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Although security is a crucial issue for information systems, traditionally, it is considered after the definition of the system. This approach often leads to problems, which most of the times translate into security vulnerabilities. From the viewpoint of the traditional security paradigm, it should be possible to eliminate such problems through better integration of security and software engineering. This paper firstly argues for the need to develop a methodology that considers security as an integral part of the whole system development process, and secondly it contributes to the current state of the art by proposing an approach that considers security concerns as an integral part of the entire system development process and by relating this approach with existing work. The different stages of the approach are described with the aid of a real-life case study; a health and social care information system.

Older people often have a complex mixture of health and social care needs and several different health and social care professionals are involved in their care. National policy in England is to promote the single assessment process (SAP), an integrated assessment of health and social care needs of older people. However, most of the current information systems do not adequately provide the functionality that is required by health and social care professionals. In this paper we discuss the suitability of agent technology, explaining why we selected it as offering the greatest potential for efficient and flexible information collection and sharing, and for supporting effective care planning. Also, we point out benefits derived from the use of agent technology in the development of health and social care systems, such as the minimization of health and social care professionals' workload. In addition, we describe how we have developed a model for an integrated information system, based on agent technology, for health and social care needs assessment of older people. Finally, we discuss issues, such as security and mobility, involved in the development of such a system, which will need to be designed and tested prior to its implementation in health and social care practice.

Health care information systems are becoming more and more computerized. A huge amount of health related information needs to be stored and analysed, and with the aid of computer systems this can be done faster and more efficiently. The Agent Oriented paradigm provides an alternative way of developing medical based systems. This article presents an initial exploration of the analysis and design of a multi-agent system to deliver the Single Assessment Process, an integrated health and social care information system for older people. The article concludes by making the following observations: Agent technology has the potential to support the development of medical and health and social care systems for older people. Nevertheless there are not many real-life agent based applications successfully applied in the health care sector. One of the main reasons is the limitation of the existing analysis and design methodologies. Thus, in order for the agent-technology to be widely accepted in the development of computer based medical information systems for older people (and in extent any medical system) it is necessary to develop a complete and mature analysis and design methodology to support the development of agent based medical systems.

A methodology called Parallel Communicating Sequential Code (PCSC) is currently being researched and developed for designing and coding parallel system software. To implement this methodology a parallel CASE tool is also being developed and refined hand-in-hand. The underlying philosophy behind the PCSC methodology is consistency between design, program code, configuration and documentation. Design is captured via pictures (diagrams) and annotations (text). The diagrams and text completely define a parallel design. They form an abstract language from which program code is to be derived automatically. Configuration refers to the specification of the software and hardware as well as mapping between them. Documentation involves generation of reports and documents on all aspects of the methodology. Automation (full or partial) is seen as the key player for ensuring consistency between the four main aspects of the methodology.

Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) is a software paradigm that has grasped the attention of researchers the last few years. As a result, many different methods have been introduced to help developers in the development of multi-agent systems. However, so far, these methods have mainly neglected security requirements. The common approach towards the inclusion of security within a system is to identify security requirements after the definition of the system. However, this approach has provoked the emergence of computer systems afflicted with security vulnerabilities. In this paper we propose an analysis, based on the measures of criticality (how critical an actor of the system is) and complexity (represents the effort required by the actors of the system to achieve the requirements that have been imposed to them), which aims to identify possible bottlenecks of a multi-agent system with respect to security. An integrated agent-based health and social care information system is used as a case study throughout this paper.

Security plays an important role in the development of multiagent systems. However, a careful analysis of software development processes shows that the definition of security requirements is, usually, considered after the design of the system. This is, mainly, due to the fact that agent oriented software engineering methodologies have not integrated security concerns throughout their developing stages. The integration of security concerns during the whole range of the development stages could help towards the development of more secure multiagent systems. In this paper we introduce extensions to the Tropos methodology to enable it to model security concerns throughout the whole development process. A description of the new concepts is given along with an explanation of how these concepts are integrated to the current stages of Tropos. An example from the health care sector is used to illustrate the above.

A self-healing network is a ‘dream’ for every network designer today. Abstractly it is a network that capable of maintaining the availability of network services. This would not be impossible to be turned into a reality if the networks are embedded with intelligence. By having the intelligent capability the network can be self- managed in response to events that taken place within the network itself through the learning mechanisms. This paper presents the User Manager Agent System (UMAS) learning performance in controlling a request for network application session. ANFIS of Matlab v5.3 has been used to simulate the learning process in which it bases on the training data of network state. The work also had revealed some weaknesses of ANFIS in processing a large volume of training data sets and substantial amount of time taken for processing.

Security is a crucial issue for information systems. Traditionally, security is considered after the definition of the system. However, this approach often leads to problems, which translate into security vulnerabilities. From the viewpoint of the traditional security paradigm, it should be possible to eliminate such problems through better integration of security and systems engineering. This paper argues for the need to develop a methodology that considers security as an integral part of the whole system development process. The paper contributes to the current state of the art by proposing an approach that considers security concerns as an integral part of the entire system development process and by relating this approach with existing work. The different stages of the approach are described with the aid of a case study; a health and social care information system.

It has been argued that security concerns should inform all the stages of the development process of an agent-based system. However, this is not the case since current agent-oriented methodologies do not, usually, consider security concepts within their modelling ontology. In this paper we present extensions to the Tropos ontology to enable it to model security.