Group Members

	Stanisław Ambroszkiewicz, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Head of the Group
	Waldemar Bartyna, M.Sc.
	Marek Faderewski, M.Sc.
	Piotr Kulma, M.Sc.
	Andrzej Ryżko, M.Sc.
	Marcin Stępniak, M.Sc.

Research Domain The group is engaged in research and development of information technologies (IT) for open and heterogeneous distributed systems, in particular in two main research areas:

Automation of electronic business processes: modeling, planning, execution and transactions. The research is focused on the contemporary research and technologies for electronic business processes based on the SOA paradigm. Generally, the semantics of such processes is widely recognized as the main key for the development and deployment of modern IT. Despite many years of research, the semantics still remains the main challenge. The existing standards for Web services (WSDL, SOAP, UDDI) are not sufficient, and this fact has been already known for many years. On the other hand, the idea embodied by Semantic Web Services based on OWL is still too theoretic. There are many approaches (e.g. WSMO, SWSF, WSDL-S) to solving the problem of semantics in electronic business processes. However, their use in real life applications is limited. Hence, the semantics still remains an open problem in theoretical research as well as in IT Projects: Ongoing project. ITSOA: New information technologies for e-business and e-society based on the SOA paradigm. ( https://www.soa.edu.pl/web/guest/home) Supported by EC and the Polish Government POIG, 01.01.2009 - 31.12.2012. Principal coordinator is AGH Krakow. Stanisław Ambroszkiewicz was appointed as the coordinator on behalf of ICS PAS - a partner of the project consortium. The goal of the project is to exploit modern information technologies from the area of distributed systems. Such technologies, based on the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm, support computerized business process management as well as development of service platforms and IT infrastructure for e-Science. The central point of this approach is to automate access to both individual services and complex business processes based on these services. Key challenges in this scope include: development of proper service description languages; enabling providers to publish their services, and clients to search for the services they require; creation of semantics-based protocols for service composition in the framework of complex and potentially long-running business processes. One of the results of the project is the Neiberia portal (http://www.neiberia.com) and a forthcoming platform (based on social media) for development of electronic markets for small and medium enterprises. Completed project. ELA-enT: Protocols and prototype of a platform for realization of electronic market for service with special emphasis on people excluded from labor market. (https://ent.ipipan.waw.pl/) Supported by Polish Government MNiSzW Nr R02 036 02; 2.03.2007 - 1.03. 2010. Electronic markets do exist but are like separate islands with separate specific and usually limited range of industries and fields of application as well as closed technological solutions. The lack of common standards impedes their integration. The aim of the project is limited to electronic market for services only (EMS in short). The essence of such a market is the automation of the following processes: publishing offers by service providers; finding relevant offers by customers willing to purchase services; arranging a deal between the customer and service provider; and finally signing a contract for the arranged services.

Interoperability of software agents, robots and intelligent cognitive devices in multi-robot systems. Rapid development and ubiquitous use of intelligent devices (equipped with sensors, microcontrollers, and connected to a network) pose new possibilities and challenges in Robotics and Information Technology. One of them is creating large open distributed systems consisting of heterogeneous devices that can interoperate in order to accomplish complex tasks. An example is Ambient Intelligence (AmI) that is currently one of the most explored research areas. The general idea of AmI is that intelligent cognitive devices, in a human environment, are able to interoperate to perform complex task delegated by people. Ubiquitous robotics is a similar idea resulting from developments in the ubiquitous computing and the network technology. It claims that in the near future humans will live in a world where all devices are fully networked, so that any desired service can be provided at any place at any time. These ideas require new information technologies for developing distributed systems that allow defining tasks in a declarative way by human users and automatic task accomplishing by the system. Openness and heterogeneity of the system are essential here because they enable extensibility and scalability, that is, heterogeneous devices may be added to (or removed from) the system, in the plug and play manner, so that the system may grow to large size and still keep its basic functionality, (i.e. automatic task accomplishing), if there are still sufficient services in the system. The key problem here is a representation of the environment common for people and other system components, that is, the devices. Also generic protocols are necessary for task accomplishment involving heterogeneous devices. The new emerging technologies (based on the SOA paradigm) aim at the creation of global distributed systems widely known as "Internet of things", and "Internet of services". Completed project. Project: Robo-enT: Interoperability in Open Heterogeneous Multirobot Systems. (http://ent.ipipan.waw.pl/robo-ent Supported by the Polish Government MEiN grant No. 3 T11C 038 29. 9.12.2005 - 8.12.2008. The challenge of the project was to situate software agents in open systems consisting of cognitive heterogeneous robots that are supposed to perform jointly complex tasks. The starting points are: the current paradigm of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and the semantic interoperability between heterogeneous robots.