Elena del Val

I am a PhD candidate (full-time student) at the GTI-IA Research Group ([1]). I have been working with GTI-IA group since 2005, participating in several projects related to the implementation and application of Multi-Agent Systems to large-scale open distributed computer systems.

I am interested on the development of mechanisms based on social features to facilitate a decentralized management of resources and adaptation in large distributed systems where only local knowledge is available. Specifically, In the last years I have been working on the inclusion of a social feature called homophily as a criterion to facilitate service management in Service-Oriented Multi-Agent Systems (SOMAS). This main goal is divided in the following sub-goals:

1. The generation of self-organized network structures based on homophily between agents that facilitate the search of resources considering local information.

2. The use of greedy algorithms for decentralized search based on local information related to organizational and functional information.

3. The creation of self-organization mechanisms based on local information. These mechanisms are based on utility functions and link-decay functions. The aim of the consideration of self-organization is to improve the system performance and utility when changes in the environmental conditions occur.

4. The inclusion of mechanisms that facilitate the emergence of cooperation in heterogeneous systems where cooperative and non-cooperative agents can appear. These mechanisms are based on economical incentives and social plasticity of the agents present in the network.