Simon Miles

• PhD in Computer Science
• Lecturer at King's College London

Given the distributed, heterogenous, and dynamic nature of service-based IoT systems, capturing circumstances data underlying service provisions becomes increasingly important for understanding process flow and tracing how outputs came about, thus enabling clients to make more informed decisions regarding future interaction partners. Whilst service...

Current work on multi-agent systems at King’s College London is extensive, though largely based in two research groups within the Department of Informatics: the Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) thematic group and the Reasoning & Planning (RAP) thematic group. DAI combines AI expertise with political and economic theories and data, to explo...

Reputation is crucial to enabling human or software agents to select among alternative providers. Although several effective reputation assessment methods exist, they typically distil reputation into a numerical representation, with no accompanying explanation of the rationale behind the assessment. Such explanations would allow users or clients to...

An increase in volumes of data and a shift towards live data enabled a stronger focus on resource-intensive tasks which run continuously over long periods. A Grid has potential to offer the required resources for these tasks, while considering a fair and balanced allocation of resources among multiple client agents. Taking this into account, a Grid...

Reputation is crucial to enabling human or software agents to select among alternative providers. Although several effective reputation assessment methods exist, they typically distil reputation into a numerical representation, with no accompanying explanation of the rationale behind the assessment. Such explanations would allow users or clients to...

Trust and reputation allow agents to make informed decisions about potential interactions. Trust in an agent is derived from direct experience with that agent, while reputation is determined by the experiences reported by other witness agents with potentially differing viewpoints. These experiences are typically aggregated in a trust and reputation...

Assessing trust and reputation is essential in multi-agent systems where agents must decide who to interact with. Assessment typically relies on the direct experience of a trustor with a trustee agent, or on information from witnesses. Where direct or witness information is unavailable, such as when agent turnover is high, stereotypes learned from...

Complex systems often exhibit emergent behaviour, unexpected macro-level behaviour caused by the interaction of micro-level components. In multiagent systems, these micro-level components may be autonomous agents and the emergent behaviour may be expressed as norms—patterns of behaviour that arise among the agents in response to their environment a...

Quality of Service (QoS) properties play an important role in distinguishing between functionally equivalent services and accommodating the different expectations of users. However, the subjective nature of some properties and the dynamic and unreliable nature of service environments may result in cases where the quality values advertised by the se...

This paper presents an expert system for a nutrition care process tailored for the specific needs of elders. Dietary knowledge is defined by nutritionists and encoded as Nutrition Care Process Ontology, and then used as underlining base and standardized model for the nutrition care planning. An inference engine is developed on top of the ontology,...

Many researchers focus on resource intensive tasks which have to be run continuously over long periods. A Grid may offer resources for these tasks, but they are contested by multiple client agents. Hence, a Grid might be unwilling to allocate its resources for long terms, leading to tasks’ interruptions. This issue becomes more substantial when tas...

Nowadays, much research is concerned with execution of long-term continuous tasks, which produce data in real time, e.g. monitoring applications. These tasks can be run for months or years and they are usually resource intensive in terms of the large amounts of data which is processed per time unit. A Grid can potentially provide the amount of reso...

Data about patients are available from diverse sources, including those routinely collected as individuals interact with service providers, and those provided directly by individuals through surveys. Linking these data can lead to a more complete picture about the individual, to inform either care decision making or research investigations. However...

Due to distribution, participant autonomy and lack of local control, service-based systems operate in highly dynamic and uncertain environments. In the face of such dynamism and volatility, the ability to manage service changes and exceptions during composite service execution is a vital requirement. Most current adaptive composition approaches, ho...

In human organisations, it is common to subject a new employees to periods of probation for which additional restrictions or oversight apply in order to reduce the consequences of poor recruitment choice. In a similar way, multi-agent organisations may need to employ agents of unknown trustworthiness to perform services defined by contracts (or set...

Malnutrition is considered one of the root causes of the occurrence of other diseases. It is particularly common in the ageing population, where it requires more efficient handling and management to enable longer home independent living. However, to achieve this, a number of related challenges need to be overcome, especially those related to manage...

Agent-based simulation has shown great success for the study of complex adaptive systems and could in many areas show advantages over traditional analytical methods. Due to their internal complexity, however, agent-based simulations are notoriously difficult to verify and validate. This paper presents MC2MABS, a Monte Carlo Model Checker for Multia...

Service-oriented computing has become the de-facto way of developing distributed applications and, in such systems, an accurate assessment of reputation is essential for selecting between alternative providers. Existing methods typically assess reputation on a combination of direct experiences by the client being provided with a service and third p...

Due to their immense complexity, large-scale multiagent systems are often unamenable to exhaustive formal verification. Statistical approaches that focus on the verification of individual traces can provide an interesting alternative. However, due to its focus on finite execution paths, trace-based verification is inherently limited to certain type...

Due to the increase in collaborative work and the decentralization of processes in many domains, there is an expanding demand for large-scale, flexible and adaptive software systems to support the interactions of people and institutions distributed in heterogeneous environments. Commonly, these software applications should follow specific regulatio...

Decision making is required by many tasks, such as shopping, nowadays assisted by software systems, and providing support to the decision making process is a feature that would significantly improve such systems. Many decision support systems and related approaches have been proposed to that purpose, but they often involve tedious elicitation proce...

The behaviour of autonomous agents may deviate from that deemed to be for the good of the societal systems of which they are a part. Norms have therefore been proposed as a means to regulate agent behaviours in open and dynamic systems, where these norms specify the obliged, permitted and prohibited behaviours of agents. Regulation can effectively...

Agent-based simulation has shown great success for the study of complex adaptive systems and could in many areas show advantages over traditional analytical methods. Due to their internal complexity, however, agent-based simulations are notoriously difficult to verify and validate. This paper presents MC2MABS, a Monte Carlo Model Checker for Multi...

Due to their immense complexity, large-scale multiagent systems are often unamenable to exhaustive formal verification. Statistical approaches that focus on the verification of individual traces can provide an interesting alternative. However, due to its focus on finite execution paths, trace-based verification is inherently limited to certain type...

Research on preferences has significantly increased in recent years, as it involves not only many subproblems to be investigated, such as elicitation, representation, and reasoning, but has also been the target of different research areas, for example, artificial intelligence and databases. In particular, much work has focused on qualitative prefer...

The prov family of documents are the final output of the World Wide Web Consortium Provenance Working Group, chartered to specify a representation of provenance to facilitate its exchange over the Web. This article reflects upon the key requirements, guiding principles, and design decisions that influenced the prov family of documents. A broad rang...

Provenance awareness adds a new dimension to SOC systems' design allowing them to answer different kinds of questions about the system's history processing by recording information during system execution. Incorporating provenance in SOC systems requires to carefully model and analyse provenance infrastructure requirements at system's design time i...

Grids are dynamic, with the resource availability fluctuating over time, and at different rates at each instant. To obtain the resources for tasks execution, each client may negotiate with a resource allocator. If demand on resources is higher than their availability, resources can be exhausted. Therefore, a client needs to anticipate the resource...

Swarm-based systems, i.e. systems comprising multiple simple, autonomous and interacting components, have become increasingly important. With their decentralised architecture, their ability to self-organise and to exhibit complex emergent behaviour, good scalability and support for inherent fault tolerance due to a high level of redundancy, they of...

Due to their internal complexity, agent-based simulations are rarely amenable to conventional formal verification. With its focus on individual traces, runtime verification represents an interesting alternative for correctness assessment. Here, execution traces produced by the running system are observed by a monitor and checked for correctness on-...

Reputation enables customers to select between providers, and balance risk against other aspects of service provision. For new providers that have yet to establish a track record, negative ratings can significantly impact on their chances of being selected. Existing work has shown that malicious or inaccurate reviews, and subjective differences, ca...

In order to address the unreliable nature of service providers, and the dynamic nature of services (their quality values could change frequently over time due to various factors), this paper proposes a probabilistic, multi-valued quality model for services, capable of capturing uncertainty in their quality values by assigning each quality attribute...

Aging is becoming a critical issue for Europe and many countries around the world. It is imposing significant burden on societies and their national services. Enabling longer home independent living is seen one of the most promising ways to overcome this issue. However, to achieve a number of challenges need to be overcome, especially those related...

Provenance awareness adds a new dimension to the engineering of service-based systems, enabling them to increase their accountability through answering questions about the provenance of any data produced. Provenance awareness can be achieved by recording provenance data during system execution. In our previous work we have proposed an overall resea...

Recently, research has focused on processing tasks that require continuous execution to produce data in a real-time manner. Such tasks often also need to be executed for long periods of time such as years, requiring large amounts of resources (e.g. CPUs) that can be found in a Grid. However, a Grid may be unwilling or unable to allocate resources f...

Introduction: This article is part of the Focus Theme of METHODS of Information in Medicine on "Managing Interoperability and Complexity in Health Systems". Objectives: The increasing availability of electronic clinical data provides great potential for finding eligible patients for clinical research. However, data heterogeneity makes it difficu...

Introduction: This article is part of the Focus Theme of METHODS of Information in Medicine on "Managing Interoperability and Complexity in Health Systems". Background: Data heterogeneity is one of the critical problems in analysing, reusing, sharing or linking datasets. Metadata, whilst adding semantic description to data, adds an additional la...

Normative organisations use norms to guide and constrain agent behaviour in order to facilitate cooperation. Norms and their associated enforcement strategies are chosen to further organisational goals, but the effect that a norm has upon organisational performance may change over time in a dynamic environment and behaviour that is desirable in one...

The provenance of a piece of data refers to knowledge about its origin, in terms of the entities and actors involved in its creation, e.g. data sources used, operations carried out on them, and users enacting those operations. Provenance is used to better understand the data and the context of its production, and to assess its reliability, by asser...

Provenance awareness adds a new dimension to the engineering of service-oriented systems, requiring them to be able to answer questions about the provenance of any data produced. This need is even more evident where atomic services are aggregated into added-value composite services to be delivered with certain non-functional characteristics. Prior...

Clinical trials are widely adopted for the purpose of evaluating medical research. In particular, they are used to study various aspects of medical science, as well as being a vital stage in the deployment of new drug treatments. However, a review of the UK Medical Research Council found that only 31% of trials actually recruited to their planned t...

This report presents simLTL, a LTL-based property specification language for the verification of large-scale agent-based simulation traces in the context of runtime verification. As opposed to existing specification languages, simLTL provides two distinct layers, an agent layer and a group layer, which facilitates the formulation of multi-level pro...

In many cases, intermediaries play a major role in linking between service providers and their target users. Yet, attracting intermediaries at a marketplace to promote a service to their existing customers can be very challenging, since they are usually very busy and would incur additional cost as a result of such promotion. In response, this paper...

Distributed service-based systems are becoming increasingly common, with a vast range of resources and functionalities being exposed as services over open networks (e.g. the web and Grid systems). Due to the distribution, participant autonomy and lack of local control, such systems operate in highly dynamic and uncertain environments, in which serv...

The task repurposing of heterogeneous, distributed data for originally unintended research objectives is a non-trivial problem because the mappings required may not be precise. A particular case is clinical data collected for patient care being used for medical research. The fact that research repositories will record data differently means that as...

Pervasive computing applications bring together heterogeneous network-connected devices, services and resources to enable context-aware information integration. The increasing adoption of pervasive computing technology in the healthcare domain offers a healthcare model that delivers high quality service with fewer resources. In this paper, we brief...

We define and validate an architecture for systems that identify patient cohorts for clinical trials from multiple heterogeneous data sources. This architecture has an explicit query model capable of supporting temporal reasoning and expressing eligibility criteria independently of the representation of the data used to evaluate them. The architect...

Development of distributed ehealth systems is increasingly becoming a common necessity to work across organisations to provide efficient services. This requires healthcare information to be accessible, under appropriate safeguards, for research or healthcare. However, the progress relies on the interoperability of local healthcare software, and is...

In a service-oriented system, an accurate assessment of reputation is essential for selecting between alternative providers. In many cases, providers have differing characteristics that must be considered alongside reliability, including their cost, experience, quality, and use of sub-providers, etc. Existing methods for reputation assessment are l...

Specifying and analysing non-functional properties (NFPs) is essential for driving architectural decisions and validating composite service designs. Only where NFPs have been specified can we choose between services with similar functionality that would better satisfy our non-functional requirements. Meanwhile, incorporating provenance functionalit...

This paper focusses on the usefulness of approximate probabilistic model checking for the verification and validation (V&V) of large-scale agent-based simulations. We describe the translation of typical V&V questions into a variant of linear time logic as well as the formulation of properties that involve external data. We further present a prototy...

This document specifies how to use standard Web protocols, including HTTP, to obtain information about the provenance of resources on the Web. We describe both simple access mechanisms for locating provenance records associated with web pages or resources, and provenance query services for more complex deployments. This is part of the larger W3C PR...

As the complexity of online services increases, there is a corresponding need for service-oriented systems to provide support for answering questions about how they have processed and produced data. This need is particularly evident in compositions of services, where audits of each individual service's use do not provide a connected picture of the...

The contract project was a European Commission project whose aim was to develop frameworks, components and tools to model, build, verify and monitor distributed electronic business systems based on electronic contracts. In this context, an electronic contract provides a specification of the expected behaviours of individual services, with the assum...

Large scale information systems are increasingly structured around flexible workflows of services providing a range of functionalities that are configured to suit particular needs, yet this flexibility can bring a lack of organisation in the ways in which services are combined. Particular system structures bring different benefits to an application...

Online e-health systems are being proposed and developed at an ever increasing rate. However, the progress relies on the interoperability of local healthcare software, and is often hampered by ad hoc methods leading to closed systems with a multitude of protocols, terminologies, and design approaches. Agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) seem...

Natural-language preference expressions, not yet exploited by existing preference reasoning approaches, match the way users express preferences in many scenarios and potentially improve automated decision making. Further, the preferences provided are often not sufficient to make a choice on behalf of users, as trade-offs are resolved with psycholog...

Before signing electronic contracts, a rational agent should estimate the expected utilities of these contracts and calculate the violation risks related to them. In order to perform such pre-signing procedures, this agent has to be capable of com-puting a policy taking into account the norms and sanctions in the contracts. In relation to this, the...

Due to the highly dynamic nature of services (web services can enter or leave the system at any time, or change their characteristics), adaptation to change during service composition is necessary to meet user needs. Yet current approaches to change handling detect quality violations and service unavailability only after their occurrence (after exe...

Web service composition is an important topic. Typically, no single service can fulfil all user requirements for a system. Specifying and analysing the non-functional properties (NFPs) is essential to successful service composition. Only where NFPs have been specified, can we choose between services with similar or identical functionality, based on...

A content-centric network is one which supports host-to-content routing, rather than the host-to-host routing of the existing Internet. This paper investigates the potential of caching data at the router-level in content-centric networks. To achieve this, two measurement sets are combined to gain an understanding of the potential caching benefits o...

Many different forms of explanation have been proposed for justifying decisions made by automated systems. However, there is no consensus on what constitutes a good explanation, or what information these explanations should include. In this paper, we present the results of a study into how people justify their decisions. Analysis of our results all...

It is rare for data's history to include computational processes alone. Even when software generates data, users ultimately decide to execute software procedures, choose their configuration and inputs, reconfigure, halt and restart processes, and so on. Understanding the provenance of data thus involves un-derstanding the reasoning of users behind...

Large scale information systems are increasingly structured around flexible workflows of services providing a range of functionalities that are con- figured to suit particular needs, yet this flexibility can bring a lack of organisation in the ways in which services are combined. Particular system structures bring different benefits to an applicati...

The automation of user tasks by agents may involve decision making that must take into account user preferences. This paper introduces a decision making technique that reasons about preferences and priorities expressed in a high-level language in order to choose an option from the set of those available. Our technique includes principles from psych...

Abstract. Online e-health systems are being proposed and developed atan ever increasing rate. However, the progress relies on the interoperabil-ity of local healthcare software, and is often hampered by ad hoc methodsleading to closed systems with a multitude of protocols, terminologies,and design approaches. AOSE seems intuitively a good approach...

The contract project was a European Commission project whose aim was to develop frameworks, components and tools to model, build, verify and monitor distributed electronic business systems based on electronic contracts. In this context, an electronic contract provides a specifi- cation of the expected behaviours of individual services, with the ass...

Electronic contracts mirror the paper versions exchanged between businesses today, and offer the possibility of dynamic, automatic creation and enforcement of restrictions and compulsions on service behaviour that are designed to ensure business objectives are met. Where there are many contracts within a particular application, it can be difficult...

The execution of process models is usually presented through a graphical user interface, especially when users' input is required. Existing mechanisms, such as Electronic Institutions EIs, provide means to easily specify and automatically execute process ...

This chapter proposes a provenance model for the clinical research domain, focusing on the planning and conduct of randomized controlled trials, and the subsequent analysis and reporting of results from those trials. We look at the provenance requirements for clinical research and trial management of different stakeholders (researchers, clinicians,...

This document specifies how to use standard Web protocols, including HTTP, to obtain information about the provenance of Web resources. We describe both simple access mechanisms for locating provenance information associated with web pages or resources, and provenance query services for more complex deployments. This is part of the larger W3C Prov...

Automated negotiation is especially important when tasks, which require many resources, enter a Grid where resources are scarce. The level of resource scarcity dynamically changes in a Grid and the client’s negotiation strategy has to adapt to this dynamism. In addition, we consider the non-transparency of a Grid with respect to a client. That is,...

Patient recruitment for clinical trials is expensive and has been a significant challenge, with many trials not achieving their recruit- ment goals. One method that shows promise for improving recruitment is the use of interactive prompts that inform practitioners of patient el- igibility for clinical trials during consultation. This paper presents...

Norms impose obligations, permissions and prohibitions on individual agents operating as part of an organisation. Typically, the purpose of such norms is to ensure that an organisation acts in some socially (or mutually) beneficial manner, possibly at the expense of individual agent utility. In this context, agents are normaware if they are able to...

Dynamic composition of services provides the ability to build complex distributed applications at run time by combining existing services, thus coping with a large variety of complex requirements that cannot be met by individual services alone. However, with the increasing amount of available services that differ in granularity (amount of functiona...

Provenance refers to the past processes that brought about a given (version of an) object, item or entity. By knowing the provenance of data, users can often better understand, trust, reproduce, and validate it. A provenance-aware application has the functionality to answer questions regarding the provenance of the data it produces, by using docume...

Provenance refers to the past processes that brought about a given (version of an) object, item or entity. By knowing the provenance of data, users can often better understand, trust, reproduce, and validate it. A provenance-aware application has the functionality to answer questions regard- ing the provenance of the data it produces, by using docu...

Just as in human societies, for which we have developed reasonably effective systems to organise and manage interactions in such a way as to minimise the impact of erroneous or malicious behaviour, we also need to find ways to organise and manage computational entities in order to mitigate their potential deleterious effect on computational systems...

A description of a data item’s provenance can be provided in different forms, and which form is best depends on the intended use of that description. Because of this, different communities have made quite distinct underlying assumptions in their models for electronically representing provenance. Approaches deriving from the library and archiving co...

The Open Provenance Model is a model of provenance that is designed to meet the following requirements: (1) Allow provenance information to be exchanged between systems, by means of a compatibility layer based on a shared provenance model. (2) Allow developers to build and share tools that operate on such a provenance model. (3) Define provenance i...

Mirroring the paper versions exchanged between busi-nesses today, electronic contracts offer the possibility of dynamic, automatic creation and enforcement of restrictions and compulsions on agent behaviour that are designed to ensure business objectives are met. However, where there are many contracts within a particular application, it can be dif...

Electronic contracts are a means of representing agreed responsibilities and expected behaviour of autonomous agents acting on behalf of businesses. They can be used to regulate behaviour by providing negative consequences, penalties, where the responsibili-ties and expectations are not met, i.e. the contract is violated. How-ever, long-term busine...

Users are facing an increasing challenge of managing information and being available anytime anywhere, as the web exponentially grows. As a consequence, assisting them in their routine tasks has become a relevant issue to be addressed. In this paper, we introduce an adaptation mechanism that is responsible for dynamically adapting a BDI agent-based...

The specification of acceptable behaviour can be achieved via the use of obligations, permissions and prohibitions, collectively known as norms, which identify the states of affairs that should, may, or should not hold. Norms provide the ability to constrain behaviour while preserving individual agent autonomy. While much work has focused on the se...

PrIMe is a methodology for adapting applications to make them provenance-aware, that is to enable them to document their execution in order to answer provenance questions. A provenance-aware application can satisfy provenance use cases, where a use case is a description of a scenario in which a user interacts with a system by performing particular...

We address one of the challenges in developing solutions based on multiagent systems for the problems of cross-organizational business processes and commerce generally. Specifically, we study how to gather and analyze requirements embodied within business contracts using the abstractions from multiagent systems. Commerce is driven by business cont...

The importance of understanding the process by which a result was generated in an experiment is fundamental to science. Without such information, other scientists cannot replicate, validate, or duplicate an experiment. We define provenance as the process that led to a result. With large scale in-silico experiments, it becomes increasingly difficult...

Given the distributed and dynamic nature of SOC, and the autonomy of the agents involved, it is inevitable that failures will sometimes occur. Such failures might be due to simple errors or bugs, or may be a result of explicit malicious behaviour on behalf of an agent. In this chapter we introduce a number of future directions that will support the...

Being able to ask questions about the provenance of some data requires documentation on each influence on that data’s existence and content. Much software exists, and is being developed, for which there is no provenance-awareness, i.e. at best, the data it outputs can be connected to its inputs, but with no record of intermediate processing. Furthe...

While much work has focused on the creation of norm aware agents, much less has been concerned with aiding a system designers in understanding the effects of norms on a system. However, since norms are generally pre-determined by designers, providing such support can be critical in enabling norm refinement for more effective or efficient system reg...

Norm-aware agents are able to reason about the obligations, permissions and prohibitions that affect their operation. While much work has focused on the creation of such norm-aware agents, less effort has been placed on enabling system designers and users to understand the interactions between norms. Providing designers with such an understanding c...

Agent-based normative systems offer the potential for a business to model, understand the consequences of, and then refine contracts to improve the outcomes for that business. In this paper, we combine a simulation technique designed for investigating and tuning emergent behavior in multi-agent systems with an approach to modeling norms of the comp...