Book Chapters

1.      E. Curry, "Message-Oriented Middleware", in Middleware for Communications,
Q. H. Mahmoud, Ed. Chichester, England: John Wiley and Sons, 2004, pp. 1-28.

Summary:

2.      E. Curry, "Adaptive and Reflective Middleware", in Middleware for Communications,
Q. H. Mahmoud, Ed. Chichester, England: John Wiley and Sons, 2004, pp. 29-52.

Summary:

Peer-reviewed journal, conferences, and workshops

3.      E. Curry and P. Grace, "Increasing Flexibility within Self-Managed Systems using the Model-View-Controller Design Pattern", IEEE Software, (in press).

4.      E. Ridge and E. Curry, “A Roadmap of Nature-Inspired Systems Research and Development”, Multi-Agent and Grid Systems, vol. 3, no. 1, 2007, pp. 3-8.

5.      E. Curry, "Increasing Flexibility within MOM using Portable Rule-Bases", IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 10, no. 6, 2006, pp. 26-32.

Summary
   Message-oriented middleware (MOM) provides an effective integration mechanism for distributed systems, but it must change frequently to adapt to evolving business demands. Content-based routing (CBR) can increase the flexibility of MOM-based deployments. Although centralized CBR improves a messaging solution’s maintainability, it limits scalability and robustness. This article proposes an alternative, decentralized approach to CBR that uses a portable rule base to maximize MOM-based deployments’ maintainability, scalability, and robustness.

6.      E. Ridge, E. Curry, D. Kudenko, and D. Kazakov, "Parallel, Asynchronous and Decentralised Ant Colony System", presented at The First International Symposium on Nature-Inspired Systems for Parallel, Asynchronous and Decentralised Environments (NISPADE), AISB convention, Bristol, 2006.

Summary
  This paper describes a multi-agent system architecture that would permit implementing an established and successful nature-inspired algorithm, Ant Colony System (ACS), in a parallel, asynchronous and decentralised environment. We review ACS, highlighting the obstacles to its implementation in this sort of environment. It is suggested how these obstacles may be overcome using a pheromone infrastructure and some modifications to the original algorithm. The possibilities opened up by this implementation are discussed with reference to an elitist ant strategy. Some related exploratory work is reported.

7.      E. Curry and E. Ridge, "The Collective: A Common Information Service for Self-Managed Middleware”, presented at 4th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware, Middleware 2005, Grenoble, France, 2005.

Summary
  As the deployment of self-managed re°ective middleware platforms increases, the process of collecting and examining information used within the reflective process becomes ever more complex. The quality of such information is vital to ensure the successful outcome of the self-management process. However, the cost associated with the collection of this information plays a major role in influencing the success of a self-managed system.
  Within typical deployment environments it is not uncommon for multiple self-managed systems to be deployed, each collecting information for use within their respective reflective computations. In many cases, these systems will collect the same information, replicating the effort required to retrieve the information. Such replication could be avoided by sharing information between systems to reduce the overall cost of collection within the deployment environments.
  Current self-managed systems lack adequate support for information collection and sharing. This work proposes the use of an independent information service to assist in the collection and management of information within self-managed middleware systems.

8.      E. Ridge, D. Kudenko, D. Kazakov, and E. Curry, "Moving Nature-Inspired Algorithms to Parallel, Asynchronous and Decentralised Environments", in Self-Organization and Autonomic Informatics (I), vol. 135, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, H. Czap, R. Unland, C. Branki, and H. Tianfield, Eds.: IOS Press, 2005.

Summary
  This paper motivates research into implementing nature-inspired algorithms in decentralised, asynchronous and parallel environments. These characteristics typify environments such as Peer-To-Peer systems, the Grid and autonomic computing which demand robustness, decentralisation, parallelism, asynchronicity and self-organisation. Nature-inspired systems promise these properties. However, current implementations of nature-inspired systems are only loosely based on their natural counterparts. They are generally implemented as synchronous, sequential, centralised algorithms that loop through passive data structures. For their successes to be relevant to the aforementioned new computing environments, variants of these algorithms must work in truely decentralised, parallel and asynchronous Multi-Agent System (MAS) environments. A general methodology is presented for engineering the transfer of nature-inspired algorithms to such a MAS framework. The concept of pheromone infrastructures is reviewed in light of emerging standards for agent platform architecture and interoperability. These ideas are illustrated using a particularly successful nature-inspired algorithm, Ant Colony System for the Travelling Salesman Problem.

9.      E. Curry, D. Chambers, and G. Lyons, “Extending Message-Oriented Middleware using Interception”, presented at Third International Workshop on Distributed Event-Based Systems (DEBS '04), ICSE '04, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, 2004.

Summary
  Varieties of Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) latforms are available each with their own propriety functionality to solve specific messaging challenges. At resent, it is not possible to mix and match these propriety features into a customized MOM solution.
  A number of patterns have been identified that allow a software systems implementation to be more flexible and extensible. This work investigates the use of one such pattern, the POSA Interceptor pattern, in the construction of a MOM framework that is easily customised and extended in a structured way.
  This framework, Chameleon, is designed to support the use of interceptors (message handlers) with a MOM platform to facilitate dynamic changes to the behaviour of the deployed platform. The framework also allows for interceptors to be used on both the client-side and serverside, permitting advance functionality to be deployed to the client, and for co-operation between client-side and server-side interceptors.

10.  E. Curry, D. Chambers, and G. Lyons, “ARMAdA: Creating a Reflective Fellowship (Options for Interoperability)”, presented at 3rd Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware, Middleware 2004, Toronto, Canada, 2004.

Summary
  With the development of numerous adaptive and reflective middleware platforms, inter-platform interoperability is a desirable next step. At present, little or no interoperability is possible at the meta-layer of reflective middleware. The emergence of an open standard for meta-layer interaction is imperative to support the development of next-generation middleware that can express their needs and capabilities to platforms with which they interact. In this paper, we describe the foundations of the ARMAdA interaction standard for adaptive and reflective middleware platforms.

11.  E. Curry, D. Chambers, and G. Lyons, “Enterprise Service Facilitation within Agent Environments”, presented at The 8th IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications, MIT Cambridge, MA, USA, 2004.

Summary
  A prerequisite of participating in an enterprise system is the ability to cope with the rigorous demands experienced within the system. In order to cope with these demands, a number of infrastructure support services are available to assist developers in their creation. A key obstacle to the widespread deployment of agent technology is the relative immaturity of agent technology with regard to its infrastructure. This paper presents a solution to the problem by offering enterprise-level infrastructure services to agent platforms in an agentriendly manner. The proposed solution uses Service-Agent Gateways (SAG) to offer these services within an agent environment.
  This paper describes the SAG design pattern and presents an implementation of the pattern that offers the functionality of Enterprise Message Services (EMS) to an agent environment. The Java Message Service (JMS)-Agent Gateway enhances the acceptability of agent platforms within business environments, moving them a step closer to full-scale participation in the digital enterprise.

12.  E. Curry, D. Chambers, and G. Lyons, “Could Message Hierarchies Contemplate?”, presented at 17th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2003), Darmstadt, Germany, 2003. (poster)

13.  E. Curry, D. Chambers, and G. Lyons, “A JMS Message Transport Protocol for the JADE Platform”, presented at IEEE/WIC International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, Halifax, Canada, 2003.

Summary
  A prerequisite of joining an enterprise system is the ability to cope with the rigorous demands experienced within such systems. One of the most fundamental of these demands is the requirement for enterprise-level systems to have guaranteed reliable messaging between the participants of the system. Our research involves integrating an agent platform with an enterprise messaging service. This first step in combining agent technology with a mainstream messaging service is vital to the participation of agent systems within the digital enterprise.
  This paper introduces a new Message Transport Protocol (MTP) for the Java Agent DEvelopment (JADE) platform. The new protocol uses the Java Messaging Service (JMS) to deliver interplatform communication between agent platforms. The paper provides a brief overview of the design of this new MTP, evaluates its performance, and examines the benefits of the MTP in comparison to the other available MTPs, it then concludes and highlights plans for the development of the MTP. 

14.  E. Curry, “Introducing Reflective Techniques to Message Hierarchies”, presented at Doctoral Symposium at 17th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2003), Darmstadt, Germany, 2003.

15. E. Curry, D. Chambers, and G. Lyons, “Reflective Channel Hierarchies”, presented at 2nd Workshop on Reflective and Adaptive Middleware, Middleware 2003, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2003.

Summary
  Hierarchical channel structures are used to create granular sub-channels from a parent channel. Utilized in routing situations that are more or less static, they require that the channel namespace schema be both well defined and universally understood. The publish/subscribe messaging model currently requires a message publisher to place messages into a specific channel within the hierarchy. A relocation of responsibility for channel selection logic from the publishing client to the middleware service would open up static channel hierarchies to the application of reflective techniques.
  This shift in responsibilities enables the service more control over the definition, creation and maintenance of the channel hierarchy. The service is now able to apply reflective and adaptive techniques to dynamically adapt, grow and improve the hierarchy to better meet the needs of its changing environment and operating conditions. This paper describes work-in-progress on the definition of reflective channel hierarchies.