a control center to have global knowledge about fleet status, including existing incidents. Fleet management systems support real-time decision making at the control center so as to maximize fleet performance. In this paper, setting out from our experi...

In this paper, we consider the route coordination problem in emergency evacuation of large smart buildings. The building evacuation time is crucial in saving lives in emergency situations caused by imminent natural or man-made threats and disasters. Conventional approaches to evacuation route coordination are static and predefined. They rely on eva...

In this paper we study the coordination of Emergency Medical Service (EMS) for patients with acute myocardial infarction with ST-segment elevation (STEMI). This is a health problem with high associated mortality. A ``golden standard'' treatment for STEMI is angioplasty, which requires a catheterization lab and a highly qualified cardiology team. It...

Nowadays, vehicles of modern fleets are endowed with advanced devices that allow the operators of a control center to have global knowledge about fleet status, including existing incidents. Fleet management systems support real-time decision making at the control center so as to maximize fleet performance. In this paper, setting out from our experi...

This paper treats the coordination of Emergency Medical Assistance (EMA) and hospitals for after-hours surgeries of urgent patients arriving by ambulance. A standard hospital approach during night-shifts is to have standby surgery teams come to hospital after alert to cover urgent cases that cannot be covered by the in-house surgery teams. This app...

The invention relates to a coordination model for any type of service for which the objective is to attend events that may occur unexpectedly in any area of a region of influence and wherein a fleet of vehicles is used to carry out the attendance. The invention is centered around services of the type wherein the time taken by a vehicle to arrive at...

Agreement technologies have settled the foundations for creating systems that operate on the basis of agreements in societies of independent, autonomous computational entities (agents). Nowadays more and more systems of such kind rely on a seamless interaction of software agents with humans. Humans work in partnership or closely related with agents...

This paper treats the coordination of Emergency Medical Assistance (EMA) and hospitals for after-hours surgeries of urgent patients arriving by ambulance. A standard hospital approach during night-shifts is to have standby surgery teams come to hospital after alert to cover urgent cases that cannot be covered by the in-house surgery teams. This app...

This paper presents an efficient Web Service Discovery approach based on hierarchical clustering. Conventional web service discovery approaches usually organize the service repository in a list manner, therefore service matchmaking is performed with linear complexity. In this work, services in a repository are clustered using hierarchical clusterin...

In Emergency Medical Assistance an efficient coordination of the ambulance fleet is crucial for enhancing patient treatment by reducing response times. Basic requirement for ambulance coordination is comprehensive information about the current state of the entire ambulance fleet. State information is usually transmitted by the ambulance crew member...

The main objective of emergency medical assistance (EMA) services is to attend patients with sudden diseases at any possible location within an area of influence. This usually consists in providing “in situ” assistance and, if necessary, the transport of the patient to a medical center. The potential of such systems to reduce mortality is directly...

Agreement technologies have settled the basis for creating systems that operate on the basis of agreements in societies of independent, autonomous computational entities (agents). However, nowadays more and more systems of such kind rely on a seamless interaction of software agents with humans. Humans work in partnership (directly or indirectly) or...

Fleet management systems are commonly used to coordinate mobility and delivery services in a broad variety of domains. However, their traditional top-down control architecture becomes a bottleneck in open and dynamic environments, where scalability, proactiveness, and autonomy are becoming key factors for their success. Here, the authors present an...

Multi-agent technology allows the development of current AmI applications. Specifically, a multi-agent system allows the formation and management of applications where the main components can be humans and software agents interacting and communicating with humans in order to help them in their daily activities. This kind of applications are what we...

The main objective of Emergency Medical Assistance services is to attend patients with sudden diseases at any possible location within an area of influence. Especially for severe emergency patients, the potential of such systems to reduce mortality is directly related to the response time, e.g., the time a patient has to wait for an ambulance. An e...

We present a framework for Dialogue-Based Web Services (DBWS), i.e. services that require several message exchanges during their execution. Service development is simplified with the use of script languages and abstracting the communication layer. Service advertisements are carried out with a semantic Web Service directory with search and reputatio...

In this Chapter we propose an organization-based multi-agent application for emergency medical assistance (EMA). The application uses different Agreement Technologies (AT) to provide support to the entire process of out-of-hospital assistance to severe emergency patients and to all involved participants. The system is inspired by the operational mo...

The capability of autonomous adaptation to changing conditions is a feature that requires the ability of agents to alter their own configuration and even their own composition. Adaptive agent organisation should consider agent self-adaptation and reorganisation processes. In this chapter a review of methods for designing and/or implementing adaptiv...

In Task-oriented MultiAgent Systems (T-MAS) with a heterogeneous population, deciding with whom to interact is a particularly difficult issue for an agent, as repeated interactions with the same agents might be scarce, and reputation mechanisms become increasingly unreliable. In this work, we present a mechanism (REM) which can be used by agents in...

Organisational abstractions have been presented during the last years as common solutions to regulate Open MultiAgent Systems. In particular, the concept of norm is defined at design time to assure the correct behaviour of agents in such systems. However, in many cases, the performance of a system does not only depend on the correct behaviour of th...

Adaptiveness can be considered as one of the most relevant features of complex distributed systems in general and Agreement Technologies (AT) in particular. In an agent-based, service-oriented and organisation-centric framework such as AT, a critical challenge is the definition of new organisations ”on the fly”, reacting to changes in the environme...

En este artículo se presenta un sistema multiagente para dar apoyo a la gestión de un servicio de asistencia en emergencias médicas. La aplicación proporciona un apoyo integral al proceso de asistencia, facilitando una interacción más eficaz entre los diferentes actores y entidades que participan en él, y utiliza servicios externos para ofrecer nue...

In this paper, the decentralized mobile target allocation problem is researched. We assume the existence of two groups of mobile agents: attackers and targets. Every attacker agent gets allocated to its best target based on the communication and coordination with the rest of the group positioned within a limited communication range (radius) and mov...

This work presents an adaptive sanctioning mechanism that can be applied in open multi-agent systems that are regulated through norms. This mechanism tries to identify the attributes of the environment that have some influence on agents decision making and uses such attributes to define sanctions that may prevent norm violations. Our approach adapt...

This article provides a brief overview of the field of coordination in multiagent systems, and outlines its relation to current efforts working towards a paradigm for smart, next-generation distributed systems, where coordination is based on the concept of agreement between computational entities. Two examples are provided to visualize the types of...

This paper proposes a mechanism that is able to encourage agents, participating in an open multiagent system, to follow a desirable behaviour, by introducing modifications in the environment. This mechanism is deployed by using an infrastructure based on institutional agents called incentivators. Incentivators are in charge of discovering which cha...

In this paper we propose a mechanism that encourages agents, participating in an open MAS, to follow a desirable behaviour, by introducing modifications in the environment. This mechanism is deployed by using an infrastructure based on institutional agents called incentivators. Each external agent is assigned to an incentivator that is able to disc...

The global objective of open multiagent systems might be in conflict with individual preferences of rational agents participating in such systems. Addressing this problem, we propose a mechanism able to attach incentives to agent actions such that the global utility of the system is improved. Such incentives are dynamically adjusted to each agent's...

In open multiagent systems, where agents may join/leave the system at runtime, participants can be heterogeneous, self-interested and may have been built with different architectures and languages. Therefore, in such a type of systems, we cannot assure that agents populating them will behave according to the objectives of the system. To address thi...

This paper presents a model for rational self-interested agents, which takes into account the possibility of violating norms. The transgressions take place when the expected rewards obtained with the defection from the norms surpass the expected rewards obtained by being norm-compliant. To develop such model, we employ Markov Decision Processes (MD...

Rational self-interested agents, which act so as to achieve the best expected outcome, should violate the norms if the expected rewards obtained with the defections from the norms surpass the expected rewards obtained by being norm-compliant. It means they should estimate the earnings brought about by the violations and the losses caused by their r...

In Open Multi-Agent Systems (OMAS), deciding with whom to interact is a particularly difficult task for an agent, as re- peated interactions with the same agents are scarce, and reputation mechanisms become increasingly unreliable. In this work, we present a coordination artifact which can be used by agents in an OMAS to take more informed decision...

Semantic web services have been studied during last years as an extension of Service-Oriented Computing on the Web 2.0. A lot of effort has been made to address some problems such as service discovery, matchmaking or service composition. Nevertheless, there is not much work in the literature about how to integrate trust into the process of selectin...

This paper addresses the problem of exploring how organizational structures may evolve over time using the information from the agents’ trust models. We present a mechanism based on clustering techniques capable of detecting behavioural patterns in organizational multi-agent systems, thereby identifying new roles that dynamically extend the role ta...

Bringing together structured and text-based sources is an exciting challenge for biomedical informaticians, since most relevant biomedical sources belong to one of these categories. In this paper we evaluate the feasibility of integrating relational and text-based biomedical sources using: i) an original logical schema acquisition method for textua...

In this paper we present an approach to design an Organized Multiagent Systems (OMAS) for teamwork. We use a general formal model for OMAS that employs the notion of organizational mechanisms. The purpose of such mechanisms is influencing the behaviour of the agents towards more effectiveness with regard to some objectives. To achieve our goal we u...

In the emerging field of m-Health, advanced applications provide healthcare to people anywhere, anytime using broadband and wireless communications, as well as mobile computing devices. The notion of Service-Oriented Multi-Agent Systems (SOMAS) that has recently been proposed appears to adequately capture the requirements of applications in this fi...

In this paper we present a demonstrator application for a real-world m-Health scenario: mobile medical emergency management in an urban area. Medical emergencies have a high priority given the potential life risk to the patients. And the use of advanced applications that support the different actors involved can improve the usage of appropriate res...

In this paper, we propose a general formal framework for organising multiagent systems whose participants are rational agents. This model is based on the idea of organisational mechanisms. These are mechanisms introduced in a multiagent system with the aim of influencing the behaviour of the agents towards more effectiveness with regard to some obj...

This paper provides a brief overview of the field of coordination in multi-agent systems, and outlines its relation to current efforts working towards a paradigm for smart, next-generation distributed systems, where coordination is based on the concept of agreement between computational entities. To illustrate the types of mechanisms that we envisi...

ABSTRACT Virtual Organizations (VOs) are becoming,an increasingly important research topic in the field of Multi-Agent Sys- tems (MAS). The problem of selecting suitable counterparts to interact with is of particular relevance for agents belong- ing to a VO. This issue has been extensively investigated, applying probability or cognitive approaches,...

Organisational models cannot only be used to structure multiagent systems but also to express behaviour constraints for agents in open environments. However, sometimes these behaviour constraints cannot be exhaustively enforced, and some agents may transgress the norms put forward by a Virtual Organisation. This poses an additional burden on agents...

The problem of selecting correct counterparts to interact with is of particular relevance in open and dynamic environ- ments. This problem increases when third parties may vary their behaviour at will. In this paper we examine the prob- lem of service provider selection using trust and reputation techniques. Most approaches to service provider sele...

In this paper, we describe OntoFusion, a database integration system. This system has been designed to provide unified access to multiple, heterogeneous biological and medical data sources that are publicly available over Internet. Many of these databases do not offer a direct connection, and inquiries must be made via Web forms, returning results...

In this paper we present a novel approach to integrate non-structured and structured sources of biomedical information. We part from previous research on database integration conducted in the context of the EC funded INFOGENMED project. In this project we developed the ONTOFUSION system, which provides a robust framework to integrate large sets of...

In this paper we present a suite of tools to automatically acquire and browse conceptual schemas from large collections of HTML-based biomedical documents. This suite is composed of two tools: the schema acquisition tool (SAT) and the zoomable browser (ZB). The SAT is the implementation of a novel four-phased method to extract conceptual schemas fr...