Jorge J. Gómez-Sanz

• Software Engineering
• Professor (Associate) at Complutense University of Madrid

Interactive applications are becoming increasingly popular to gather feedback from users in different fields (e.g., Urbanism, Design, Economy, or Sociology). However, it is difficult to keep users engaged with an application to provide high-quality answers, as there are plenty of competitors for their attention (e.g. other applications) and their a...

The quality of daily life is a key factor in today’s urban development. This is a complex aspect, as different groups of citizens understand it quite differently and have different needs. This is particularly important for people with disabilities. When thinking about solutions for smart cities, there are a few approaches for the identification of...

One of the key technologies transforming cities into smart cities is the Internet of Things or IoT. Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that third parties, such as authorities, citizens, and companies, do not really understand what IoT and other enabling technologies bring to them. Instead, they live in a continuum of delivering vertical (fi...

Pedestrian or crowds simulation is a complex and expensive task that involves a plethora of technologies. In certain exigent environments, for example, whether we want to use a complex simulation in a machine learning system, in real-time decision making or when the user does not need the details of the simulation, this computational cost may not b...

Smart Environments (SEs) work in close interaction with their users. To perform properly, these systems need to process their information (both from sensing and to act) considering its meaning for people. For instance, when they manage workflows that represent users’ activities or consider the tradeoffs between alternative actions. Introducing soci...

The use of Crowd Simulation for re-enacting different real life scenarios has been studied in the literature. In this field of research, the interplay between ambient assisted living solutions and the behavior of pedestrians in large installations is highly relevant. However, when designing these simulations, the necessary simplifications may resul...

Recent publications focus on the importance of designing an Ambient Intelligence that can be sensitive to human values and responsible for its societal impact. Obtaining and properly modeling these requirements can be a challenging task. Co-creation and social sciences methods are frequently applied in order to discover what end-users need using me...

The paper introduces a testing solution for evaluating Ambient Assisted Living systems by means of 3D simulations generated with a game engine, complex event processing, and classifiers. The solution aims to ensure that: (1) some key features of the problem appear in the simulation, and (2) the assistive solution interacts with the persons in the r...

Pedestrian or crowds simulation is a complex and expensive task that involves a plethora of technologies. In certain exigent environments, for example, whether we want to use a complex simulation in a machine learning system, in real-time decision making or when the user does not need the details of the simulation, this computational cost may not b...

Fighting plagiarism can be an exhausting task. In the context of social networks, it is common that some users regularly copy the content prepared by others and exhibit them as own. In the higher education context, it is not different and it may be even more critical. In a write-to-learn approach, if students copying text of others get similar rewa...

Testing the control and deployment of large networks of sensors and actuators is a complex and expensive task. This paper presents a 3D simulation tool that facilitates testing and measuring this kind of systems in a virtual environment, which alleviates the costs of doing these tasks in a physical setting. This is illustrated with an example of ho...

Developing a large, but smart environment is a complex task that requires the collaboration of experts of different disciplines. How to successfully attain such collaboration is not a trivial matter. The paper illustrates the problem with a case study where the manager of the facility intends to influence pedestrians so that they choose a task that...

Dealing with Alzheimer's Disease is an open problem within the ageing population context. While clinical solutions arrive, actions for improving the quality of the daily living of these patients are needed. Which solutions these can be is something experts can discuss and engineers can develop. To facilitate such discussion, and enabling a low cost...

The engineering of applications for complex and dynamic domains with autonomous participants is an increasingly difficult process. Requirements and functionalities are not fixed a priori, components are not designed nor controlled by a common entity, and unplanned or underspecified changes may occur during runtime. There is a need for representing...

This chapter presents the INGENIAS framework for Social Coordination. INGENIAS is an agent-oriented methodology that comprehends a modeling language, a development process, and a set of tools. The modeling language captures the MAS specification as well as the requirements of the system to be developed. The development process is an iterative proce...

When considering touch devices, hand dexterity becomes an issue for the elderly population. Solutions to this issue ought to be on the supportive side while not diminishing the autonomy of the users. According to self-determination theory, this implies being autonomy supportive. This idea inspires two concepts introduced in this paper, the undesira...

Mass media websites can be worthy to understand user trends in web services. RTVE, the National Broadcaster in Spain is a sample of such kind of service. Trend points to a shorter user interaction over the last three years, and a more straight access to content. Besides the number of pages consumed in a visit is becoming smaller as well. This artic...

The development of Ambient Assisted Living systems would be facilitated if there was a development environment that allowed to simulate in a computer the physical environment, its inhabitants, as well as the Ambient Assisted Living system. This requires, on the one hand, an infrastructure for simulating the physical environment and, on the other ha...

Micro-blogging has become a popular activity nowadays thanks to Twitter. However, micro-blogging is more than a commercial product. There exist free software implementations of the same principles. This work introduces Bolotweet, which is built on top of one of these free software platforms. It is oriented towards enabling an effective teacher-stud...

The gathering of crowd traffic data either from videos or from visual observation has different uses. In the social simulation context, one of them is validating crowd behavior models and match the resulting traffic in control points with the real ones. When such models have been already validated, the immediate use can be aiding managers of facili...

The deployment of AmI technologies in large facilities sets new challenges due to the difficulty to perform experiments in physical large settings, with high number of users. We propose a framework for such domain using simulations that combine social simulation techniques, specialized in assessing large population behaviors, along with experience...

For many years, the progress in agent-oriented development has focused on tools and methods for particular development phases. This has not been enough for the industry to accept agent technology as we expected. Our hypothesis is that the Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) community has not recognized the kind of development methods that in...

Research on agent interaction has attracted the attention of agent researchers for a long time. This paper revisits an old work to find uses of an argumentation protocol which borrows from social sciences to raise agreements among several agents. In this protocol, several agents discuss and provide a conclusion after some rounds of mutual informati...

The aim of this paper is to present a platform for helping agent researchers to become familiar with Smart Grids. Agent technology has been recognised as one of the enablers for Smart Grids. A Smart Grid intends to make an advanced use of available metering and generation capabilities in order to use more efficiently the electricity. Contributions...

Understanding how the web objects of a website are demanded is relevant for the design and implementation of techniques that assure a good quality of service. Several authors have studied generic profiles for web access, concluding that they resemble a Zipf distribution, but further evidences were missing. This paper contributes with additional emp...

Research in Ambient Intelligence usually cites Multi-Agent Systems as control solution. This demo introduces a development kit that combines Android, JADE-LEAP, and game engines to create a simulation environment where different systems can be developed. The demoed software will enable agent researchers to look for ways of controlling the elements...

Caches are a critical element of web-based information systems. Understanding the expected behaviour of cache policies is especially important for achieving good quality of service. Existing works have suggested that the behaviour of the web demand can be modelled as a Zipf distribution with α≤1. New evidence, which is presented in this paper, show...

In an Ambient Intelligence system for humans, devices in the environment perform actions to improve the quality of the daily living of a person. Research in normative systems could be applied to regulate the operation of this kind of systems. Nevertheless, determining the right norms is not trivial. This contribution discusses the case of a Parkins...

Computer simulation can be a complementary tool to study culture. A main issue in its application is finding the suitable computational primitives to translate the abstractions of social studies in a given context. Looking to overcome this problem, our research has developed a modelling framework based on the Activity Theory. This theory regards cu...

Functional annotation aims to predict the biological function of DNA sequences. This complex and time-consuming task has to process huge amounts of data and get high quality results. In order to guarantee the quality of the outcome, the annotation should be carried out by human experts, but the great volume of biological data produced lately demand...

This demo shows how the development of Ambient Assisted Living systems can be enhanced with the assistance of agent technology. Concretely, this demo introduces advances in the PHAT framework to create what we call Virtual Living Labs. This Virtual Living Lab reproduces realistic conditions of an application working inside embedded hardware that ca...

The construction of Smart Grids leads to the main question of what kind of intelligence such grids require and how to build it. Some authors choose an agent based solution to realize this intelligence. However, there may be some misunderstandings in the way this technology is being applied. This paper exposes some considerations of this subject, fo...

This chapter introduces a review of most of the work done in the INGENIAS methodology along 10 years. Few methodologies have been capable of evolving while keeping their initial premises. The key for INGENIAS survival has been an extreme adoption of Model Driven Development practises since its inception. The needs of its end users, the developers,...

The goal of this work is to introduce requirements analysis for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications for patients with Parkinson Disease (PD). The work is part of SociAAL project, which aims to reduce costs in the development of AAL applications for PD patients. A first step is the understanding of the needs of the PD patient and the differen...

This paper introduces PHAT, a 3D environment for facilitating the development of AAL services by providing a virtual living lab. PHAT’s purpose is reduce development costs of these services. It is based on an existing 3D game engine, jMonkeyEngine, to provide realistic representations of scenarios including visual details and physics laws to make t...

Agent-based technology is being used in an increasing variety of applications and domains. Despite the substantial research effort on methodologies for analyzing, designing and implementing multi-agent systems (MAS), maintenance and evolution of MAS software is nowadays challenging. This paper presents REAGENT, a reverse engineering technique for r...

Ambient Assisted Living is attracting the attention of researchers not only for dealing with aging, but also to improve the quality of living of people with other circumstances, like those of Parkinson patients. An Ambient Assisted Living system for a Parkinson patient has to consider the particularities of this disease. It mainly involves the alte...

A supervised statistical model for detecting the activities of daily living ADL from sensor data streams is proposed in this paper. This method works in two stages aiming at capturing temporal intra-and inter-activity relationships. In the first stage ...

Smart phones are equipped with a wide range of sensors (such as GPS, light, accelerometer, gyroscope, etc.) and allow users to be connected everywhere. These characteristics offer a rich information source for creating context-aware applications. However, testing these applications in the lab, before their deployment, could become a hard task or im...

Recent technological advances in the power generation and information technologies areas are helping to change the modern electricity supply system in order to comply with higher energy efficiency and sustainability standards. Smart grids are an emerging trend that introduce intelligence in the power grid to optimize resource usage. In order for th...

This paper introduces advances made in the INGENIAS methodology to deal with Ambient Intelligence (AmI). The work considers the particular features of AmI systems and how an agent-oriented methodology can help to address their development. Being INGENIAS a model-driven methodology, a first step has been to compare the concepts used in INGENIAS and...

One of the main challenges of today's society is the need to fulfill at the same time the two sides of the dichotomy between the growing energy demand and the need to look after the environment. Smart Grids are one of the answers: intelligent energy grids which retrieve data about the environment through extensive sensor networks and react accordin...

Online-behavior analysis must integrate people and systems. Activity theory provides a way to describe patterns of social interactions as properties with descriptions for automated processing.

Context: Choosing a design solution most often involves dealing with trade-offs and conflicts among requirements and design objectives. Making such trade-offs during early stages of requirements and design is challenging because costs and benefits of ...

This paper presents a methodology and tools for SoS engineering. The approach is based on the experience acquired in several developments made in the context of the SiCoSSyS project. It considers that the nature of SoS requires (1) the participation of a diversity of people with different backgrounds and profiles, and (2) to cope with the heterogen...

Agent literature has shown a big concern on the production of multi-agent system specifications. Nevertheless, there has not been a similar effort in surveying the different ways an agent oriented specification can be transformed into the actual implementation. This survey intends to cover this gap by pointing at concrete representative works of di...

The development of MAS can be facilitated with the introduction of simulations into the development process. The integration of simulations has been addressed by some agent oriented methodologies, generally defining mappings from the original Multi-Agent specification to concrete simulators like Repast or Sesame. This paper contributes with a deepe...

The human context within which a software system will operate is fundamental for its requirements. It may not appear to be very much related to the system, but it is very relevant in achieving its successful adoption. However, requirements engineers have usually a background in Software Engineering and are not trained to elicit this kind of informa...

Self-organisation can be studied from the perspective of self-management. A system assumed to have self-management capabilities can behave in the same way a self-organising sys-tem. Self-management aspects that leads to self-organising behaviours in this paper are self-protection and self-confi-guration aspects. This connection is studied in this p...

Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools support modeling-related activities in development projects. Given the variety of tools and functionalities, it is quite common to work with several tools in the same project. However, data cannot usually be exchanged between these tools without loss of information. Recent approaches address this mod...

This paper proposes using clustering techniques, such as Formal Concept Analysis to search the web for resources which are potentially useful for educational purposes and returning a clustering of results based on pedagogical criteria. Using the web as a sort of learning object repository can help providing a rich environment for content authoring...

This paper introduces a language called Self-Management Modelling Language (SelfMML) which supports the modelling of self- management capability requirements. The paper presents a case study related to t he automatic re-binding features in services which illustrates and analyses t he language usage in service-oriented systems.

In some areas of software engineering research, there are several metamodels claiming to capture the main issues. Though it is profitable to have variety at the beginning of a research field, after some time, the diversity of metamodels becomes an obstacle, for instance to the sharing of results between research groups. To reach consensus and unifi...

The emergent behavior of complex systems, which arises from the interaction of multiple entities, can be difficult to validate, especially when the number of entities or their relationships grows. This validation requires understanding of what happens inside the system. In the case of multi-agent systems, which are complex systems as well, this und...

Metamodels are a formalism for defining the abstract syntax of modeling languages. However, designing a suitable metamodel from the features intended for the language is not a trivial task. This paper presents a guideline for defining such metamodels using an Entity-Relationship approach in the Eclipse Modeling Framework. This guideline proposes to...

Practitioners of model-driven engineering usually find that producing model transformations still requires much effort. The Model Transformation By-Example (MTBE) approach softens this problem by means of the automated creation of model transformations from pairs of source and target model examples. However, the current techniques and tools for MTB...

This paper proposes a corpus of metrics to evaluate the balance of communications in these systems. The hypothesis of this paper is that these metrics are strongly related with the quality of service of the MASs. In addition, some classification rules are provided to classify agents according to the metrics; thus, an origin of the low quality of se...

This paper presents a chain of model transformations to guide and support the application of the INGENIAS development process. The MTGenerator tool generates these transformations with a Model Transformation By-Example approach, that is, automatically from pairs of model prototypes. The MTGenerator has the advantage over similar approaches and tool...

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering is currently deeply influenced by the techniques and concepts of Model-Driven Development. In this context, the use of automated transformations to support software processes is not explored enough. Models are supposed to be created following the activities of a process, which standard transformations could parti...

Requirements elicitation and analysis is intended to gain knowledge about customers' needs and the environment of a software system. Requirements not only commonly deal with business processes and their data but also with the motivation behind these activities, the social structures that forge them, and previous design decisions. Recent studies sho...

Many Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) methodologies incorporate a model- driven approach. Model Driven Engineering is based on three main ideas: models are the "first-class citizens", meta-models define modelling languages that are used to specify models and models are transformed during the development. However, model transformation is still a challengin...

INGENIAS is a methodology for the development of multi-agent sys- tems. INGENIAS support tools has recently incorporated a plug-in called the MT- Generator, which has been developed to facilitate the creation of model transforma- tions by-example from INGENIAS models. The MTGenerator tool overcomes some of the limitations of similar tools about the...

There is a growing interest among agent and multiagent system developers for formal methods. Formal methods are means to define and realize correct specifications of multiagent system. The benefits of formal methods become clearer when we recognize the cost of developing a defective multiagent system. This paper seeks to introduce engineers to the...

Software architectures that contain many dynamically interacting components, each with its own thread of control, engaging in complex coordination protocols, are difficult to correctly and efficiently engineer. Agent-oriented modelling techniques are important for the design and development of such applications. This book provides a diverse and int...

The use of simulation tools for reasoning about human societies formalizes their analysis and reduces the related costs, but it demands a high level of expertise in the design and programming of complex systems. This paper presents the SCAT framework aimed at bringing these tools closer to their end users, the researchers in social sciences. For th...

Context-aware applications rely on location services in order to provide functionality adapted to specific physical settings. A common problem in the design of these applications is the lack of a standard approach to incorporate these services in the overall application. The research in this paper proposes a Model-Driven Engineering approach using...

One of the key issues in development of Multi-agent System is following the more suitable development process for a particular problem. This means that development process models must be defined. Definition leads to better process understanding, facilitates process measurement and improvement, and constitutes the basis for automating the process it...

Looking for alternative ways of coordinating agents, this paper explores the adaptation of the Delphi protocol to agent systems. The Delphi protocol can be applied when a community of experts is required to deliver a consensual answer. In these cases, consensus stands for reaching an agreement among the experts about what the answer should be. This...

Testing and debugging activities are getting more relevance in multi-agent systems (MAS) as agents become part of real applications. Both activities are related, since failures to be debugged are frequently detected during the execution of tests. The support for these activities is not yet as complete as other activities of MAS development. However...

This paper presents a framework for defining metamodels. The main goal of this framework is to achieve the model interchange among CASE tools. This framework adds the CASE tools issues to the definitions of the model languages. The presented framework contains four internal metamodels. Firstly, a metamodel specifies the abstract syntax of the model...

Most agent-based simulation toolkits are based on the Java programming language. This makes their use difficult for social scientists, who are usually not skilled in computer programming. However, agent modelling concepts are not unlike those which could be used for the modelling of social systems. This assumption is considered in proposing the use...

The fast pace of evolution in Agent-oriented Software Engineering leads to a great variety of continuously changing Multi-Agent System (MAS) Modeling Languages (MLs). In this situation, there is a rising need of evaluation for MAS MLs, as the plenty of works on this subject reflects. This paper follows this line of research presenting an evaluation...

The INGENIAS Development Kit, IDK from now on, is the development support tool for the INGENIAS methodology [2]. It is distributed as GPL software and developed in Java. The distribution can be downloaded from http://ingenias.sourceforge.net while updated versions are always available in the subversion repositores hosted within the INGENIAS sourcef...

The Delphi protocol is applied when a community of experts is required to reach a consensus and to deliver an answer. In these cases, consensus stands for reaching an agreement among the experts about what the answer should be. This consensus reaching problem has been already considered in the literature, though its automatisation remains as a chal...

There is a lot of hype about social networks and related software within the concept Web 2.0 in the business and technical worlds. Given the fact that information is being widely spread in an exponential way with rooted dependencies among networks of social networks, we could find our digital identity exposed in ways that we could consider as inapp...

Agent-oriented methodologies are paving the way towards the adoption of agent technology in software industry. However, there are still several issues to address: testing mechanisms, specialized verification methods, a formally defined agent oriented development process, illustrative case studies, or better development tools. This should be conside...

Multi-agent systems methodologies define tasks and tools covering all the development cycle. Modelling and implementation activities are well supported and experimented. However, there has been few effort invested in debugging and validation techniques for MAS compared to modelling and implementation stages. This paper addresses the lack of tools t...

Intelligent multisensor surveillance systems consist of several types of sensors, which are installed on fixed and mobile devices. These components provide a huge quantity of information that has to be contrasted, correlated and integrated in order to recognize and react on special situations. These systems work in highly dynamic environments, with...

Each current agent-oriented methodology focuses on some aspects of multi-agent systems and may leave others aside. For this reason, a developer may find it useful to apply different specialised methods and tools for each aspect of the system under development. Nevertheless, the integration of different elements into a specification is not trivial....

The specification of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) involves the identification of a large number of entities and their relationships. This is a non-trivial task that requires managing different views of the system. Many problems concerning this issue originate in the presence of contradictory goals and tasks, inconsistencies, and unexpected behaviours...

The use of agents in workflows has been studied in several research papers. Contributions of agents to workflows include scalability, performance, distribution and interoperability. This paper shows the first steps towards an integrated approach for business workflows modelling using an agent oriented methodology called INGENIAS. It includes a mode...

This paper introduces a view of web services following the Web Services Architecture. This architecture considers web services as abstractions implemented with special programs called agents. The paper discusses the nature of these agents from the agent research perspective. Aiming at reusing the experience of agent research, the paper proposes an...

This paper proposes enhancing rapid application development by im-proving specifications to code mapping. This technique has been codified in a meta-CASE tool in order to be applied in a wider set of domains. The tool can be configured to integrate sources of a small application and make it evolve until obtaining the actual system prototype. The pr...

Although there is a huge amount of work and valuable proposals about agent oriented software engineering, it seems that the paradigm has not been yet widely adopted by software industry. Some claim that there is a need for a killer application showing clearly the benefits of multi-agent systems with respect to other techniques. Others may consider...