Guest Editorial: Special Section: Contemporary Topics in Intelligent Distributed Computing

We have the pleasure to open the special section of the Computer Science and Information Systems journal focused on "Contemporary Topics in Intelligent Distributed Computing".

Intelligent distributed computing (IDC) faces the challenges of adapting and combining research results in the fields of intelligent computing and distributed computing. Intelligent computing develops methods and technology covering topics from artificial intelligence, computational intelligence, machine learning, and intelligent agents. Distributed computing develops methods and technology to build systems that are composed of interacting components deployed on computer networks on local, as well as on global scale. IDC sets the foundation for the development of the new generation of intelligent distributed systems.

One direction of IDC is the application of intelligent methods including logic-based coordination languages, evolutionary computing, taxonomy-based knowledge structuring, and intelligent analytics for tackling large-scale problems in complex computational and social environments. On the other hand, distributed computing methods, possibly enhanced by bio-inspired approaches, can be employed for solving difficult large scale and complex computational problems.

This special section brings to the reader new research results and applications of intelligent distributed computing, with a special focus on the synergies between intelligent methods on one side and distributed computing on the other side, for tackling difficult problems in complex social and computational environments. In particular, some of the papers address interesting applications of intelligent distributed approaches in the areas of ambient intelligence, human-computer interaction, large scale distributed systems, and fault-tolerant meta-heuristics. We hope that the papers selected for inclusion in this special section will be a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working in these contemporary research areas that are part of IDC.

This special section includes extended versions of selected papers from the 11-th International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing (IDC 2017) and the collocated 7-th Workshop on Applications of Software Agents (WASA 2017), both held from 11 to 13 October 2017 in Belgrade, Serbia. There were 52 submissions from 30 countries to the joint IDC 2017 and WASA 2017 event, from which only 28 were accepted and included in the proceedings after a rigorous review process. From the list of accepted papers, 5 papers with higher review scores were selected and invited to be extended and submitted to this special section. Finally, after two peer-review rounds, all of them were carefully revised, extended, and improved, thus being judged acceptable for their publication in this special section.

The first article "ReSpecTX: Programming Interaction Made Easy", by Giovanni Ciatto, Stefano Mariani, and Andrea Omicini, is in the coordination languages for ambient intelligence. The authors introduce the ReSpecTX language and its associated tools and libraries. The aim of the authors is to contribute to bridging the gap between the academic side of coordination models and languages, where the focus is on theory and proof-of-concept implementation and the industrial side, where the interest is in mature-enough and robust implementation and tools. ReSpecTX comprise a logic-based programming language, a tool chain and a standard library for programming the coordination of multi-agent systems.

The second article "X3S: A Multi-modal Approach to Monitor and Assess Stress through Human-computer Interaction", by Filipe Gonçalves, Davide Carneiro, José Pêgo, and Paulo Novais, is in the area of intelligent analytics for human-computer interaction. In this article, the authors introduce a distributed multi-modal framework approach entitled X3S, which aims to non-intrusively and non-invasively monitor and assess the psychological stress of computer users during high-end tasks. The framework was evaluated by experiments of monitoring groups of medical students during their interactions with the computer. The results include presentation and discussion of correlation of the mouse performance metrics and decision making performance metrics in order to quantify the stress levels of each individual.

The third article “The CRI-Model: A Domain-independent Taxonomy for Non-Conformance between Observed and Specified Behaviour”, by Christopher Haubeck, Alexander Pokahr, Kim Reichert, Till Hohenberger, and Winfried Lamersdorf, is in the area of large-scale distributed systems. The authors present the CRI-Model (Cause, Reaction, Impact) proposing a domain-independent taxonomy of non-conformance types between observed and specified behaviour in long-running large-scale systems. The taxonomy has been developed by studying anomaly types in the literature, and it was validated by checking its applicability to distributed cloud systems and cyber-physical production systems.

The fourth article “On the Use of Self-* Island-based Evolutionary Computation Methods on Complex Environments”, by Rafael Nogueras and Carlos Cotta is in the area of fault-tolerant evolutionary computing. The authors analyze the performance of island-based evolutionary algorithms in fault-prone settings specific to unstable computational environments, under experimental scenarios of both correlated and non-correlated node failures. Simple island-based EAs exhibit significant performance degradation in the correlated scenario with respect to its uncorrelated counterpart. However, resilience is improved via endowing evolutionary algorithms with self-* properties, thus making it able to withstand from low up to moderately high volatility.

The fifth article “A Novel Distributed Registry Approach for Efficient and Resilient Service Discovery in Megascale Distributed Systems”, by Lars Braubach, Kai Jander, and Alexander Pokahr, is in the area of large-scale distributed systems. The authors formulate requirements for service discovery in mega-scale systems based on a three facets analysis involving provider, client, and architectural sides, while shortcomings of existing approaches are identified and discussed. Based on this initial assessment, the authors propose a new architectural solution by separation of static and dynamic service properties. Finally, the proposal is experimentally evaluated on a sample scenario, using the Jadex middleware, showing that it is capable to meet the performance, scalability and high availability requirements.

Guest Editors

Costin Bădică
University of Craiova, Department of Computers and Information Technology, Craiova, Romania

Bogdan Trawiński
Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Faculty of Computer Science and Management, Poland