Tropos seminars

This is a list of Tropos-related seminars held at the University of Trento and at FBK-IRST. Tropos seminars are highly-interactive sessions where authors either present ongoing research or rehearse their talk before a conference.


Date and location: 15th January, 2010, 2.30PM, DISSE room @DISI, Povo

Speaker: Le Minh Sang Tran

Title: A Simulation Framework for Self-reconfiguring Socio-Technical Systems

Abstract: Socio-technical systems (STS), as opposed to the traditional technical computer base systems, include human agents as an integral part of their structure. One important aspect of an STS is its dynamicity: an STS operates in a continuous evolving environment and, accordingly, its structure changes dynamically. In this setting, the thesis aims to develop a framework supporting a system able to self-configure, which is to evolve dynamically in response to changes in its environment. A runtime reconfiguration mechanism will be based on AI planning for generating possible system configurations. In particular, the thesis task is to provide a framework that takes an initial organizational structure, and explores the organizational solution space with the help of AI planning technique. Found candidate solutions are simulated with respect to user-defined set of events to evaluate how these solutions adapt to environment changes. Moreover, these solutions are assessed by quantitative evaluators which are accompanied with the framework as well as user-defined ones. Assessment results are visualized to end-user in tree-structure, table, chart to help for a wise decision.


Date and location: 11th December, 2009, 2.30PM, DISSE room @DISI, Povo

Speaker: Ivan Jureta

Title: From Decision Theory to Techne, and back [pdf]


Date and location: 16th October, 2009, 2.30PM, DISSE room @DISI, Povo

Speaker: Raian Ali

Title: Modeling and Reasoning about Contextual Requirements [pdf]

Abstract: Every software system is situated in a context. Context is the reification of the environment that is whatever provides a surrounding in which the system operates. There is a strong relation between the requirements of a system and its context. On the one hand, the context might be considered to determine the set of requirements relevant to a system, the alternatives that can be adopted to meet these requirements, and the quality of each of such alternatives. On the other hand, the system itself may cause changes in the context to meet its requirements. Therefore, there is a mutual influence between requirements and context. In spite of the central role of context in requirements, most requirements engineering (RE) research ignores, or presumes a uniform nature of, the context where the system operates. A RE framework specialized for systems reflecting their context is still missing. In the first place, context influences stakeholder's goals and their choices to reach these goals. Capturing this influence is essential for software meeting stakeholder's expectation in different contexts. In this talk, we propose a goal-based RE methodological framework to model and validate the requirements for systems operating in and reflecting different contexts. We propose the Contextual Goal Model to capture the requirements for such systems, reasoning techniques and automated support tool, and a methodological process to follow for constructing it. Various future work directions will be also discussed.


Date and location: 12th June, 2009, 2.30PM, DISSE room @DISI, Povo

Speaker: Komminist Weldemariam

Title: Web-based Navigational Prototypes from Agent-Oriented Specifications


Date and location: 5th June, 2009, 2.30PM, DISSE room @DISI, Povo

Speaker: Amit Chopra

Title: The Semantic Bases for Adaptation [pdf]


Date and location: 14th May, 2009, 11.45AM, Sala Kessler @FBK, Povo

Speaker: Alberto Siena

Title: Towards a Framework for Law-Compliant Software Requirements [ppt]

Abstract: During the requirements elicitation phase, analysts have often to take into consideration laws and regulations enacted by different levels of government. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, a systematic process is outlined which, given a problem and a collection of legal prescriptions, generates a set of requirements that address the problem while complying with the prescriptions. Second, the conceptual framework is outlined, which characterises the process by providing both legal concepts proposed in theoretical studies in the legal domain and concepts from goaloriented requirements engineering. The issues and challenges of the proposed framework are also evaluated, with regard to expected results.


Date and location: 8th May, 2009, 2.30PM, DISSE room @DISI, Povo

Speaker: Mirko Morandini

Title Operational semantics of goal models in adaptive agents [pdf]

Abstract: Several agent-oriented software engineering methodologies address the emerging challenges posed by the increasing need of adaptive software. A common denominator of such methodologies is the paramount importance of the concept of goal model in order to understand the requirements of a software system. Goal models consist of goal graphs representing AND/OR-decomposition of abstract goals down to operationalisable leaf-level goals. Goal models are used primarily in the earlier phases of software engineering, for social modelling, requirements elicitation and analysis, to concretise abstract objectives, to detail them and to capture alternatives for their satisfaction. Although various agent programming languages incorporate the notion of (leaf-level) goal as a language construct, none of them natively support the definition of goal models. However, the semantic gap between goal models used at design-time and the concept of goal used at implementation and execution time represent a limitation especially in the development of self-adaptive and fault-tolerant systems. In such systems, design-time knowledge on goals and variability becomes relevant at run-time, to take autonomous decisions for achieving high level objectives correctly. Recently, unifying operational semantics for (leaf) goals have been proposed [15]. We extend this work to define an operational semantics for the behaviour of goals in goal models, maintaining the flexibility of using different goal types and conditions. We use a simple example to illustrate how the proposed approach effectively deals with the semantic gap between design-time goal models and run-time agent implementations.


Date and location: 8th May, 2009, 2.30PM, DISSE room @DISI, Povo

Speaker: Cu Nguyen Du

Title Evolutionary Testing of Autonomous Software Agents [pdf]

Abstract: A system built in terms of autonomous agents may require even greater correctness assurance than one which is merely reacting to the immediate control of its users. Agents make substantial decisions for themselves, so thorough testing is an important consideration. However, autonomy also makes testing harder; by their nature, autonomous agents may react in different ways to the same inputs over time, because, for instance they have changeable goals and knowledge. For this reason, we argue that testing of autonomous agents requires a procedure that caters for a wide range of test case contexts, and that can search for the most demanding of these test cases, even when they are not apparent to the agents’ developers. In this paper, we address this problem, introducing and evaluating an approach to testing autonomous agents that uses evolutionary optimization to generate demanding test cases.


Date and location: 29th April, 2009, 11.30PM, Sala CS @FBK, Povo

Speaker: Nauman Qureshi

Title Engineering Adaptive Requirements [pdf]

Abstract: Challenges in the engineering of self-adaptive software have been recently discussed and summarised in a seminal research road map. Following it, we focus on requirements engineering issues, with a two-fold, long term objective. The first objective is to support the system analyst to engineer adaptive requirements at requirements-time, the second is to make software able to reason on requirements at run-time in order to enable a goal-oriented adaptation. Along the first objective, in this position paper we propose a characterisation of adaptive requirements. Moreover, we investigate how available techniques aimed at eliciting and specifying domain properties, stakeholders' goals and preferences, can provide a practical support to the analyst while capturing adaptive requirements.


Date and location: 24th April, 2009, 2.30PM, DISSE room @DISI, Povo

Speaker: Vitor Souza

Title Monitoring and Diagnosing Malicious Attacks with Autonomic Software [pdf]

Abstract: Monitoring and diagnosing (M&D) software based on requirement models is a problem that has recently received a lot of attention in field of Requirement Engineering. In this context, Wang et al. propose a M&D framework that uses goal models to diagnose failures in software at different levels of granularity. In this paper we extend Wang’s framework to monitor and diagnose malicious attacks. Our extensions include the addition of anti-goals to model attacker intentions, as well as context-based modeling of the domain within which our system operates. The extended framework has been implemented and evaluated through a series of experiments intended to test its scalability.


Date and location: 17th April, 2009, 2.30PM, DISSE room @DISI, Povo

Speaker: Alexis Morris

Title:  Requirements Engineering for Socio-Technical Systems


Date and location: 20th March, 2009, 2.30PM, DISSE room @DISI, Povo

Speaker: Fabiano Dalpiaz

Title:  An Architecture for Requirements-driven Self-reconfiguration [pdf]

Abstract: Self-reconfiguration is the capability of a system to autonomously switch from one configuration to a better one in response to failure or context change. There is growing demand for software systems able to self-reconfigure, and specifically systems that can fulfill their requirements in dynamic environments. We propose a conceptual architecture that provides systems with self-reconfiguration capabilities, enacting a model-based adaptation process based on requirements models. We describe the logical view on our architecture for self-reconfiguration, then we detail the main mechanisms to monitor for and diagnose failures. We present a case study where a self-reconfiguring system assists a patient perform daily tasks, such as getting breakfast, within her home. The challenge for the system is to fulfill its mission regardless of the context, also to compensate for failures caused by patient inaction or other omissions in the environment of the system.


Date and location: 4th March, 2009, 2.30PM, DISSE room @DISI, Povo

Speaker: Volha Bryl

Title:  Supporting the Design of Socio-Technical Systems by Exploring and Evaluating Design Alternatives


Date and location: 27th February, 2009, 2.30PM, DISSE room @DISI, Povo

Speaker: John Mylopoulos

Title:  Requirements Models Revisited


Date and location: 23rd January, 2009, 10.00AM, DISSE room @DISI, Povo

Speaker: Amit Chopra

Title:  Commitment Alignment: Semantics, Patterns, and Decision Procedures for Distributed Computing [pdf]


Date and location: 7th December, 2006

Speaker: Carlos Cares

Title:  TroposPL: Tropos for Prolog implementations [ppt]


Date and location: 30th November, 2006

Speaker: Yudis Asnar

Title:  A Risk-Driven Approach for Goal Deliberation [ppt]


Date and location: 23rd November, 2006

Speaker: Alexander Birukou

Title:  ICPatterns: A Multi-Agent System for Choosing Software Patterns


Date and location: 7th July, 2006

Speaker: Yudis Asnar

Title:  Risk modeling [ppt]


Date and location: June, 2006

Speaker: Michael Weiss

Title:  Security Patterns: State of the Art and Research Issues


Date and location: June, 2006

Speaker: Volha Bryl

Title:  Desiging Agent Societies [ppt]


Date and location: 2nd March, 2006

Speaker: John Mylopoulos

Title:  Tropos at the Age of 6: Status and Research Directions [ppt]

 

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