Agent communication languages (ACLs) are fundamental mechanisms that enable agents in multi-agent systems to talk, communicate with each other in order to satisfy their individual and social goals in a cooperative and competitive manner. Social approaches are advocated to overcome the shortcomings of ACL semantics delineated by using mental approaches in the figure of agents’ mental notions. Over the last two decades, social commitments have been the subject of considerable research in some of those social approaches as they provide a powerful representation for modeling and reasoning upon multi-agent interactions in the form of mutual contractual obligations. They particularly provide a declarative, flexible, verifiable, and social semantics for ACL messages while respecting agents’ autonomy, heterogeneity, and openness.

In this manuscript, we go through prominent and predominate proposals in the literature to explore the state of the art on how temporal logics can be devoted to define a formal semantics for ACL messages in terms of social commitments and associated actions. We explain each proposal and point out if and how it meets seven crucial criteria, four of them introduced by Munindar P. Singh to have a well-defined semantics for ACL messages. Far from deciding the best proposal, our aim is to present the advantages (strengths) and limitations of those proposals to designers and developers using a concrete running example and to compare between them, so that they can make the best choice with regard to their needs. We explore and evaluate current specification languages and different verification techniques that have been discussed within those proposals to, respectively, specify and verify commitment-based protocols. We also investigate logical languages of actions advocated to specify, model, and execute commitment-based protocols in other contributed proposals. Finally, we suggest some solutions that can contribute to address the identified limitations.

Multi-agent systems have been widely used in the literature, including for the monitoring of distributed systems. However, one of the unresolved issues in this technology remains in the reassignment of the responsibilities of monitoring agents when some of them become unable to meet their obligations. This paper proposes a new approach for solving this problem based on (a) the gathering of evidence on whether the agent can or cannot fulfil the tasks it has been assigned and (b) the reassignment of the task to alternative agents using their trust level as a selection parameter. A weather station case study is proposed as an instantiation of the proposed model.

Coordination infrastructures play a central role in the engineering of multiagent systems. Since the advent of agent technology, research on coordination infrastructures has produced a significant number of infrastructures with varying features. In this paper, we review the the state-of-the-art coordination infrastructures with the purpose of identifying open research challenges that next generation coordination infrastructures should address. Our analysis concludes that next generation coordination infrastructures must address a number of challenges: (i) to become socially aware, by facilitating human interaction within a MAS; (ii) to assist agents in their decision making by providing decision support that helps them reduce the scope of reasoning and facilitates the achievement of their goals; and (iii) to increase openness to support on-line, fully decentralised design and execution. Furthermore, we identify some promising approaches in the literature, together with the research issues worth investigating, to cope with such challenges.

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 preferences, because these are closer to the way people express their preferences in comparison with quantitative preferences. Against this background, a large number of approaches have been proposed, associated with heterogeneous areas, so that these approaches are usually just compared with those of the same area. In response, we present in this paper a survey of approaches to qualitative multi-attribute preference reasoning, covering different research areas. We introduce selected approaches that propose different techniques and algorithms, which take as input qualitative multi-attribute preference statements following a particular structure specified by the approach. We analyse each approach in a systematic way and discuss their commonalities and limitations.

Biometric user authentication in large-scale distributed systems involves passive scanners and networked workstations and databases for user data acquisition, processing, and encryption. Unfortunately, traditional biometric authentication systems are prone to several attacks, such as Replay Attacks, Communication Attacks, and Database Attacks. Embedded biometric sensors overcome security limits of conventional software recognition systems, hiding its common attack points. The availability of mature reconfigurable hardware technology, such as field-programmable gate arrays, allows the developers to design and prototype the whole embedded biometric sensors. In this work, two strong and invasive biometric traits, such as fingerprint and iris, have been considered, analyzed, and combined in unimodal and multimodal biometric sensors. Biometric sensor performance has been evaluated using the well-known FVC2002, CASIA, and BATH databases.

The sources of information on the Web relating to Fine Art and in particular to Fine Artists are numerous, heterogeneous and distributed. Data relating to the biographies of an artist, images of their artworks, location of the artworks and exhibition reviews invariably reside in distinct and seemingly unrelated, or at least unlinked, sources. While communication and exchange exists, there is a great deal of independence between major repositories, such as museum, often owing to their ownership or heritage. This increases the individuality in the repository’s own processes and dissemination. It is currently necessary to browse through numerous different websites to obtain information about any one artist, and at this time there is little aggregation of Fine Art Information. This is in contrast to the domain of books and music, where the aggregation and re-grouping of information (usually by author or artist/band name) has become the norm. A Museum API (Application Programming Interface), however, is a tool that can facilitate a similar information service for the domain of Fine Art, by allowing the retrieval and aggregation of Web-based Fine Art Information, whilst at the same time increasing public access to the content of a museum’s collection. In this paper, we present the case for a pragmatic solution to the problems of heterogeneity and distribution of Fine Art Data and this is the first step towards the comprehensive re-presentation of Fine Art Information in a more ‘artist-centric’ way, via accessible Web applications. This paper examines the domain of Fine Art Information on the Web, putting forward the case for more Web services such as generic Museum APIs, highlighting this via a prototype Web application known as the ArtBridge. The generic Museum API is the standardisation mechanism to enable interfacing with specific Museum APIs.