Papers by Frances Brazier
Multi-agent system (MAS) design focuses primarily on design of functionality, structure and (emer... more Multi-agent system (MAS) design focuses primarily on design of functionality, structure and (emergent) behaviour. Very little research focuses on the design of interaction between MASs and human users (multiactor systems), and in particular on the design of trust. Based on the YUPTA framework and exploratory research, this paper argues, that temporal engagement between human beings and multi-agent systems must be explicitly designed and implemented for trust in multi-actor systems, including MAS, to be acquired
Automated and effcient energy management has many potential benefits for producers and consumers ... more Automated and effcient energy management has many potential benefits for producers and consumers of energy, and the environment. Focusing on energy management on the consumer side, this paper considers two forms of energy management: minimizing energy usage in single households and avoiding peaks in energy consumption in a larger area. A combination of context aware and autonomic computing is used to describe an automated and self-managing system that, by analyzing context information and adapting to its environment, can learn the behavior of household occupants. Based on this information, together with user defined policies, energy usage is lowered by selectively powering down devices. By powering specific thermostatically controlled devices on or off energy can also be redistributed over time. This is utilized to avoid global peaks in energy usage. The self-managing system reasons about context and other information and acts when required. This information is the knowledge with wh...
Proceedings International Conference on Multi Agent Systems (Cat. No.98EX160)
Verification of multi-agent systems hardly occurs in design practice. One of the difficulties is ... more Verification of multi-agent systems hardly occurs in design practice. One of the difficulties is that required properties for a multi-agent system usually refer to multi-agent behaviour which has nontrivial dynamics. To constrain these multi-agent behavioural dynamics, often a form of organisational structure is used, for example, for negotiating agents, by following strict protocols. The claim is that these negotiation protocols entail a structured process that is manageable with respect to analysis, design and execution of such a multi-agent system. In this paper this is shown by a case study: verification of a multi-agent system for one-to-many negotiation in the domain of load balancing of electricity use. A compositional verification method for multi-agent systems is applied that allows to (1) logically relate dynamic properties of the multi-agent system as a whole to dynamic properties of agents, and (2) logically relate dynamic properties of agents to properties of their subcomponents. Given that properties of these subcomponents can be verified by more standard methods, these logical relationships provide proofs of the dynamic properties of the multi-agent system as a whole.
When physical communication network infrastructures fail, infrastructure-less communication netwo... more When physical communication network infrastructures fail, infrastructure-less communication networks such as mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET), can provide an alternative. This, however, requires MANETs to be adaptable to dynamic contexts characterized by the changing density and mobility of devices and availability of energy sources. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a decentralized context-adaptive topology control protocol. The protocol consists of three algorithms and uses preferential attachment based on the energy availability of devices to form a loop-free scale-free adaptive topology for an ad-hoc communication network. The proposed protocol has a number of advantages. First, it is adaptive to the environment, hence applicable in scenarios where the number of participating mobile devices and their availability of energy resources is always changing. Second, it is energy-efficient through changes in the topology. This means it can be flexibly be combined with differ...
Frontiers in Computer Science, 2020
Making it work together can be challenging when various stakeholders are involved. Given the cont... more Making it work together can be challenging when various stakeholders are involved. Given the context of neighborhoods and cities specifically, stakeholders values and interests are not always aligned. In these settings, to construct long-term and sustaining participatory city-making projects, to make it work together, is demanding. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a design framework for inclusive and participatory city-making. This framework is inspired by the playable city perspective in that it endorses an open, exploratory, and interactive mindset of city actors. An extensive literature review on approaches taken for playful and participatory interventions in local communities provides the foundations for the framework. The review brings forward four pillars on which the framework is grounded and four activities for exploration of the design space for participatory city-making. A case study from The Hague (NL) is used to demonstrate how the framework can be applied ...
Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal, 2010
Anonymity can be of great importance in distributed agent applications such as e-commerce & aucti... more Anonymity can be of great importance in distributed agent applications such as e-commerce & auctions. This paper proposes and analyzes a new approach for anonymous communication of agents based on the use of handles as pseudonyms. A novel naming scheme is presented that can be used by agent platforms to provide automatic anonymity of communication for all agents on its platform, or, alternatively, to provide anonymity on demand. The paper furthermore introduces new approaches that provide authentication and anonymous payment schemes for agents. Performance measures for an anonymity service implemented for the AgentScape platform provides some insight in the overhead involved.
Complex, intelligent, distributed systems in dynamic environments need to adapt continually, and ... more Complex, intelligent, distributed systems in dynamic environments need to adapt continually, and thus need to be designed to this purpose. As central management of such systems is often not an option decentralised self management is required. This holds, for example, for energy/power management: for both resources and devices. Self management of emergent virtual organisations is needed. SLAs provide a means to regulate interaction between individual systems within emerging virtual organisations, and between virtual organisations, as the basis for negotiating, monitoring and regulating provision, distribution and consumption. Relevant research questions include: 'What is the appropriate level of aggregation?', 'How can SLAs be (re)negotiated automatically to adapt to this dynamic environment?' and 'How can energy consumption be globally stabilized by using local self management?'. Assuming energy consuming devices are autonomous systems, represented by software agents capable of self-management, virtual organizations of agents can emerge. Such organisations define communication structures between agents, e.g., hierarchical organizations, between and within which agents can choose to cooperate and coordinate their actions, or compete. Dynamically organized hierarchies can be used to support adaptive, aggregate, nonlinear behavior, as a means to reduce complexity. Current research within IIDS focuses on global stabilization of the energy consumption of an electricity network (power grid), minimizing oscillations of all thermostatic controlled appliances (TCA) within a single household. Such devices, for example, refrigerators, air conditioners and water heaters, consume 25% of the total energy supply in the USA. Self management of these devices could potentially have a significant effect on the stabilization of global resource consumption. To this purpose software agents in TCAs autonomously and automatically negotiate their resource requirements, configurations, and SLAs, ultimately acquiring global stabilization in energy consumption, which in turn leads to higher reliability of the power grid and lower costs for consumers and producers. Using relatively straightforward models of energy devices our current research has shown that hierarchical local coordination achieves emerging convergence of the global stabilization through local knowledge, local decisions and local interactions by individual software agents [4]. Self-management in this aspect has thus shown to be feasible,
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012
Complex, intelligent, distributed systems in dynamic environments, such as the power grid need to... more Complex, intelligent, distributed systems in dynamic environments, such as the power grid need to be designed to adapt autonomously. Self-management, in particular of large scale adaptive systems such as the power grid, is necessarily distributed. Agent and peer-to-peer based decentralized self-management can change the future of energy markets in which the power grid plays a core role. Assuming that both consumers and providers of energy are autonomous systems, represented by software agents or peers capable of self-management, virtual organizations of systems can emerge and adapt when necessary. Communication structures between systems, e.g., hierarchical or clustered organizations, can emerge, organizations between and within which systems can choose to cooperate and coordinate their actions, or compete. Overlay structures (as defined within p2p research) define such adaptive communication structures, multi-agent research provides interaction patterns. Global goals are achieved by local management on the basis of local goals and knowledge. The appropriate delegation of managerial responsibility determines the control structure. Aggregate information differs depending on the position of a system in an organization, the aggregation mechanisms and policies.
Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications, 2014
Energy demand-side management becomes a well-established approach in the Smart Power Grid. Aggreg... more Energy demand-side management becomes a well-established approach in the Smart Power Grid. Aggregation of consumption information is a critical operation performed by most demand-side energy management mechanisms as it provides information about the required adjustment of power demand. However, a centralized demand-side energy management approach controlled exclusively by utility companies is not always scalable, robust and aligned to the privacy requirements of consumers. A large amount of end-user consumption information is aggregated continuously in centralized approaches. This paper introduces an alternative demand-side energy management scheme: ALMA, the Adaptive Load Management by Aggregation. In ALMA, consumers adjust their demand by selecting between different incentivized demand-options based on aggregate consumption information provided by peer-to-peer aggregation mechanisms. The feasibility of dynamic adjustment in power demand is
Handbook of Ethics, Values, and Technological Design, 2015
Handbook of Ethics, Values, and Technological Design, 2015
In a time where more andmore information about people is collected, especially in the digital dom... more In a time where more andmore information about people is collected, especially in the digital domain, the right to be left alone and to be free of surveillance, i.e., privacy, is no longer as self-evident as it once was. Therefore, it is important that new systems are designed with privacy in mind. This chapter explores the notion of privacy and how to design “privacy-preserving” systems: systems that are designed with privacy for the end users in mind. Several design approaches that address this issue, such as “Privacy by Design,” “Value Sensitive Design,” and “Privacy Enhancing Technologies,” are discussed. Examples of privacypreserving (and breaking) systems, ranging from smart meters to electronic health records, are used to illustrate the main difficulties of designing such systems. M. Warnier (*) • F. Dechesne • F. Brazier Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 J. van den Hoven et al. (eds.), Handbook of Ethics, Values, and Technological Design, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6970-0_17 431
Studies in Computational Intelligence, 2010
Witnessing is core to the design of social interaction. This chapter explores the role of witness... more Witnessing is core to the design of social interaction. This chapter explores the role of witnessing from different perspectives. The first perspective focuses on witnessing in its social and psychological consequences. Response-ability, address-ability, the performance of testimony and transparency of subject position determine how individuals perceive/witness each other. The second perspective focuses on the impact of technology on witnessing and introduces the YUTPA framework as a tool for the design and orchestration of witnessing in technology environments. The third, fourth and fifth sections discuss initial results of exploratory research performed in the Netherlands and in India. This research shows that the way in which witnessing is orchestrated affects the psychological wellbeing of the people involved: it can be beneficial or detrimental. These results demonstrate the need to explicitly design witnessing along the four dimensions of the YUTPA model: space, time, action and relation. The sixth section addresses a third perspective, the technological perspective that focuses on the design of large scale socio-technological systems. The conclusion of this chapter argues that health systems that affect the psychological well being of the people involved must both be designed to take witnessing into account but also to be used appropriately.
Proceedings of the 2011 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC), 2011
Interactive business simulations are widely used to explore and compare business strategies from ... more Interactive business simulations are widely used to explore and compare business strategies from both practice and theory. In many business simulations however, educators and researchers lack support in observing how the simulated actors operationalize their strategies, in validating whether operations have been aligned with the strategy, and also in (re)configuring available player and opponent strategies based on new theoretical or practical insights. This paper specifies requirements for a novel business simulation architecture that facilitates transparency, consistency and modularity of strategic decision making by simulated actors in interactive business simulations. A system architecture is proposed that integrates three components: an extensible agent middleware, a distributed simulation engine and a modular reasoning framework. How the architecture fulfills the three requirements of strategic reasoning transparency, consistency and modularity is illustrated in a use case of a business simulation game for supply chain management education.
Handbook of Ethics, Values, and Technological Design, 2013
In a time where more and more information about people is collected, especially in the digital do... more In a time where more and more information about people is collected, especially in the digital domain, the right to be left alone and to be free of surveillance, i.e. privacy, is no longer as self-evident as it once was. Therefore it is important that new systems are designed with privacy in mind. This chapter explores the notion of privacy and how to design 'privacy preserving' systems: systems that are designed with privacy for the end-users in mind. Several design approaches that address this issue, such as 'Privacy by Design', 'Value Sensitive Design' and 'Privacy Enhancing Technologies' are discussed. Examples of privacy preserving (and breaking) systems, ranging from Smart Meters to Electronic Health records are used to illustrate the main difficulties of designing such systems.
Grid Middleware and Services, 2008
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) represents an agreement between a service user and a provider in ... more A Service Level Agreement (SLA) represents an agreement between a service user and a provider in the context of a particular service provision. SLAs contain Quality of Service properties that must be maintained by a provider, generally defined as a set of Service Level Objectives (SLOs). These properties need to be measurable and must be monitored during the provision of the service that has been agreed in the SLA. The SLA must also contain a set of penalty clauses specifying what happens when service providers fail to deliver the pre-agreed quality. Although significant work exists on how SLOs may be specified and monitored, not much work has focused on actually identifying how SLOs may be impacted by the choice of specific penalty clauses. The participation of a trusted mediator may be necessary in order to resolve conflicts between involved parties. The main focus of the paper is on identifying particular penalty clauses that can be associated with an SLA, and how such penalty clauses may be used to modify the reputation of a provider over time.
The Second International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES'07), 2007
The use of digital dossiers in Courts of Law, although currently in the phase of study, will be c... more The use of digital dossiers in Courts of Law, although currently in the phase of study, will be common practice in the future. This paper introduces the notion of distributed digital dossiers supported by a multi-agent system architecture, developed in interaction with the Courts of Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Management of such dossiers is core to the approach: consistency, completeness, integrity and security key concepts.
Accurately monitoring changing energy usage pat terns in households is a first requirement for mo... more Accurately monitoring changing energy usage pat terns in households is a first requirement for more efficient and eco-friendly energy management. Such data is essential to the establishment of the Smart Grid, but at this stage, domestic data collection devices are still in development and monitoringenabled domestic appliances are rare, so that any experimental software framework must be flexible and adaptable both in respect of sensor sources and developer and user requirements. These considerations have been the drivers behind the dis tributed agent-based platform this paper proposes. It provides: (i) a generic sensor interface that can be specialised for new devices as required, while insulating the rest of the platform from such changes, (ii) persistent unstructured (RDF) data storage, permitting both semantic annotation and semanticbased queries, independent of data sources, and (iii) a flexible, dynamic browser interface, that allows for remote configuration of the sensor platform and accessibility via a wide range of devices. Two small case studies show the utility of the approach.
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2014
The electricity networks in many countries are facing a number of challenges due to growth in pea... more The electricity networks in many countries are facing a number of challenges due to growth in peak demand, integration of renewable energy sources, increasing security risks and environmental concerns. Smart Grid, as an automated and widely distributed energy network, offers viable solutions to those challenges. Software agents running on customer premises or embedded in appliances and equipment can be used to plan future energy consumption and to shift loads according to pre-defined constraints. However, testing such distributed solutions prior to actual deployment in domestic households is a challenge. Simulations may not capture all the aspects of distributed, large-scale, complex environments, such as one can find in the Smart Grid. This paper presents a distributed Smart Grid simulation/emulation environment called Symphony that allows running real-world experiments within distributed environment with the participation of multiple actors. Symphony is being developed in the context of a European Institute for Innovation and Technology project.
An important characteristic of mobile agents is that they often do not run on their user's p... more An important characteristic of mobile agents is that they often do not run on their user's platform, but on the platform of someone else. There often is no pre-existing relation between the 'owner' of the running agent's process and the owner of the platform on which the agent process runs. When there are conflicts the position of the owner is not clear: is he allowed to slowdown the process or even remove it from the system? And how can the interests of the owner of the agent be protected? This paper explores the legal and technical perspectives to protecting the integrity of agent processes.
One of the tasks of software agents on the Internet will be to close contracts on behalf of their... more One of the tasks of software agents on the Internet will be to close contracts on behalf of their owner. The closing of a contract is subject to liabilities. In this, there is no distinction between the real world and the virtual world. Like in the real world, within the virtual world a distinction has to be made between the precontractual phase and the contractual phase. The liabilities in these phases are different. Therefore negotiation protocols for agents need to distinguish between these phases and different responsibilities may exist in the different phases. This paper presents some of the issues involved, viewed from a technical and legal perspective.
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Papers by Frances Brazier