Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2001

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems and Engineering Management, Operational Sciences, and Engineering Physics

Artificial Intelligence, Robots, and Philosophy

This book is a collection of all the papers published in the special issue “Artificial Intelligence, Robots, and Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol.13, No.1, 2023, pp.1-146. The authors discuss a variety of topics such as science fiction and space ethics, the philosophy of artificial intelligence, the ethics of autonomous agents, and virtuous robots. Through their discussions, readers are able to think deeply about the essence of modern technology and the future of humanity. All papers were invited and completed in spring 2020, though because of the Covid-19 pandemic and other problems, the publication was delayed until this year. I apologize to the authors and potential readers for the delay. I hope that readers will enjoy these arguments on digital technology and its relationship with philosophy. *** Contents*** Introduction : Descartes and Artificial Intelligence; Masahiro Morioka*** Isaac Asimov and the Current State of Space Science Fiction : In the Light of Space Ethics; Shin-ichiro Inaba*** Artificial Intelligence and Contemporary Philosophy : Heidegger, Jonas, and Slime Mold; Masahiro Morioka*** Implications of Automating Science : The Possibility of Artificial Creativity and the Future of Science; Makoto Kureha*** Why Autonomous Agents Should Not Be Built for War; István Zoltán Zárdai*** Wheat and Pepper : Interactions Between Technology and Humans; Minao Kukita*** Clockwork Courage : A Defense of Virtuous Robots; Shimpei Okamoto*** Reconstructing Agency from Choice; Yuko Murakami*** Gushing Prose : Will Machines Ever be Able to Translate as Badly as Humans?; Rossa Ó Muireartaigh**

Generic autonomic adapter architecture and policy model for semantic socio-cyber-physical collaborative network

The cyber-physical system aims to improve the quality of life of citizens by providing intelligent and automated services in a wide variety of sectors like transportations, healthcare,enterprises, self-driving cars, energy sectors and so forth. Recently, considerable amounts of researches have focused on integrating cyber-physical systems in a social context. The idea is to socially connect cyber-physical resources (i.e., physical devices, software elements,networked components, digital contents, etc.) so that they can interact and collaborative for autonomous decision making like humans social networking. However, several challenges remain concerning the designing appropriate methodologies, frameworks and techniques for supporting cyber-physical relation and collaboration within the social context. Most of the existing social software modelling focuses on maintaining human-to-human or human-to object centric interaction only. Existing systems do not recognise how socio-cyber-physical resources can maintain their social status, communicate and interact with both humans and non human entities. The reason may be the lack of understanding and limited approaches or methodologies to semantically (a formal characterisation of the information) represent the socio-cyber-physical resources relation and interactions in a collaborative network. This limits data integration, interoperability, and knowledge discovery from its underlying data sources. Semantic Web’s ontology with a software agent model can help to overcome this limitation by describing and interconnecting socio-cyber-physical objects in a social space.The software agents can act as a representative of these resources to track, manage and update their collaborative activities in a social world.Nevertheless, due to the exponential network growth and uncertainties, the states and relations among socio-cyber-physical objects may keep changing when they are in different situations. Therefore, it is an ardours task and error-prone for humans or traditional software agents to keep track, manage and maintain the larger number of socio-cyber-physical resources and their social dynamics. One potential and flexible solution to this problem is to leverage the autonomic computing approach with social and adaptive goals to make the socio-cyber physical network self-managed and adaptive. Autonomic Computing (AC) approach has laid the necessary foundation to tackle this challenge by developing policy-based Autonomic Adapter (AA) model (e.g., autonomous agent). The AAs can continuously monitor socio cyber-physical resource status, analyse the situation and make a collaborative decision based on the policy knowledge defined by the system administrator. However, autonomic computing model must rely on input knowledge to decide self management operations such as “what”, “where” and “how” to perform the adaptation to the system. Previously, adaptation approaches in a different context have been done in an ad-hoc manner based on the algorithms to predict future circumstances and embed in the program code. This approach is inflexible to dynamic and uncertain environments where system configuration needs to adjust frequently. Defining a flexible policy model and integrating policy into knowledge repository outside the code itself is the most appropriate to manage the autonomic system behaviours during the run-time. Sadly, there has been relatively a little work on developing appropriate policy model and specification language for domain neutral autonomic system.To fulfil the above gaps, our proposed solutions in this thesis has three core contribution to the knowledge. First, we address the establishment of both socio-cyber-physical and human relations and interactions within a social-collaborative network. To achieve this, we propose a software agent-centric Semantic Social-Collaborative Network (SSCN) that provides the functionality to represent and manage cyber-physical resources in a social network. We discuss how nonhuman resources can be represented as socially connected nodes and manage by the software agents. The SSCN is supported by an extended ontology model for semantically describing the concept, properties and relations of human and nonhuman resources. A Java-based software agent API has been implemented to demonstrate some actions performed on behalf of the nonhuman resources in a real-world collaborative healthcare system called, GRiST (www.egrist.org). Second, we propose a Generic Autonomic Social-Collaborative Framework (GASCF) with a policy-based Autonomic Adapter (AA) architecture. The AAs are capable of monitoring system resources, analysing context information, and act accordingly using high-level policy. The AAs can also communicate and exchange data with other AAs through a social network for collaborative decisions making like human social interaction.Third, we propose Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rule-based policy model and specification language for AA by defining Policy Schema Definition (PSD) and Policy Script Specification(PSS) languages, modelled with XML syntax. Finally, we test and evaluate our approach by implementing it to the extended GRiST socio-healthcare service context and eGRiST clinical decision support system. We demonstrate and evaluate how socio-cyber-physical relation,interaction and autonomous decision-making is achieved by integrating AAs and using policy specification to manage AAs behaviour within socio-cyber-physical medical context

Dynamics in Logistics

This open access book highlights the interdisciplinary aspects of logistics research. Featuring empirical, methodological, and practice-oriented articles, it addresses the modelling, planning, optimization and control of processes. Chiefly focusing on supply chains, logistics networks, production systems, and systems and facilities for material flows, the respective contributions combine research on classical supply chain management, digitalized business processes, production engineering, electrical engineering, computer science and mathematical optimization. To celebrate 25 years of interdisciplinary and collaborative research conducted at the Bremen Research Cluster for Dynamics in Logistics (LogDynamics), in this book hand-picked experts currently or formerly affiliated with the Cluster provide retrospectives, present cutting-edge research, and outline future research directions

Dynamics in Logistics

This open access book highlights the interdisciplinary aspects of logistics research. Featuring empirical, methodological, and practice-oriented articles, it addresses the modelling, planning, optimization and control of processes. Chiefly focusing on supply chains, logistics networks, production systems, and systems and facilities for material flows, the respective contributions combine research on classical supply chain management, digitalized business processes, production engineering, electrical engineering, computer science and mathematical optimization. To celebrate 25 years of interdisciplinary and collaborative research conducted at the Bremen Research Cluster for Dynamics in Logistics (LogDynamics), in this book hand-picked experts currently or formerly affiliated with the Cluster provide retrospectives, present cutting-edge research, and outline future research directions

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2004

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems and Engineering Management, Operational Sciences, and Engineering Physics

UAS in the Airspace: A Review on Integration, Simulation, Optimization, and Open Challenges

Air transportation is essential for society, and it is increasing gradually due to its importance. To improve the airspace operation, new technologies are under development, such as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). In fact, in the past few years, there has been a growth in UAS numbers in segregated airspace. However, there is an interest in integrating these aircraft into the National Airspace System (NAS). The UAS is vital to different industries due to its advantages brought to the airspace (e.g., efficiency). Conversely, the relationship between UAS and Air Traffic Control (ATC) needs to be well-defined due to the impacts on ATC capacity these aircraft may present. Throughout the years, this impact may be lower than it is nowadays because the current lack of familiarity in this relationship contributes to higher workload levels. Thereupon, the primary goal of this research is to present a comprehensive review of the advancements in the integration of UAS in the National Airspace System (NAS) from different perspectives. We consider the challenges regarding simulation, final approach, and optimization of problems related to the interoperability of such systems in the airspace. Finally, we identify several open challenges in the field based on the existing state-of-the-art proposals