Recently, the civilian applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are gaining more interest in several domains. Due to operational costs, safety concerns, and legal regulations, Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) is commonly used to design models and conduct tests. This has resulted in numerous research works addressing ABS in civilian UAV applications. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the ABS contribution in civilian UAV applications by conducting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on the relevant research in the previous ten years. Following the SLR methodology, this objective is broken down into several research questions aiming to (i) understand the evolution of ABS use in civilian UAV applications and identify the related hot research topics, (ii) identify the underlying artificial intelligence systems used in the literature, (iii) understand how and when ABS is integrated in broader and more complex internet of things & ubiquitous computing environments, and (iv) identity the communication technologies, tools, and evaluation techniques used to design, implement, and test the proposed ABS models. From the SLR results, key research directions are highlighted including problems related to autonomy, explainability, security, flight duration, integration within smart cities, regulations, and validation & verification of the UAV behavior.

Localization awareness is a fundamental requirement in many Internet of Things (IoT) and other wireless sensor applications. The information transmitted by an individual entity or node is of limited use without the knowledge of its location. Research in this area is mostly geared towards multi-hop range-free localization algorithm as that only utilizes connectivity (neighbors) information. This work focuses on anchor-based, range-free localization algorithm, particularly in anisotropic networks. We observe that the pioneer Distance Vector Hop or DV-Hop algorithm, which provides accurate estimation in isotropic networks, can be enhanced to compute localization estimation for anisotropic networks with similar or comparable accuracy. The recently proposed algorithms for anisotropic networks are complex with communication and computational overheads. These algorithms may also be overkill for several location dependent protocols and applications. This paper proposes a scheme, called DV-maxHop, which reaches comparable accuracy quickly utilizing simpler, practical and proven variant of the DV-Hop algorithm. We evaluate the performance of our scheme using extensive simulation on several topologies under the effect of multiple anisotropic factors such as the existence of obstacles, sparse and non-uniform sensor distribution, and irregular radio propagation pattern. Even for isotropic networks, our scheme out-performed recent algorithms with lower computational overheads as well as reduced energy or communication cost due to its faster convergence. We also introduce the formulation and simulation of Multi-objective Optimization to obtain the optimal solution.

Context awareness refers to the system capability of both sensing and reacting to situational changes. It is one of the most exciting trends in computing today that holds the potential to make our daily life more productive, convenient and enjoyable. Over the years, advances in Web and mobile technologies are gradually bringing the full potential of desktop computers to potable mobile devices. As a matter of the fact that the number of mobile phone users is already much higher than desktop users, most Internet and Web-based services such as search engine querying, news reading, multimedia downloading, instant messaging, online shopping and also social networking can be accessed mainly through a large variety of mobile devices instead of desktop computers. Indeed, context-aware mobile services are emerging as an important technology to underpin the new breed of user-centric smart applications on the future ubiquitous Web. Although mobile devices naturally have the capability to capture both the physical context, such as location, and the social context, such as presence and relationships, of users, there are many hurdles to cross in order to realize the full potential of context-aware ambient services. This theme issue looks at the new development in ambient and context-aware Web information systems such as location-based applications, mobile payment systems, mobile context-aware applications and mobile Web data search engines.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consume a lot of energy in infrastructure creation and maintenance which also include topology control, i.e., coverage and connectivity. Several sleep-based topology control protocols have been proposed for better performance. While the existing protocols serve their purpose, they still consume high energy. We propose an energy-efficient protocol for Coverage, Connectivity and Communication (C3) in WSNs. The proposed protocol runs in four steps: divide the network into virtual rings using RSSI, define clusters having cluster heads at alternating rings, make dings that are rings inside clusters using triangular tessellation, and start sending data through cluster heads which may involve gateways. It achieves better performance by using near-optimal deployment, load balancing, and energy-efficient communication. Simulation results show that C3 protocol can guarantee 1-connected network, partial coverage of greater than 90% and energy-efficient communication, while consuming 20-25% energy compared to the Layered Diffusion-based Coverage Control (LDCC), and the Coverage and Connectivity Protocol (CCP).

This paper presents a deliberative, semi-automatic, semi-cooperative personal Meeting Scheduling Agent. The Agent is expected to guide Meeting Scheduling Agents to select appropriate negotiation strategies to resolve or avoid meeting conflicts via automated negotiation. We view scheduling as a strategic agreement problem. In a strategic environment, strategies play crucial role concluding negotiation process and bring a possible win-win result. The proposed Agent is designed using model-based, goal-based methodology that uses special communication protocol guided by simultaneous response protocol. Naïve Bayes model of Maximum Likelihood Estimation is used for evaluating meeting invitation subjected to user preference, participant's importance for the meeting, schedule availability and hence guide meeting scheduling agents to select appropriate negotiation strategies.

Time synchronization plays an important role in distributed systems. Distributed wireless sensor networks (WSN) often require accurate time synchronization for coordination and data reliability. But precision of time synchronization is limited to scope and criticality of the application. Energy, lifetime and time synchronization are important parameters of any wireless sensor network. Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol (FTSP) and Recursive Time Synchronization Protocol (RTSP) are two state of the art protocols for time synchronization in WSNs. In this paper, a comparative analysis of both protocols under two different topologies i.e. bus and tree, using message count as performance parameter. Xbee Pro and Arduino Mega are used for communication and logical design implementation of both protocols, respectively.

Sand and dust storms (SDSs) offer very serious hazards to the environment, economy and health. An early warning of the upcoming SDS would allow people to take precautionary measures. Traditionally, satellite imaging is used to detect large-scale and long-term SDSs. However, small-scale and short-term SDSs may go undetected due to the poor spatial and temporal resolution of satellites. We propose a hybrid design of sand and dust storm detection system (SDSDS) using wireless sensor network (WSN) and satellite imaging in order to detect SDSs of all types. A layered architecture of context-aware system is used. While the WSN provides real time data from the area of interest, near-real time METEOSAT MSG images are obtained from their website. An experimental prototype is developed for evaluation of the proposed system. Performance studies show that such a hybrid approach can effectively detect and predict SDSs of all types.

There has been a tremendous growth in the use of wireless networks on Saudi Arabian highways, especially in the eastern region, which are subject to several sandstorms and sand dunes that yield to reduced visibility, unsafe roads and sometimes it is life threatening. This makes wireless sensor networks (WSNs) bring very promising, desired and effective natural solution to provide safe roads. This paper presents an agent-based system architecture approach for data dissemination in a WSN for sandstorm monitoring. This system architecture consists of three layers of agents, including the interface, routing and data collection layer. The interface agent interacts with the users to fulfill their interests, whereas the data collection layer has direct access to sensor nodes. The routing agent generates the optimized query plan to the cluster agent, performs data dissemination and efficient in-network processing with the other agents at the routing layer, and captures the required data through the data collection layer. This paper provides the agents' architecture, design and implementations that enable them to communicate and work together to disseminate and gather data in WSNs.

Over the past few years, with the trend of mobile computing, Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) has become one of the most important wireless communication mechanisms among all. Unlike traditional network, MANET does not have a fixed infrastructure, every single node in the network works as both a receiver and a transmitter. Nodes directly communicate with each other when they are both within their communication ranges. Otherwise, they rely on their neighbors to store and forward packets. As MANET does not require any fixed infrastructure and it is capable of self configuring, these unique characteristics made MANET ideal to be deployed in a remote or mission critical area like military use or remote exploration. However, the open medium and wide distribution of nodes in MANET leave it vulnerable to various means of attacks. It is crucial to develop suitable intrusion detection scheme to protect MANET from malicious attackers. In our previous research, we have proposed a mechanism called Enhanced Adaptive Acknowledgement (EAACK) scheme. Nevertheless, it suffers from the threat that it fails to detect misbehaving node when the attackers are smart enough to forge the acknowledgement packets. In this paper, we introduce Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) into the EAACK scheme, and investigate the performance of DSA in MANET. The purpose of this paper is to present an improved version of EAACK called EAACK2 that performs better in the presence of false misbehavior and partial dropping.

A Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET) is an infrastructureless network consisting of self-configuring mobile nodes connected by wireless links. Nodes rely on each other to store and forward packets. Most of the proposed MANET protocols assume cooperative and friendly network context, and do not address security issues. Furthermore, MANETs are highly vulnerable for passive and active attacks because of their open medium, rapidly changing topology, lack of centralized monitoring. Encryption and authentication solutions, which are considered as the first line of defense, are not sufficient to protect MANETs from packet dropping attacks. Most of the current Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) for MANETS rely on the Watchdog technique. In this research we study the behavior of this technique and propose a novel mechanism, named: Adaptive ACKnowledgment (AACK), for solving two significant problems: the limited transmission power and receiver collision. This mechanism is an enhancement to the TWOACK scheme where its detection overhead is reduced while the detection efficiency is increased. NS2 is used to simulate and evaluate the proposed scheme and compare it against the TWOACK and Watchdog methods. The obtained results show that the new AACK scheme outperforms both of the TWOACK and Watchdog methods in terms of network packet delivery ratio and routing overhead.

There has been a tremendous growth in the use of wireless communication in the past few decades. Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is one of the most important one among various wireless communication mechanisms. In MANET, each node in a network performs as both a transmitter and a receiver. They rely on each other to store and forward packets. Its unique infrastructureless network and self-configuring capability makes it ideal for many mission critical applications, including military use and remote exploration. However, these characteristics also make MANET vulnerable to passive and active attacks due to its open medium, changing topology and lack of centralized monitoring. To address the new security challenges, Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is required to detect the malicious attackers before they can accomplish any significant damages to the network. Many existing IDSs for MANETs are based upon Watchdog mechanism. In this paper, we propose a new IDS called Enhanced Adaptive ACKnowledgement (EAACK) that solves four significant problems of Watchdog mechanism, which are ambiguous collisions, receiver collisions, limited transmission power and false misbehavior report. We use Network Simulator 2 to simulate the proposed mechanism and compare the results with existing mechanisms.

Shrinking size and increasing deployment density of wireless sensor nodes implies to smaller equipped battery size. This means emerging wireless sensor nodes must compete for efficient energy utilization. MAC protocols play a vital role in energy consumption of sensor node as it controls the radio activities. Customized or open source simulators play an important role to measure the performance effectiveness of MAC protocols. Due to the fact that they are flexible, reduce experimental overhead and cost. Nevertheless, these benefits come at the cost of results accuracy. In this paper, we investigate differences of the behaviour of our agent based S-MAC protocols in real deployment compared to the results produced using our custom based simulator, which ignores the lower layers effects such as packet collision and overhearing and using an ns2, an open source simulator, which provides a complete protocol stack. We further try to find and explain the rationale of the variance of results produced by real deployment and that of simulators.

Nowadays, wireless sensor networks are deployed in a wide range of applications such as military. To enable sinks to avoid physical attacks from adversaries, most of WSNs adopt sink-location privacy mechanisms. By utilizing these mechanisms, an adversary cannot analyze packet traffic and perform hop-by-hop trace-back, and thus deduce the location of a sink. In this paper, we propose an attack approach to track anonymous sinks. It utilizes a Pseudo-Noise (PN) code to mark a data flow in an invisible manner. An adversary is able to interfere with a source nodepsilas traffic by embedding a secure signal into the nodepsilas traffic. The signal is carried along with the traffic from the source node to the sink. Therefore, the attacker can recognize the location of a sink node by tracking the invisible secure signal. Through our simulation experiments, we conclude that the proposed attack approach is able to track an anonymous sink without additional traffic overhead.

An embedded sensor network is a system of nodes, each of which is equipped with a certain amount of sensing, actuating, computation, communication and storage components. Two major components of sensor nodes are sensing unit and wireless transceiver. They directly interact with nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that are easily prone to failure due to hardware failure, communication link errors, energy depletion, malicious attacks, etc. Even if the sensor node hardware is in excellent condition, still the communication between sensor nodes depends on many factors such as signal strength, obstacles and interference. Degradation in these factors results in low reliability of sensor nodes. One of the key prerequisite for an effective, efficient embedded sensor network is utilization of low-cost, low-overhead and high-resilient fault-inference techniques. Our attempt is to address fault-inference issues in sensor networks using an agent-based approach. Our proposed approach involves an intelligent agent that outfitted with a fault-inference engine. This engine profits from Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm to evaluate fault probabilities of sensor nodes. Our experiment in a wireless sensor testbed is conducted to demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of our approach.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is becoming attractive technology as an alternative to barcode systems. RFID systems provide an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using RFID tags or transponders. An RFID tag is an object that can be attached to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification using radio waves. Chip-based RFID tags contain silicon chips and antennae. In this paper, we develop a smart shopping system that allows customers to manage their shopping list while shopping and only pay the bill at the checkout counter. The shopping cart has the ability to automatically calculate and display the total prices of all the products inside it. This makes it easy for the customer to know how much he or she has to pay while shopping and not at the checkout counter. This way the customer can also control his or her budget and receive faster service at the checkout. An advantage for the shop owners is that they would need a fewer cashiers, which would result in a large cut in their costs. In this paper, we also provide a mathematical model to calculate the estimated delay for each cart to access the system through the ad hoc or WLAN networks.

Implementing wireless sensor networks present new challenges compared with theoretical networks. In addition, results derived from the implementation might differ from theoretical results. Moreover, some routing protocols when implemented might fail to perform. In this paper, we implement three routing protocols namely: Dynamic MANET On-demand, Collection Tree and Dissemination Protocols using a TELOSB sensor network. Our aim is to compare their performances. To demonstrate the pros and cons of these protocols, several performance metrics are carried out. True sensors' readings are measured for future use in our simulation experiments.

The reliability of communication and sensor devices has been recognized as one of the crucial issues in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In distributed environments, micro-sensors are subject to high-frequency faults. To provide high stability and availability of large scale sensor networks, we propose a fault inference mechanism based on reverse multicast tree to evaluate sensor nodes' fault probabilities. This mechanism is formulated as maximization-likelihood estimation problem. Due to the characteristics (energy awareness, constraint bandwidth and so on) of wireless sensor networks; it is infeasible for each sensor to announce its working state to a centralized node. Therefore, maximum likelihood estimates of fault parameters depend on unobserved latent variables. Hence, our proposed inference mechanism is abstracted as Nondeterministic Finite Automata (NFA). It adopts iterative computation under Markov Chain to infer the fault probabilities of nodes in reverse multicast tree. Through our theoretical analysis and simulation experiments, we were able to achieve an accuracy of fault inference mechanism that satisfies the necessity of fault detection.

The IEEE 802.11i amendment has been finalized to address the security issues in wireless local area networks. A prodigious amount of research has demonstrated that the IEEE 802.11i specification is sufficient to prevent unauthorized access and use. In this paper, we analyze the IEEE 802.11i wireless networking amendment with respect to data confidentiality, integrity, mutual authentication and availability. Our analysis indicates that a number of serious threats have still not been addressed by the 802.11i amendment. This includes DoS attacks, insider attacks, offline guessing attacks, etc. Furthermore, configuring security features on a commercial Wi-Fi network is moderately-to-very difficult. Towards this end, this paper proposes an improved authentication mechanism which adopts asymmetric cryptography and thus accomplishes link-layer frame protection. Through our further analysis and discussion, we conclude that the proposed mechanism not only prevents potential security threats but also accomplishes autonomic security configuration without human intervention.

Studying and understanding algorithms is important for all computer scientists. Knowledge gained from these practices allows us to design and implement logically correct programs with considerations to runtime and memory constraints. For many students, learning algorithms in a traditional manner (i.e. using text-books) is challenging. We have developed an alternative approach to teaching algorithms called the Structured Hypermedia Algorithm Explanation (SHALEX) system, which uses hypermedia and represents algorithms as an abstract tree structure. Although SHALEX is a fully functioning teaching tool, currently it does not provide a way of receiving feedback on student's progress. To address this problem, this paper extends SHALEX with intelligent agent to monitor student progress, to provide the student with hints where necessary and to record the results of student interaction, all of which provide a means of quantifying the level of understanding the student has achieved.

The performance of wireless networks under video traffic is subjected to two-fold constraints. Both power minimization and other QoS requirements such delay, delay jitter etc. need to be taken care of properly. Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are more sensitive to these issues where each mobile device acts like a router and thus, routing delay adds significantly to overall end-to-end delay. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the Warning Energy Aware Clusterhead/Virtual Base Station-On demand (WEAC/VBS-O) protocol, proposed earlier by one of the authors [1], in terms of average delay, multihop communication and power minimization aspects subject to video traffic. The H.263 standard is utilized to model video traffic in our simulation design. Primarily, we establish a single hop communication between nodes. It is then extended to multihop communication. However, we found that the protocol can support up to two hops for an acceptable network performance provided there is a significant number of nodes in the network. Hence, we modelled the same network with H.264 and showed that the hop count increases from two to five with better performance. We also took power minimization issue into consideration and minimize power consumption by making use of HCB model by applying it within the neighborhood of the node. Simulation results showed that this strategy does minimize power consumption and it did not degrade multihop communication improvement. With the idea that maximum power saving is achieved if the relaying node lies in the middle of source and destination node for HCB model [2]. Furthermore, we saw the effect of sudden demise of cluster heads in the Warning Energy Aware Cluster head (WEAC) protocol based on our previous work [3]. Subsequently, we compared the results when some clusterheads (CHs) have sudden death to the results when there is no switching of CH based on selected performance metrics. We found that there is little power loss if the relaying node is not in the middle of source and destination node. However, performance is seriously degraded on the introduction of sudden demise of CH during simulation as far as average end-to-end delay is concerned.

Most existing message-oriented middleware for mobile networks rely on infrastructure or assume the existence of reliable and continuous connections among communicating entities. These schemes do not take advantage of cross-layer optimizations. Publish/subscribe middleware has been widely used to provide asynchronous communication functionality in distributed application environments. Due to node mobility and frequent node disconnections, asynchronous publish/subscribe message middleware is a proper communication model for mobile ad hoc networking environments. In this paper, we propose a MOBility-aware and CROSS-layer based middleware (MOBCROSS) for mobile ad hoc networks. MOBCROSS is based on the publishing and subscription of topics. The main features of MOBCROSS are mobility awareness, network reconfiguration, and cross-layer interaction support. The performance of the middleware is evaluated in a simulation environment. The simulation results indicated that MOBCROSS achieves a good packet delivery ratio and low overhead.

This paper presents an agent-based system to minimize the energy consumption for border nodes in sensor-MAC (S-MAC), a cluster based contention protocol. The S-MAC protocol is based on unique feature; it conserves battery power at nodes by powering off nodes that are not actively transmitting or receiving packets. In doing so, nodes also turn off their radios. Inspired by the energy conservation mechanism of the S-MAC, we unmitigated our efforts to augment the node life time in sensor network. Border nodes act as shared nodes between virtual clusters. Virtual clusters are formed on the basis of sleep/listen schedule of nodes. Towards this end, we propose a multi-agent system that allows nodes to join cluster where they experience minimum energy drain. This system includes two types of agents: stationary and mobile agents. A prototype implementation and simulation results compared with S-MAC are presented.

In an environment where node density is massive, placement is heterogeneous and lots of sensory traffic with redundancy is produced; individual nodes waste limited wireless bandwidth and consume lot of energy. This minimizes their life time on the network. To handle such problem number of routing schemes have been proposed by researchers. These schemes tend to find the minimum energy path to prolong the network life. In this paper, we argue that it is not always wise to use the minimumenergy path. Nodes along the optimal path will be used rapidly, burn out energy aggressively and eventually die hastily creating communication holes in network. This brings rapid change in the topology resulting in increased latency, poor connectivity and production of heterogeneous subnets. Thus, it is better to occasionally use suboptimal paths. We unmitigated our efforts to augment the node life time in sensor network by frequent use of suboptimal paths, and reducing redundant sensory network traffic. Towards this end, we propose an agentbased directed diffusion approach that incorporates static and mobile agents. Static agent is responsible for calculating and maintaining the set of optimal paths.Mobile agent main function is to perform data processing and make data aggregation decisions at nodes in the network rather than bring data back to a central processor (sink). This paper provides an analytical model for data dissemination for both approaches. To demonstrate the performance evaluation, a prototype of a simulator is implemented.

This paper presents an ongoing research on developing an agent based system architecture for wireless sensor networks. The main objective of this system is to facilitate the design, implementation, and maintenance of applications for sensor networks that consist of wireless sensor nodes. The proposed system architecture contains four types of agents: interface, regional, cluster, and query agents. The interface agents receive queries from the users and return the results back to them. The regional agent is responsible for sending query packets to the cluster agents. The cluster agents disseminate query into the network and provide efficient in-network processing. Finally, the query agents process the query in the sensor node. The delegation of specific tasks to different software agents facilitates the development and maintenance of sensor network applications.

Scheduling a meeting that involves persons with different commitments and preferences is a difficult task. This paper presents a multi-agent system in which each person is represented by an agent. Each agent has its own capabilities to manage, negotiate and schedule tasks, meetings, events, appointments for its assigned user. In this multi-agent system, the agents coordinate their activities and negotiate on behalf of their associated users to find a solution that satisfies the users' desires. A prototype is implemented and evaluation of preliminarily results is demonstrated

Intelligent software agents are becoming essential part of collaborative virtual environments. In these environments, there is a need of agents that have the ability to learn user actions and predict future actions. Collaborative virtual workspace (CVW) is a collaborative virtual environment where agents can be created and perform important tasks for the user. Several agents have been created in CVW for specific tasks. These agents although can perform important tasks for the user, they lack the ability to learn and predict user actions. This paper presents a learning observer agent that is able to monitor the user's actions with learning capability using genetic algorithm (GA). To demonstrate the feasibility of this agent, it is implemented and demonstrated in FCVW. FCVW is our extension of CVW.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enable pervasive, ubiquitous, and seamless communication with the physical world. This paper presents P2P multi-agent data transfer and aggregation system architecture in WSNs. The architecture includes four types of agents: interface, query, routing, and data acquisition agents. The interface agent interacts with the users to fulfil their interests. The routing agent is responsible for energy efficient data transfer. The query agent facilitates the collaboration between the interface and routing agents, and is responsible for creating optimized plans to achieve their desired goals. Both interface and query agents are placed at the resource-enriched base station because they require computation intensive operations. The data acquisition agent is responsible to acquire, filter, and format the sensor data. Sensor nodes have limited energy and computing resources. Thus, we create proxy agents for query and routing agents to act as peer agents with similar capabilities. The proxy query agents receive query execution plans from query agent, and proxy routing agents receive routing plans from routing agent. This paper provides the agents' architecture and design that enable them to coordinate and communicate with each other to transfer and aggregate data in WSNs

Distributed applications have become very popular and there is a growing need to efficiently and securely distribute data. This paper describes the design and the implementation of a distributed installer (DP), which can accomplish both these tasks. The authors reviewed the goals that any such system should achieve, and show which goals are achieved by DI and several similar systems. This paper provides the description of the functionality, design and the implementation of DI.

Software agents offer a promise to change electronic commerce trading by helping Internet traders to purchase products from online distributed resources based on their interests and preferences. Users delegate trading responsibilities to software agents to automate many of the real world trade practices. Existing e-commerce systems inhabit some limitations, which are not realistic in real world trading. This paper presents a peer-to-peer agent-mediated e-commerce system. The system architecture describes the different stages and components that require automation and needed to develop an e-commerce system. The main objective of this system is to address some of the shortcomings that are present in contemporary e-commerce systems, such as single attribute-based negotiation and the necessity of an electronic marketplace. To demonstrate the proposed system a prototype is implemented.

The need for frameworks in the software engineering field is being realized as the complexities and cost of software is increasing. Frameworks will provide an edge for any software industry in the 21st century. Frameworks of various kinds have been developed for many object oriented applications in the past but there have been very few attempts to develop agent frameworks in collaborative virtual environments. This paper presents the ongoing research to build agent frameworks for the federated collaborative virtual workspace (FCVW), our extension of MITRE's CVW (collaborative virtual workspace). We propose two types of agent frameworks namely the middleware and client framework. This paper focuses on client framework development and shows several types of agents that are in preparation for the development of a more general framework.

This paper presents a multi-agent security service system architecture. This system consists of four types of agents: interface, authentication, authorization, and service provider agents. The interface agents interact with the users to fulfill their interests. The authentication agents investigate the validity of using keystroke dynamics to strengthen security. The authorization agents decide who can access which resources and for what purposes. The service provider agents offer different encryption services to different users. A prototype of the system is implemented using the Java agent development framework (JADE).

This paper presents a multi-agent system architecture developed to track moving objects. This architecture consists of several software agents with similar architecture and functions. An object can move freely within a predefined area, which is divided into several sub-areas based on the number of agents used in the system. Each agent is responsible for a specified sub-area. Agents are able to communicate with each other and to coordinate their activities by sharing their knowledge about the position of the moving object. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) are utilized to locate the exact position of the moving object. A GPS receiver is placed inside the moving object and serves as a signal platform that provides the desired information about its location to each agent. The main purpose of this work is to develop agents that are able to interact with the users, who are interesting in tracking some objects, and to provide them with the exact position of a moving object. This paper provides the agents' architecture, design and implementations that enable them to cooperate and communicate with each other to track a moving object. A prototype is implemented, using the ZEUS toolkit.