Simulations in Multi-Agent Communication System

103 Pages·2012·2.34 MB·Estonian

by  Vadim Kimlaychuk

THESIS ON INFORMATICS AND SYSTEM ENGINEERING C77
Simulations in Multi-Agent
Communication System
VADIM KIMLAYCHUK
PPRREESSSS
FACULTY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER CONTROL
TALLINN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

Dissertation was accepted for the defense of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in computer and system engineering on 30th of June 2012.

Supervisor:
Professor, DSc Leo Mõtus, Department of Computer Control,
Tallinn University of Technology

Opponents:
Professor Janis Grundspenkis, Head of the Department of Systems Theory
and Design, Director of the Institute of Applied Computer Systems,
Riga Technical University, Latvia

Professor Kuldar Taveter, Department of Informatics, Head of the Chair of
Sofware Engineering, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia

Defence of the thesis: 15 august 2012 at 14-00, II-309

Declaration: Hereby I declare that this doctoral thesis, my original investigation and
achievement, submitted for the doctoral degree at Tallinn University of Technology has
not been submitted for any degree or examination.

/Vadim Kimlaychuk/

Copyright: Vadim Kimlaychuk 2012
ISSN 1406-4731
ISBN 978-9949-23-335-9 (publication)
ISBN 978-9949-23-336-6 (PDF)
INFORMAATIKA JA SÜSTEEMITEHNIKA C77
Simulatsioonid
multiagentsüsteemis
VADIM KIMLAYCHUK

Contents
ABSTRACT 9
KOKKUVÕTE 11
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 12
1 INTRODUCTION 13
1.1 Novelty and original contribution of the thesis 17
2 APPLICATIONS FOR INTELLIGENT AGENTS 20
2.1 Agent definition and agent application area 20
2.2 Agent structure and agent types 22
2.3 Communication between agents 25
2.4 Information security as a part of social life 26
2.5 JADE simulation platform 27
3 ANT COLONY SIMULATION 30
3.1 Model structure 30
3.1.1 Internal goals 31
3.1.2 Foreign affairs 32
3.2 Agent approach 32
3.3 Distributed model of mobile agents 33
3.4 Ontology 34
3.5 Implementation in JADE agent development environment 36
3.5.1 Running system 36
3.5.2 Examples of GUI 37
3.6 Conclusion 39
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4 OPTIMIZE SHARED RESOURCES. 5 HUNGRY PHILOSOPHERS
PROBLEM 40
4.1 Process modeling 40
4.2 Agent approach and ontology 41
4.3 Implementation in JADE 42
4.3.1 System 42
4.3.2 Agents 43
4.3.3 Ontology 45
4.3.4 Executive Environment 46
4.4 Results obtained from simulation in JADE 46
4.4.1 Time constraints 46
4.4.2 Homogeneous systems 47
4.4.3 Heterogeneous systems 48
5 COMMERCIAL OFF-THE-SHELF PRODUCT IMPROVEMENTS 49
5.1 SOA structure and main principles 49
5.2 Major integration problems 50
5.2.1 Addresses and names 51
5.2.2 Services are not intelligent 52
5.3 Intelligent agents as an improvement for services 52
5.3.1 Addresses and names 52
5.3.2 Intelligent services 53
5.4 JADE implementation 55
5.4.1 Web services and software agents 55
5.4.2 Making agents work 56
5.4.3 Conclusion and further work 59
6 DISTRIBUTED SENSOR AGENT NETWORKS 60
6.1 Overview of sensor networks 60
6.2 Security problems in WSN-s 61
6.3 Target implementation domain 63
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6.3.1 Structure of MICA2/MICA2DOT motes 63
6.3.2 Conception of operation for DSN 63
6.3.3 General network structure 64
6.3.4 Non-symmetric cryptography 65
6.4 TLMK protocol 65
6.4.1 Key pre-deployment 66
6.4.2 Key update/revoke 67
6.4.3 Message exchange 68
6.5 Complex scenarios 69
6.5.1 Multi-hop network 69
6.5.2 Coalitions and group-level security 71
6.6 Simulation of TLMK protocol in MASE 71
6.6.1 Secure mote architecture for MASE 72
6.6.2 Special assumptions made for simulation and the result 73
6.7 TLMK implementation summary 74
7 ACCESS CONTROL BASED ON SHARED KNOWLEDGE 76
7.1 Problem background 76
7.2 Recent situation 77
7.3 Trust function 78
7.4 Requirements for authentication system 79
7.5 Difficulties to design such a system 79
7.6 Teaching agent structure and basic notions 81
7.6.1 Agents roles and properties 81
7.6.2 Agents ontology 82
7.6.3 Results in math study for student/teacher simulation in JADE 82
7.7 Conclusion and further work 84
CONCLUSION 85
BIBLIOGRAPHY 86
7
LIST OF PUBLICATIONS 93
ANNEX A. 95
ANNEX B 97
ANNEX C 99

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Abstract
We observe crisis of computational systems that can calculate at very high
speed over large data sets, but cannot manage emergent situations that always
happen in real world. Today there are many attempts that try to overcome the
restrictive boundaries of Turing computational model and create basis for non-
classical computations. One of them is self-organized computational systems
composed of agents that act in some environment. Individual agents in such a
multi-agent systems (MAS) are usually simple entities, but system itself may
demonstrate complex behaviors. Interactions in such systems are established by
communication acts between agents and the way it happens is important for the
sake of functionality. That is why ontologies of agent languages are a large part
of this research.
This thesis is devoted to simulation of agent-based systems. We do
simulation on our models because we are not able to model emergent behavior
(i.e. to describe the emergency in terms of Turing computable functions) in order
to build complete system with emergent behavior.
We are studying the properties of multi-agent systems by simulation
according to the rules permitted by non-classical models of computation.
Five practical cases have been studied in this thesis. All of them apply multi-
agent paradigm to model different real world problems. Systems that comprise
entities by their nature were studied first. Simulation of ant colony is the first
experiment in applying MAS development principles. The agent-based model of
ant colony can further be elaborated, if necessary, to capture features that are
essential to model the operation of real-world ant colony.
The other cases have conventionally been resolved without applying agent-
based paradigm. We formulated a modified “dining philosophers” problem and
web-services management problem in an enterprise as multi-agent systems and
demonstrated by simulation the feasibility of this approach. Last two
experiments were dedicated to study of features present in any multi-agent
system – those related to security of communication. We have suggested and
studied by simulation a new security protocol for WSN networks. We have also
introduced a new, shared knowledge authentication based process, and have
simulated knowledge transfer between software agents. The design of an
intelligent agent that can adopt new ontology and perform new actions was
deduced from this experiment.
Most of the simulations have been implemented within JADE MAS
framework. The results of the simulations demonstrate that agent-oriented
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approach gives better results than conventional software development paradigms
especially in the domain of the problems that natively can be resolved by using
communications between entities.
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