Social Continual Planning in Open Multiagent Systems: a First Study

Abstract. We describe a Multiagent Planning approach, named Social Continual Planning, that tackles open scenarios, where agents can join and leave the system dynamically. The planning task is not defined from a global point of view, setting a global objective, but we allow each agent to pursue its own subset of goals. We take a social perspective where, although each agent has its own planning task and planning algorithm, it needs to get engaged with others for accomplishing its own goals. Cooperation is not forced but, thanks to the abstraction of social commitment, stems from the needs of the agents

Cybercrime and Risks for Cyber Physical Systems

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) is the integration of computation and physical systems that make a complete system such as the network, software, embedded systems, and physical components. Major industries such as industrial plants, transport, national grid, and communication systems depend heavily on CPS for financial and economic growth. However, these components may have inherent threats and vulnerabilities on them that may run the risk of being attacked, manipulated or exploited by cyber attackers and commit cybercrimes. Cybercriminals in their quest to bring down these systems may cause disruption of services either for fame, data theft, revenge, political motive, economic war, cyber terrorism, and cyberwar. Therefore, identifying the risks has become imperative in mitigating the cybercrimes. This paper seeks to identify cybercrimes and risks that are associated with a smart grid business application system to determine the motives and intents of the cybercriminal. The paper identified four goals to mitigate the risks: as business value, organizational requirements, threat agent and impact vectors. We used the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the importance of the goals that contribute to identifying cybercrime and risks in CPS. For the results, a case study is used to identify the threat and vulnerable spots and the prioritized goals are then used to assess the risks using a semi-quantitative approach to determine the net threat level. The results indicate that using the AHP approach to identify cybercrime and risk on CPS provides specific risk mitigation goals

Mapeamento de vulnerabilidades decorrentes dos impactes dos sistemas de transportes rodoviários

O transporte rodoviário individual tem cada vez mais relevância, principalmente em cidades de média dimensão como Aveiro. Tal relevância deve-se parcialmente, à complexidade em implementar um sistema de transportes públicos altamente eficiente e atrativo devido à dispersão populacional dos subúrbios limítrofes ao núcleo urbano. Com o mapeamento foi possível efetuar um inventário organizado espacialmente dos vários impactes considerados, tendo sido encontrados alguns hotspots como a Av. 5 de Outubro, com emissões de CO2 e NOx 90% e 114% superiores, respetivamente, ao valor médio verificado. Através do mapeamento dos acidentes entre veículos e utentes vulneráveis foram encontrados alguns pontos negros. Conclui-se que um inventário de impactes pode ser uma ferramenta útil na identificação de hotspots

DOCTalk Newsletter March/April 2015

In this issue: Bring Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day The View from Downeast Correctional Facility Maine State Prison Theatre Workshops Project Plant a Seed in Region 2 - Adult Music at the Creekhttps://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/doctalk-newsletter/1004/thumbnail.jp

Experimentation and Characterization of Mobile Broadband Networks

The Internet has brought substantial changes to our life as the main tool to access a large variety of services and applications. Internet distributed nature and technological improvements lead to new challenges for researchers, service providers, and network administrators. Internet traffic measurement and analysis is one of the most trivial and powerful tools to study such a complex environment from different aspects. Mobile BroadBand (MBB) networks have become one of the main means to access the Internet. MBB networks are evolving at a rapid pace with technology enhancements that promise drastic improvements in capacity, connectivity, and coverage, i.e., better performance in general. Open experimentation with operational MBB networks in the wild is currently a fundamental requirement of the research community in its endeavor to address the need for innovative solutions for mobile communications. There is a strong need for objective data relating to stability and performance of MBB (e.g., 2G, 3G, 4G, and soon-to-come 5G) networks and for tools that rigorously and scientifically assess their performance. Thus, measuring end user performance in such an environment is a challenge that calls for large-scale measurements and profound analysis of the collected data. The intertwining of technologies, protocols, and setups makes it even more complicated to design scientifically sound and robust measurement campaigns. In such a complex scenario, the randomness of the wireless access channel coupled with the often unknown operator configurations makes this scenario even more challenging. In this thesis, we introduce the MONROE measurement platform: an open access and flexible hardware-based platform for measurements on operational MBB networks. The MONROE platform enables accurate, realistic, and meaningful assessment of the performance and reliability of MBB networks. We detail the challenges we overcame while building and testing the MONROE testbed and argue our design and implementation choices accordingly. Measurements are designed to stress performance of MBB networks at different network layers by proposing scalable experiments and methodologies. We study: (i) Network layer performance, characterizing and possibly estimating the download speed offered by commercial MBB networks; (ii) End users’ Quality of Experience (QoE), specifically targeting the web performance of HTTP1.1/TLS and HTTP2 on various popular web sites; (iii) Implication of roaming in Europe, understanding the roaming ecosystem in Europe after the "Roam like Home" initiative; and (iv) A novel adaptive scheduler family with deadline is proposed for multihomed devices that only require a very coarse knowledge of the wireless bandwidth. Our results comprise different contributions in the scope of each research topic. To put it in a nutshell, we pinpoint the impact of different network configurations that further complicate the picture and hopefully contribute to the debate about performance assessment in MBB networks. The MBB users web performance shows that HTTP1.1/TLS is very similar to HTTP2 in our large-scale measurements. Furthermore, we observe that roaming is well supported for the monitored operators and the operators using the same approach for routing roaming traffic. The proposed adaptive schedulers for content upload in multihomed devices are evaluated in both numerical simulations and real mobile nodes. Simulation results show that the adaptive solutions can effectively leverage the fundamental tradeoff between the upload cost and completion time, despite unpredictable variations in available bandwidth of wireless interfaces. Experiments in the real mobile nodes provided by the MONROE platform confirm the findings

VI Workshop on Computational Data Analysis and Numerical Methods: Book of Abstracts

The VI Workshop on Computational Data Analysis and Numerical Methods (WCDANM) is going to be held on June 27-29, 2019, in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Beira Interior (UBI), Covilhã, Portugal and it is a unique opportunity to disseminate scientific research related to the areas of Mathematics in general, with particular relevance to the areas of Computational Data Analysis and Numerical Methods in theoretical and/or practical field, using new techniques, giving especial emphasis to applications in Medicine, Biology, Biotechnology, Engineering, Industry, Environmental Sciences, Finance, Insurance, Management and Administration. The meeting will provide a forum for discussion and debate of ideas with interest to the scientific community in general. With this meeting new scientific collaborations among colleagues, namely new collaborations in Masters and PhD projects are expected. The event is open to the entire scientific community (with or without communication/poster)

Knowledge Capturing in Design Briefing Process for Requirement Elicitation and Validation

Knowledge capturing and reusing are major processes of knowledge management that deal with the elicitation of valuable knowledge via some techniques and methods for use in actual and further studies, projects, services, or products. The construction industry, as well, adopts and uses some of these concepts to improve various construction processes and stages. From pre-design to building delivery knowledge management principles and briefing frameworks have been implemented across project stakeholders: client, design teams, construction teams, consultants, and facility management teams. At pre-design and design stages, understanding the client’s needs and users’ knowledge are crucial for identifying and articulating the expected requirements and objectives. Due to underperforming results and missed goals and objectives, many projects finish with highly dissatisfied clients and loss of contracts for some organizations. Knowledge capturing has beneficial effects via its principles and methods on requirement elicitation and validation at the briefing stage between user, client and designer. This paper presents the importance and usage of knowledge capturing and reusing in briefing process at pre-design and design stages especially the involvement of client and user, and explores the techniques and technologies that are usable in briefing process for requirement elicitation