Marco Cioffi

Autonomic Computing

Autonomic Computing I wrote this paper as a student of the course of Software Engineering at Politecnico di Milano taught by Prof. Carlo Ghezzi. The following is the abstract of the article:
Factors like the interconnection, the heterogeneity and the high dynamism characterize ICT systems like software, services or nets. The management of such systems, consequently, becomes particularly complex and expensive. The autonomic computing defines an architecture which promises to pull down costs of maintenance of ICT systems defining an architecture in which each entity can self-repair, self-configure, self-optimize and self-protect itself. This paper represents an overview of the new paradigm, in which we go through the definition of the conceptual elements of the architecture, the standards, the technologies available and some examples of applications.
Sorry this article is available only italian.

Autonomic Computing Autonomic Computing

Credit-based mobility system

7/26/2006, filed under — Marco Cioffi @ 7:44 pm

ASP I wrote this paper as a student of the ASP (Alta Scuola Politecnica, link). The following is the abstract of the article:
Traffic congestion is nowadays one of the biggest problems of livability of cities. The continuous growth of number of vehicles and the difficulty to use funds effectively to improve the capacity of the road is bringing bad times to the local administrators. Mobility managers are in crisis while they are choosing which prohibition to apply to improve the fluidness of cars’ flow. The motorists, as usual, are not happy with the continuous rise of new constraints to their freedom. Consequently, new models that act to control the demand rather than to eliminate the demand are rising up. This paper describes methods for the demand control, in particular road pricing and the recent credit-based mobility system that promise to create a virtuous circle that self-adjusts the demand while it preserves the motorists’ freedom.

Credit-based mobility system Credit-based mobility system

The organisation in the era of knowledge workers

3/31/2006, filed under — Marco Cioffi @ 7:34 pm

ASP I wrote this paper as a student of the ASP (Alta Scuola Politecnica, link). The following is the abstract of the article:
Nowadays the marketplace is extremely dynamic and competitive, the continuous requests of innovation and the following creative destruction is bringing bad times to the management. The corporate leaders are in crisis while they are tackling the problem of human resources reorganisation and if the profits of corporations are increasing, the stress caused by high level of work is rising too. Consequently, the model of the worker is crossing a new era; it is changing from a single manual-worker entity to a networked knowledge-worker entity. This paper describes how the organisations are trying to address this process, analysing different approaches to the management of organisation it presents real case studies augmented by mean of historical perspective. A proper conception of the organisation can foster and promote valuable changing and innovation inside firms while it preserves the human dimension.

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The organisation in the era of knowledge workers The organisation in the era of knowledge workers

Multi-agent Infrastructures for Objective and Subjective Coordination

7/27/2004, filed under — Marco Cioffi @ 3:03 am

A. Omicini, A. Ricci, M. Viroli, M. Cioffi, G. Rimassa
Multi-agent Infrastructures for Objective and Subjective Coordination
Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence 18(9/10). Taylor & Francis, October/December 2004.

Abstract:
Coordination in MAS can be conceived as either an agent activity (the subjective viewpoint) or an activity over agents (the objective viewpoint). The two viewpoints have generated two diverging and often contrasting lines of research, as well as different and non-compatible technologies: however, their integration is mandatory for modelling and engineering complex MAS. In this paper, we explore the issue of integration at both the model and the technology levels.
First, by taking FIPA agents and coordination artifacts as reference notions for subjective and objective approaches, respectively, we sketch a framework where agent interactions with coordination artifacts are modelled as physical acts, deliberated and executed by agents analogously to communicative actions. Then, we show how the JADE infrastructure for FIPA-compliant agents, and the TuCSoN infrastructure providing agents with coordination artifacts can be integrated at the technology level, allowing JADE agents to access TuCSoN tuple centres through JADE services.

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Kernel-Service Ontology in JADE

6/6/2004, filed under