Corrado Santoro (Uni Catania)

Planning and Reasoning in the IoT era: the DEMOCLE approach

The advent of Internet-of-Things, together with the Edge-Computing paradigm, lead to rethinking the way in which distributed smart applications have to be engineered and developed. Smart Objects have appeared since many years, embedding computing capabilities that make these devices very powerfull: high-speed microcontrollers, also equipped with accelerators and parallel processing units, have appeared in the market, making AI applications able to run also on these small computing objects.

In this context, the trend in developing IoT applications is to make them able to exhibit intelligent capabilities by decentralising and distributing also complex tasks over the various interacting devices. In this sense, multi-agent systems (MAS) offer the ideal paradigm to develop such kind of applications. But while libraries for neural network processing in embedded devices are now available (e.g. TinyML), the same cannot be said for the context of symbolic reasoning. Starting from the aspects above, the talk will focus on DEMOCLE, a library to develop multi-agent systems in IoT devices with the specific ability of allowing a programmer to express agent’s behaviour using symbolic programming.