Emil Lupu

Federating Policy-Driven Autonomous Systems: Interaction Specification and Management Patterns

Ubiquitous systems and applications involve interactions between multiple autonomous entities—for example, robots in a mobile ad-hoc network collaborating to achieve a goal, communications between teams of emergency workers involved in disaster relief operations or interactions between patients’ and healthcare workers’ mobile devices. We have previously proposed the Self-Managed Cell (SMC) as an architectural pattern for managing autonomous ubiquitous systems that comprise both hardware and software components and that implement policy-based adaptation strategies. We have also shown how basic management interactions between autonomous SMCs can be realised through exchanges of notifications and policies, to effectively program management and context-aware adaptations. We present here how autonomous SMCs can be composed and federated into complex structures through the systematic composition of interaction patterns. By composing simpler abstractions as building blocks of more complex interactions it is possible to leverage commonalities across the structural, control and communication views to manage a broad variety of composite autonomous systems including peer-to-peer collaborations, federations and aggregations with varying degrees of devolution of control. Although the approach is more broadly applicable, we focus on systems where declarative policies are used to specify adaptation and on context-aware ubiquitous systems that present some degree of autonomy in the physical world, such as body sensor networks and autonomous vehicles. Finally, we present a formalisation of our model that allows a rigorous verification of the properties satisfied by the SMC interactions before policies are deployed in physical devices.

Schaeffer-Filho, Alberto and Lupu, Emil and Sloman, Morris. Federating Policy-Driven Autonomous Systems: Interaction Specification and Management Patterns, Journal of Network and Systems Management, Springer, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10922-014-9317-5

Vittorio Illiano

Vittorio Illiano is PhD student in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, as part of the Intel ICRI on Sustainable and Connected Cities.

His main research area is security in Wireless Sensor Networks, with a focus on anomaly detection and related data analysis techniques.
He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Naples “Federico II”.

Vittorio left the group after completing and defending successfully his PhD Thesis. He is now working with Novartis.

Pedro Rodrigues

Pedro has obtained his PhD in the RISS group working on composable techniques for reliability analysis.

LTSA-PCA : Tool support for compositional reliability analysis

Software systems are constructed by combining new and existing services and components. Models that represent an aspect of a system should therefore be compositional to facilitate reusability and automated construction from the representation of each part. In this paper we present an extension to the LTSA tool that provides support for the specification, visualisation and analysis of composable probabilistic behaviour of a component-based system using Probabilistic Component Automata (PCA). These also include the ability to specify failure scenarios and failure handling behaviour. Following composition, a PCA that has full probabilistic information can be translated to a DTMC model for reliability analysis in PRISM. Before composition, each component can be reduced to its interface behaviour in order to mitigate state explosion associated with composite representations, which can significantly reduce the time to analyse the reliability of a system. Moreover, existing behavioural analysis tools in LTSA can also be applied to PCA representations.

LTSA-PCA software
Examples
Demonstration Video
P. Rodrigues, E. Lupu and J. Kramer LTSA-PCA: Tool Support for Compositional Reliability Analysis, ICSE 2014, (formal demonstrations), Hyderabad, May 31 – June 7, 2014. download preprint of the paper.

Luke Dickens

Luke joined the group as a Research Associate after having completed a PhD at Imperial College London under the supervision of Dr Alessandra Russo. Luke focuses on machine learning techniques and is working on techniques for dealing with partially trusted sources of information in particular in crowdsourcing scenarios. Luke is now a lecturer at University College London.

Policy Refinement

Layered refinement with interleaved transformations

Refining policies from high level goals to enforceable specifications in asemi-automated and principled ways remains one of the most significant challenges in policy based systems. We have on two occasions attempted to tackle this challenges in collaboration with Dr Alessandra Russo at Imperial, Dr Arosha Bandara at the Open University and Dr Jorge Lobo at IBM. The first attempt wast done during the Dr Bandara’s PhD thesis. …

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Self-Managed Cell

The Self-Managed Cell is an architectural pattern for building autonomous pervasive systems. It was developed in collaboration with Prof. Joe Sventek at the University of Glasgow, and with my colleagues Dr. Narnaker Dulay and Prof. Morris Sloman at Imperial College.

Enrico Scalavino

Enrico designed a framework for secure dissemination of information in partially disconnected environments as part of the Consequence project. This was in particular applied to information exchanges between first responder organisations in crisis management scenario. His work also investigated the protection of derived data. After successfully completing his PhD under the supervision of Dr Emil Lupu, Enrico took a position with Morgan Stanley. He is now a Senior Software engineer at Microsoft.

Alberto Egon Schaeffer Filho

Alberto did his PhD thesis under the supervision of Dr Emil Lupu and contributed significantly to our work on the Self Managed Cells. In particular, his work focussed on means of realising autonomous interactions, compositions and federations of cells in a recursive fashion. After completing his PhD, Alberto became a Research Associate at Lancaster University. He is now an Associate Professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). His web page is here.

Publication List

Ponder2

Ponder2 combines a general-purpose, distributed object management system with a Domain Service, Obligation Policy Interpreter, Command Interpreter and Authorisation Enforcement. The Domain Service provides an hierarchical structure for managing objects. The Obligation Policy Interpreter handles Event, Condition, Action rules (ECA). The Command Interpreter accepts a set of commands, compiled from a high-level language called PonderTalk, via a number of communications interfaces which may perform invocations on a ManagedObjectregistered in the Domain Service. The Authorisation Enforcement caters for both positive and negative authorisation policies, provides the ability to specify fine grained authorisations for every object and implements domain nesting algorithms for conflict resolution. …

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Kevin Twidle

Dr. Kevin Twidle has been a long time member and associate of the Distributed Software Engineering Group at Imperial College. In recent years he has been the main designer and implementer of the Ponder2 software, which was used within Imperial and by outside organisations in a broad range of contexts including for the management of Body Sensor Networks for eHealth, Autonomous Vehicles, Heterogeneous Networks, Mobile Workflows and Distributed Authorisation Systems. He is now an IT consultant based in France but working world wide.

Sye Loong Keoh

Sye-Loong obtained his PhD in 2005 under the supervision of Dr. Emil Lupu. He then worked with us as a Research Associate until 2008 when he joined Philips Research in Eindhoven. In 2013, Sye-Loong left industry to return to academia and was appointed as an Assistant Professor with the University of Glasgow in Singapore. His current web page is here.

Consequence: Context-Aware Data Centric Information Sharing

“Consequence” was a collaborative research project partly funded by the European Commission, which ran between 2008 and 2011. The project built a comprehensive framework for controlled dissemination of information based on Data Sharing Agreements and a combination of technologies based on rights management and usage control policies. The framework was demonstrated within the context of sharing large scale scientific data and also for controlled sharing of information between first responder organisations in crisis management scenarios. More details, videos, papers and project deliverable are available from the Consequence web site.