Towards the Application of Interaction-oriented Frameworks to Information Sharing in Emergency Contexts

In distributed, open evironments, possibly heterogeneous computational entities need to engage in complex interactions in order to complete tasks and often have to face sudden changes; it therefore becomes essential for modern information systems to adopt coordination technologies which support dynamic and flexible interactions among processes, whether reactive (e.g., web services) or proactive (e.g., autonomous agents). Substantial efforts are being put forward to devise suitable mechanisms for process coordination. In the past few years, interaction-oriented frameworks have been proposed, which enable distributed and heterogeneus agents to engage in coordination activities by sharing interaction models specified in executable protocol languages. Software systems have started to be developed to apply such frameworks to concrete use. In particular, the OpenKnowledge framework has been proposed as such an interaction-oriented framework, and the OpenKnowledge (OK) system has been developed for its realization. Such system provides a distributed infrastructure which allows a-priori unknown peers to gather together and coordinate with each other by publishing, discovering and executing interaction models specified in the Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC) protocol language. Although the realization of the OpenKnowledge approach is promising, its application in realistic, complex scenarios is not fully exploited. This thesis aims at applying the OpenKnowledge framework to realistic contexts such as emergency response (e-Response). Its main contribution is in the design and simulation of emergency response scenarios which are expressed in terms of LCC specifications, and are enacted by means of a simulation environment fully integrated with the OK system. Such environment is developed to: (1) informally validate the e-Response scenarios; (2) test the capability of the OK system to support such scenarios, and (3) provide a preliminary evaluation of the efficacy of different information gathering strategies (i.e., centralized or distributed) in emergency response settings. The results obtained show that the OK system is able to support complex coordination tasks; however, some limitations have emerged in relation to the discovery mechanism. Furthermore, simulations have shown to adhere with realistic scenarios, and that - under ideal conditions - centralized and decentralized information-gathering strategies are comparable.