Hierarchical Agent-based Adaptation for Self-Aware Embedded Computing Systems

Siirretty Doriast

Shaping up to improve health: the strategic leadership role of the new Health Authority

The latest return to service planning in the NHS, while harnessing the perceived benefits of previous market approaches, nevertheless signals a radical change in the long-term role of the Health Authority. It is timely to examine the actual objectives of Health Authorities in view of their envisaged strategic leadership role. The emphasis on improving health and ironing out unacceptable local inequalities places the ‘quality’ agenda at the forefront of Health Authority policies. Notwithstanding the role of Regional Offices, Health Authorities will in effect become the overseer of clinical governance arrangements, including the implementation of a more evidencebased approach to service delivery and organisation. The new all-inclusive Health Improvement Programmes represent the raison d’Ltre of the Health Authority of the future. It is argued that insufficient attention has been paid to the legal framework required to support prioritisation decisions for which Health Authorities and PCGs will be held accountable. Available case law suggests that the extent to which central guidance has been followed will be critical in reviewing commissioning decisions. Given the trend towards National Service Frameworks and the development of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the question arises of what incentives exist for Health Authorities to pursue the evidence-based approach to its natural conclusion (i.e. as one means of rationing scarce resources). Perhaps the key objective of commissioners will in fact be to avoid adverse publicity in the face of increasingly complex (and open) rationing decisions. In addition, the implication that national guidelines on clinical and cost-effectiveness will have to be adhered to sits somewhat uneasily with recent government assurances regarding clinical freedom and professional self-regulation. Attention is given to equity considerations, the difficulty of identifying common objectives and maintaining productive relationships across organisations, and barriers to changing clinical practice. Conflicting incentives are likely in applying different dimensions of the National Performance Assessment Framework, making the Health Authority’s long-term role (regulator of resource use, quality and service configuration?) a particularly difficult balancing act in ensuring administrative, clinical and political accountability in health care.Health Authorities

An AI-Layered with Multi-Agent Systems Architecture for Prognostics Health Management of Smart Transformers:A Novel Approach for Smart Grid-Ready Energy Management Systems

After the massive integration of distributed energy resources, energy storage systems and the charging stations of electric vehicles, it has become very difficult to implement an efficient grid energy management system regarding the unmanageable behavior of the power flow within the grid, which can cause many critical problems in different grid stages, typically in the substations, such as failures, blackouts, and power transformer explosions. However, the current digital transition toward Energy 4.0 in Smart Grids allows the integration of smart solutions to substations by integrating smart sensors and implementing new control and monitoring techniques. This paper is proposing a hybrid artificial intelligence multilayer for power transformers, integrating different diagnostic algorithms, Health Index, and life-loss estimation approaches. After gathering different datasets, this paper presents an exhaustive algorithm comparative study to select the best fit models. This developed architecture for prognostic (PHM) health management is a hybrid interaction between evolutionary support vector machine, random forest, k-nearest neighbor, and linear regression-based models connected to an online monitoring system of the power transformer; these interactions are calculating the important key performance indicators which are related to alarms and a smart energy management system that gives decisions on the load management, the power factor control, and the maintenance schedule planning

Improving quality of service in application clusters

Quality of service (QoS) requirements, which include availability, integrity, performance and responsiveness are increasingly needed by science and engineering applications. Rising computational demands and data mining present a new challenge in the IT world. As our needs for more processing, research and analysis increase, performance and reliability degrade exponentially. In this paper we present a software system that manages quality of service for Unix based distributed application clusters. Our approach is synthetic and involves intelligent agents that make use of static and dynamic ontologies to monitor, diagnose and correct faults at run time, over a private network. Finally, we provide experimental results from our pilot implementation in a production environment

COORDINATION AND CONTROL OF LARGE-SCALE COMPLEX IT SYSTEMS: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Since the emergence and widespread adoption of computer networks in the 1990s, developed societies have grown increasingly dependent on complex software-intensive systems. Such systems underpin business-critical applications in domains ranging from health care and financial markets to manufacturing and defense, where failure would have profound social and economic consequences Sommerville et al. (2012). These large-scale complexes IT systems are usually created and evolved dynamically through the integration of independently built and controlled heterogeneous components