Advanced Technologies

This book, edited by the Intech committee, combines several hotly debated topics in science, engineering, medicine, information technology, environment, economics and management, and provides a scholarly contribution to its further development. In view of the topical importance of, and the great emphasis placed by the emerging needs of the changing world, it was decided to have this special book publication comprise thirty six chapters which focus on multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary topics. The inter-disciplinary works were limited in their capacity so a more coherent and constructive alternative was needed. Our expectation is that this book will help fill this gap because it has crossed the disciplinary divide to incorporate contributions from scientists and other specialists. The Intech committee hopes that its book chapters, journal articles, and other activities will help increase knowledge across disciplines and around the world. To that end the committee invites readers to contribute ideas on how best this objective could be accomplished. In this chapter, we present a structure to specify agent explicit knowledge based on information algebra. We define in the context of agent knowledge the combining, marginalizing, and labelling operators. Also, we define remove and frame substitution operator. These operators are all what is needed to express operations on agent explicit knowledge. We also define a set of frames to be associated with information. Then, we prove that our structure is an information algebra which links our work to a rich heritage of mathematical theories. Our mathematical structure is expressive as it allows combining information for different purposes regardless of their frames, extracting a part of information, or associating information with a frame. We give two applications of the proposed structure. First, we apply it to the specification and analysis of agent knowledge in cryptographic protocols. In the literature of cryptographic protocols, operators are usually defined on information that belongs to a specific type, while our structure enables a uniform and a general way to handle information. Also, defining a relation between frames and linking them to the operators applied on information is not addressed in the literature. Furthermore, different protocol-dependent structures should be defined to relate different kinds of information which are not needed in our representation. Second, we show its use in the analysis of information flow between agents in multi-agent systems. Our structure provides a comprehensive language to specify agents knowledge and confidentiality policies. For example, it allows specifying and reasoning on composite information flow. Also, it allows specifying policies similar those articulated within Bell-LaPadula and Chinese Wall models Enhancing Productivity through Integrated Intelligent Methodology in Automated Production Environment