Efficient resource monitoring and organizational strategies are crucial for improving healthcare processes. Digital twins have been applied in many healthcare applications, and offer promising solutions. In our paper, we present a new digital twins-based approach that helps to improve the entire operating block management. We developed a prototype that allows for easy tracking of patients among the block, monitoring key areas: entrances, exits, and operating and recovery rooms. The system provides helpful services to medical staff, including statistical reports and scheduling assistance. Our solution was developed in partnership with the local hospital in Parma, and it seamlessly integrates with the existing legacy system to simplify healthcare operations.

Modeling and forecasting the spread of COVID-19 remains an open problem for several reasons. One of these concerns the difficulty to model a complex system at a high resolution (fine-grained) level at which the spread can be simulated by taking into account individual features. Agent-based modeling usually needs to find an optimal trade-off between the resolution of the simulation and the population size. Indeed, modeling single individuals usually leads to simulations of smaller populations or the use of meta-populations. In this article, we propose a solution to efficiently model the Covid-19 spread in Lombardy, themost populated Italian region with about ten million people. In particular, the model described in this paper is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt in literature to model a large population at the single-individual level. To achieve this goal, we propose a framework that implements: i. a scale-free model of the social contacts combining a sociability rate, demographic information, and geographical assumptions; ii. a multi-agent system relying on the actor model and the High-Performance Computing technology to efficiently implement ten million concurrent agents. We simulated the epidemic scenario from January to April 2020 and from August to December 2020, modeling the government's lockdown policies and people's mask-wearing habits. The social modeling approach we propose could be rapidly adapted for modeling future epidemics at their early stage in scenarios where little prior knowledge is available.

In this paper, a comparison between the pseudocode of a well-known algorithm for solving distributed constraint satisfaction problems and the implementation of such an algorithm in JADEL is given.First, background and motivations behind JADEL development are illustrated.Then, we make a description of the problem and a brief introduction to JADEL.The core of this work consists in the translation of the algorithm pseudocode in JADEL code, which is described in details.Scope of the paper is to evaluate such a translation, in terms of closeness to pseudocode, complexity, amount of code written and performance.

Multi-agent systems have been contributing to the development of both theory and practice of complex distributed systems. Social networks are probably the systems that exhibit the highest degree of similarity with multi-agent systems because members of a social network interact as agents do in a multi-agent system. Multi-agent system may be the best solution to enrich and facilitate the interaction and the collaboration among the members of a social network. After an introduction on the relationships between multi-agent systems and social networks, this paper describes Blogracy, a multi-agent system that supports the interaction among the members of a social network.

Abstract This paper presents a multi‐agent system called GAIN (Grid Agent Infrastructure), which can be used for the development of flexible agent‐based Grid systems. The system supports users both in the development and execution of Grid applications. In particular, GAIN allows the definition of workflow applications by composing different tasks made available by the Grid nodes. Furthermore, it follows the different phases of the execution of the workflow providing transparent allocation and re‐allocation of the tasks on the different nodes of the Grid. A first prototype of the system has been realized by using the JADE agent development software and it has been tested in lab trials involving a network of different JADE platforms. In these trials, tasks provided both by the agents of the system and by external legacy software systems have been composed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

CAFE (collaborative agents for filtering e-mails) is a multi-agent system to collaboratively filter spam and classify legitimate messages in users' mail stream. CAFE associates a proxy agent with each user, and this agent represents a sort of interface between the user's e-mail client and the e-mail server. With the support of other types of agents, the proxy agent makes a classification of new messages into three categories: ham (good messages), spam and spam-presumed. Ham messages can be in their turn divided on the basis of the sender's identity and reputation. The reputation is collaboratively inferred from users' ratings. The filtering process is performed using three kinds of approach: a first approach based on the usage of an hash function, a static approach using DNSBL (DNS-based black lists) databases and a dynamic approach based on a Bayesian filter. We give a mathematical representation of the system, showing that if users collaborate, the fault probability decreases in proportion to the number of active users

Ubiquity is one of the most important keyword of the next generation software systems. We want our systems to follow users wherever they go, and we want our systems to extend their reach to the telephony world and to its base of several hundred million users. The ever-increasing diffusion of handy appliances, e.g. palmtops and cellular phones, is familiarizing people with the use of computers for their everyday job and, more impressively, for their everyday life. This suggests that the market of software systems for mobile applications will increase dramatically in the near future.

Software engineering relies on the possibility of describing a system at different levels of abstraction. Agent-oriented software engineering introduces a new level of abstraction, that we called agent level, to allow the architect modelling a system in terms of interacting agents. This level of abstraction is not supported by an accepted set of tools and notations yet, even if a number of proposals are available. This paper introduces: (i) An UML-based notation capable of modelling a system at the agent level and (ii) A development framework, called ParADE, exploiting such a notation. The notation we propose is formalized in terms of a UML profile and it supports the realisation of artefacts modelling two basic concepts of the agent level, i.e., the architecture of the multi-agent system and the ontology followed by agents. The choice of formalising our notation in terms of a UML profile allows using it with any off-the-shelf CASE tool. The ParADE framework takes advantage of this choice by providing a code generator capable of producing skeletons of FIPA-compliant agents from XMI files of agent-oriented models. The developer is requested to complete the generated skeletons exploiting the services that ParADE and the underlying agent platform provide.

This paper presents a cooperative platform that allows the sharing of information as well as the interactive use of different kinds of application in a synchronous mode. The access to the collaborative sessions is possible from different kinds of terminal and network (fixed or mobile). In particular, we address Web users and mobile users with sufficient bandwidth. The platform is based on the centralised sharing of an off-the-shelf application that relies on a collaborative version of the graphics libraries used in Java and Microsoft Windows. A first prototype of the platform has been experimented by Ph.D. students during a seminar distributed across Italy.

To ease large-scale realization of agent applications there is an urgent need for frameworks, methodologies and toolkits that support the effective development of agent systems. Moreover, since one of the main tasks for which agent systems were invented is the integration between heterogeneous software, independently developed agents should be able to interact successfully. In this paper, we present JADE (Java Agent Development Environment), a software framework to build agent systems for the management of networked information resources in compliance with the FIPA specifications for inter-operable intelligent multi-agent systems. The goal of JADE is to simplify development while ensuring standard compliance through a comprehensive set of system services and agents. JADE can then be considered to be an agent middle-ware that implements an efficient agent platform and supports the development of multi-agent systems. It deals with all the aspects that are not peculiar to agent internals and that are independent of the applications, such as message transport, encoding and parsing, or agent life-cycle management. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

MPOOL is an object-oriented extension to the MPI library, based on three categories of objects, called units, groups and schemes. Units are active objects composed of data (state) and procedures (like traditional passive objects), but with the additional ability to store incoming messages in a queue while they are active and to send messages in parallel to other units; moreover, different units may be active simultaneously. Groups and schemes are passive objects used for the composition of units and the co-ordination of their actions. Groups manage collective communications and synchronization operations such as barriers. Schemes compose units' actions through the use of a set of constructs derived by path expressions. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A major problem for the integration of concurrency in object-oriented languages is the so-called inheritance anomaly, i.e. the conflicts between inheritance and concurrency that often cause the need to redefine inherited methods in order to maintain the integrity of objects. Several solutions have been proposed for resolving these conflicts. However, some of them are incomplete, and do not solve all types of inheritance anomaly; others make the definition of classes complex and/or their implementation inefficient. This paper describes a C++ library for concurrent programming that provides a comprehensive framework particularly suitable for coarse-grained distributed applications. This library copes with the inheritance anomaly problem, presenting a solution that minimizes the redefinition of inherited methods without increasing the complexity to write them. This solution is based on the use of a special set of methods, called interface methods, composed of a body and two sets of synchronization constraints. These two sets of synchronization constraints are respectively used to enable the execution of their method body and to disable the methods that cannot be executed after their method. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The paper presents a language for the development of multi agent systems that allows a user to write programs with a small effort thanks to a predefined agent model and a set of specialized primitives for agent management. Moreover the user can develop agent parts at a low level, taking advantage of all the potentialities of C++, Common Lisp and Java object oriented languages, and reusing a large part of the C, C++, Lisp, Common Lisp and Java software available on the Internet.

The authors present a model, called HDPTN (hierarchical and distributed process transition network), for the representation of real world phenomena. This model is based on two types of entities: circumstances and episodes. A circumstance is an elementary entity which can take on a set of discrete values over time, while an episode is a compound entity whose parts are a circumstance and/or other episodes acting concurrently. In particular, the hierarchical and distributed structure of the episode seems to be suitable for the modeling of systems which need real-time performance and the integration of representations and reasoning at different levels of detail.>