Agent organisations: from independent agents to virtual organisations and societies of agents

Real world applications using agent-based solutions can include many agents that needs communicate and interact each other in order to meet their objectives. In open multi-agent systems, the problems may include the organisation of a large number of agents that may be heterogeneous, of unpredictable provenance and where competitive behaviours or conflicting objectives may occur. An overview of the alternatives for dealing with these problems is presented, highlighting the way they try to solve or mitigate these problems.

Marketing Innovation in Tourism

Tourism businesses have become virtual organisations linked to information technology available for innovation in marketing as well as using other platforms in the social media environment such as Facebook, Instagram, etc. This use of social media is creating innovation, as the tourists are becoming co-designers, co-producers, co-marketers, and co-consumers of tourism experiences. The branding strategies methods, tools, and process are changing since the adoption of digital technology in marketing and branding. The organisations are able to reach their tourism appeal through multisensory information that touches the five senses in a more effective way. The use of liquid branding and audio branding to introduce, enhance, and develop various audio and visual elements of the brand is a new trend in branding. Therefore, as brick and mortar or virtual organisations, the destination marketing organisation should innovate their marketing efforts and should respond to change within a dynamic business environment.

Monitoring virtual machines and containers with VacMon

At the start of 2017, GridPP deployed VacMon, a new monitoring system suitable for recording and visualising the usage of virtual machines and containers at multiple sites. The system uses short JSON messages transmitted by logical machine lifecycle managers such as Vac and Vcycle. These are directed to a VacMon logging service which records the messages in an Elasticsearch database. The records can be viewed graphically using the VacMon web portal, with selections based on time ranges, virtual organisations, sites, subclusters within sites, or individual hypervisors.