Traditionally, location systems have been built bottom-up beginning with low-level sensors and adding layers up to high-level context.

Abstract. This paper deals with self-adapting software that is structured according to a control theory architecture. Such software contains, in addition to its main function, two components- a Controller and a Quality-of-Service module. We show an example of an application and analyze the mapping of this application onto various control theory-based architectures. The application is a radar-based target tracking system. We show how architectural constraints are propagated through the mapping. We also analyze various architectural solutions with respect to stability and time complexity. 1

This paper describes how multiagent systems can be used to achieve robust software, one of the major goals of software engineering. The paper first positions itself within the software engineering domain. It then develops the hypothesis that robust software can be achieved through redundancy, where the redundancy is achieved by agents that have different algorithms but similar responsibilities. The agents are produced by wrapping conventional algorithms with a minimal set of agent capabilities, which we specify. We show that the same wrapper can be used for a variety of algorithms. We describe our initial experiments in verifying our hypothesis and present results that show an improvement in robustness due to redundancy. We also completely characterize the decision-making that must occur to decide among competing redundant algorithms. We conclude by speculating on the implications of multiagent-based redundancy for general software development and future Web services.

Abstract. In mission critical applications of distributed information systems, autonomous information resources are coordinated to meet the information demands of client specific decision-support views. A major challenge is handling dynamic changes in QoS constraints of the clients and/or changes in QoS properties of the resources. This paper presents a negotiation-based adaptive view coordination approach to address such run-time changes. The three key ideas are as follows. a) A negotiation-based reasoning model for adapting view maintenance policies to meet changes in QoS needs and context constraints. b) A dynamic software architecture of the collaborating information resources supporting the client task of maintaining a specific view. c) Coordination mechanisms in the architecture that realize negotiated changes in the policies for view maintenance. The paper describes an initial prototype of the support system for the supply-chain task domain. 1

. Robot control in nonlinear and nonstationary run-time environments presents challenges to traditional software methodologies. In particular, robot systems in \open" domains can only be modeled probabilistically and must rely on run-time feedback to detect whether hardware/software con gurations are adequate. Modi cations must be e ected while guaranteeing critical performance properties. Moreover, in multi-robot systems, there are typically many ways in which to compensate for inadequate performance. The computational complexity of high dimensional sensorimotor systems prohibits the use of many traditional centralized methodologies. We present an application in which a redundant sensor array, distributed spatially over an oce-like environment can be used to track and localize a human being while reacting at run-time to various kinds of faults, including: hardware failure, inadequate sensor geometries, occlusion, and bandwidth limitations. Responding at run-time requires...