Pervasive Computing

BITS Pilani Gokul Kannan Sadasivam

Department of CS & IS
Hyderabad Campus
Overview

• Intelligent System Interaction

• Introduction
• Cooperative Interaction
• Competitive Interaction

• IS Design Principles
• Intelligent Interaction Protocols
• Multi-Agent Systems

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 BITS Pilani
Hyderabad Campus

Introduction

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Intelligent (Smart) interaction

What is Intelligent (Smart) interaction?

• Beyond using universal network communication
protocols
• Involves Coordination, Competition, etc.

2 dimensions of intelligent interaction

• Interaction between multiple intelligent systems & their
environments
• Intelligent Interaction between relatively non-intelligent
multiple systems & environments

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Nature of Communication

• Hidden from applications (lower-level or middleware

services)
• Variable paths
• Variable delays
• Variable ordering
• Variable attenuation
• Time synchronization
• Space synchronization

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P2P Interaction Between Multiple
Senders and Receivers

• MIMO systems - Multiple Input Multiple Output systems

• MAS - Multi-Agent Systems

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Interaction Multiplicity
Examples: Communication

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Unknown Sender and
Malicious Senders
• Sender masquerades
• Unknown senders' messages should be tested in
quarantined area
• E.g. Sensor Networks

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Unknown Receivers

• Multicast (or Broadcast) message transmission

• Sender interacts with an unknown receiver:
a) to share information
b) to request a response
• Used in service discovery in dynamic open systems
• Used in p2p interaction

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Too many messages

• Problems
• Receivers may become over-loaded
• Big issue in synchronous communication

• Possible Solutions
• Policy-based management - priority based handling events, FCFS, etc.
• Buffers can be used
• Receivers can support flow-control
• Proxies can off-load event processing
• Filtering of events

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Mediated Interaction

• Mediator: between interacting participants / peers

– also referred to as third-parties, intermediaries, middle-ware agents

• Advantages of Mediators
• Heterogeneous
• Reduces complexity of interaction

• Some disadvantages
• Performance
• Single point of failure
• Man-in-the-middle attack

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Shared Communication
Resource Access
• Need transmission control or co-operation

• Hidden-node problem

• Use of multiplexing is encouraged - TDMA, FDMA, CDMA

• Collision Avoidance schemes

• Collision Detection schemes

a) Used in applications like simulated games
b) Used in robots to detect obstacles

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Shared Computation
Resource Access
• Sharing of resources for interaction
• Multiple access control schemes
• Concurrency control on data (RDBMS database)
• Token ring network to access resources
• MTOS to run multiple applications in a single device

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Mediating Between
Requestors and Providers
Mediators
• Provides loose coupling
• Enhances peer discovery and service discovery
• Service capability - what type of services can be
obtained from the provider
• Service preferences
• requesters' constraints when selecting a service provider
• constraints can be kept public or private or a mixture of both

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Mediating Between
Requestors and Providers
Who Knows Capabilities
Who Knows Requests & Preferences

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Cooperative Interaction

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Cooperative Interaction

• Characterised by the following properties

• Coordination: synchronising activities
• Cohesion: acting together

• Easy to manage when

• Homogeneous systems
• Centralized control
• Systems are mandated to serve others

• Cooperation is harder to manage when

• Different systems are designed by independent developers
• Systems are autonomous
• Systems support heterogeneous goals
• Parties work in self-interested manner

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Coordination

• Cooperators share their goals with collaborating parties

& act together.

• Need for coordination

• Dependencies between agents’ actions

• IS knew about its local actions and the (anticipated)

actions of others to ensure that the community acts in a
coherent manner.

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Perfect Coordination

• Each system has a good model of other systems (Mutual

Modelling).
• No need for explicit communication.

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Coordination Classification

• Explicit coordination
• Implicit coordination

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Explicit coordination

• Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving – CDPS

• Type of distributed planning
• Decomposing problems into sub-problems
• Allocating sub-problems to different participants
• Exchanging sub-problem solutions
• Creating the overall solution out of all the sub-problem solutions

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Implicit coordination

• Norms and Electronic Institutions

• Norms: a set of standards.
• Normative behaviour: used to check if actual behaviour is legal or illegal.
• Institutions are normative systems built upon agreed constraints on individual
behaviour.
• E.g.: Passenger vehicle first allow to leave and then pick up.

• Hierarchical & Role-based Organisational Interaction

• What is an organisation? (Roles, Missions)
• Hierarchical Organisation: DNS, OO class hierarchies

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Competitive Interaction

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Competitive Interaction

• Also, called as Adversarial Interaction

• Interaction that is driven by self-interests

• Focus on autonomous participants furthering their own goals (rather

than other or group goals)

• E.g. Utility regulation scenario

• Multiple autonomous lighting devices in a room.
• All turning on at the same time, when the user enters.
• Waste of energy.

• Challenges in competitive interaction designs

• Some systems may act maliciously
• Self-interested agents keep their goals private

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Market-based Interaction

• Used to allocate resources to individual requestors

• Two principles of micro-economics

a) Optimization - the participants choose the best deal that maximizes their payoff
b) Equilibrium - demand equals supply

• Each provider and consumer is self-interested

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Auctions

• Sellers versus Bidders

• Designed to allocate resources to one of the bidders.

• Types of auction protocol depends on

• Properties for how bids can be made
• Dissemination policy (what is revealed to whom and when)
• Clearing policy

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Negotiation

• Three principle components

1) Exchange of proposals and counter-proposals
2) Deal is reached
3) Negotiation set (a set of all agreements)

• Modelled using game theory

• Argumentation-based negotiation
• Giving additional information about negotiation

• Applications
• Used in auctions
• Used in reverse auctions

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Agreements

• Needed for peers to synchronize actions

• Formal or informal
• Two/multiple participants
• Convergence
• a set of protocols and algorithms to reach agreements
• e.g. router table updates

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Consensus-based
Agreements
• Multiple participants
• A common goal
• Plan is private
• Voting
• Registration – compiling a list of participants eligible to vote
• Validation – Checking the credentials of the participants
• Casting – Voters making their selection
• Collection
• Tallying – counting the votes

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 BITS Pilani
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Is Interaction Design

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IS Interaction Design

Two basic dimensions to supporting intelligent interaction:

• to design conventional system interaction to be
intelligent
• to design individual intelligent systems to interact

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More Intelligent Conventional
system Interaction
Motivation
• Mediation & handling heterogeneity
• Reflection about communication
• Distributed problem solving
• Task delegation
• Flexibility and Selection
• Reliability

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Interaction Between Individual
ISs: Motivation
• Knowledge Bootstrapping problem
• Individual IS has to learn everything on its own.
• Need a complete knowledge model of the World

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Interaction Protocol Types

Individual messages are not used in isolation but used in

different patterns of multiple messages

Classification of Interaction Protocols

• Information sharing vs. task sharing
• Unicast versus Multicast
• Pull versus Push
• Syntactic versus Semantic

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Interaction Protocol Design

• Message: header + body

• Message header:
• message type
• the receiver address
• the sender address
• the message content encoding
• timestamp, etc.

• Types of messages
• HTTP/1.1 - Request, Response

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Message patterns

a) Information sharing
• get and set type messages, e.g., HTTP request-reply interaction
• can also be asynchronous, e.g., email messages, chat messages, mobile
phone text messages

b) Task sharing (Task delegation)

• request: description of the task to do
• reply: results performed

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Interaction Failures

Some of the interaction failures

• Network link failure
• Receiver is down
• Unknown service provider and its location

Way to handle it
• Handle failure with failure status messages

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Intelligent Interaction Protocols

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IS Message Protocols Based
Upon Speech Acts
• Borrowed from Linguistics
• Some speech utterances are like physical actions that
change the state of the world
• E.g., pronouncing someone as ‘man & wife’ in a religious ceremony
• Act: promising, ordering, greeting, warning, inviting and
congratulating.
• Speech Act Theories
• Pragmatic theories of language
• How language is used by people to achieve their goals and intentions

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Locutionary Model

1) The generation of speech (locution)

2) The choice of speech act (illocution)
3) The intended effect of the speech act on the receiver
(perlocution)

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Belief, Desire and Intention
(BDI) models
• Belief
• Desire
• Intention

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Agent Communication
Languages (ACL)
• Standard language for agent communication.
• Proposed by FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical
Agents)
• Also called as FIPA-ACL
• Based on Speech Acts (Communicative Acts)

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Agent Interaction Protocol
Suite

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AIPS Example

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Interaction Protocol Example:
Request

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Multi-Agent Systems

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Multi-Agent Systems

• Multiple Agents (IS) interacting with each other.

• Properties of MAS
i. Degree of Scale (number of agents)
ii. Type of (Organizational) Control
iii. Homogeneous vs. Heterogeneous
iv. Type of agent interaction (e.g. goal exchange, belief exchange)
v. ACL

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MAS Application Design

• Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE)

• Agent-Oriented Development (AOD)
• Proposed by many developers
• Mainly classified into two types:
• Object Oriented Methodologies
• AI Methodologies

• Two model views

• Organisational view
• Operational view

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Organizational view

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Operational view

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Intelligent Agent Interaction

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Negotiating Resource Access

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References

• Textbook 1 – Chapter 9

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