Holonic multi-agent system complemented by human disease ontology supporting bio-medical community

The medical milieu is an open environment characterized by a variety of distributed, heterogeneous and autonomous information resources. Coordination, cooperation and exchange of information are important to the medical community. This paper presents an Ontology-based Holonic Multiagent System that combines the advantages of the holonic paradigm with multi-agent system technology and ontology design, in order to realize a highly reliable, adaptive, scalable, flexible and robust diagnostic system for diseases. We design a new ontology, called Generic Human Disease Ontology (GHDO), for the representation of knowledge regarding human diseases. The concepts of the GHDO ontology are organized into the following four dimensions: Types, Symptoms, Causes and Treatments of human diseases. The holonic multi-agent system uses this common GHDO ontology for purpose of query formulation, information retrieval and information integration. This intelligent dynamic system provides opportunities to collect information from multiple information resources, to share data efficiently and to integrate and manage scientific results in a timely manner. We believe such a technique is expected to become the norm once existing resources (e.g. disease databases) will have become unlocked semantically through annotation with a shared ontology

Cyber-physical production systems: Roots, expectations and R&D challenges

One of the most significant directions in the development of computer science and information and communication technologies is represented by Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) which are systems of collaborating computational entities which are in intensive connection with the surrounding physical world and its on-going processes, providing and using, at the same time, data-Accessing and data-processing services available on the internet. Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs), relying on the newest and foreseeable further developments of computer science, information and communication technologies on the one hand, and of manufacturing science and technology, on the other, may lead to the 4th Industrial Revolution, frequently noted as Industry 4.0. The key-note will underline that there are significant roots generally -And particularly in the CIRP community -which point towards CPPSs. Expectations and the related new R&D challenges will be outlined. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license

Recent developments and future trends of industrial agents

The agent technology provides a new way to design and engineer control solutions based on the decentralization of control over distributed structures, addressing the current requirements for modern control systems in industrial domains. This paper presents the current situation of the development and deployment of agent technology, discussing the initiatives and the current trends faced for a wider dissemination and industrial adoption, based on the work that is being carried out by the IEEE IES Technical Committee on Industrial Agents

Bio-inspired multi-agent systems for reconfigurable manufacturing systems

The current market’s demand for customization and responsiveness is a major challenge for producing intelligent, adaptive manufacturing systems. The Multi-Agent System (MAS) paradigm offers an alternative way to design this kind of system based on decentralized control using distributed, autonomous agents, thus replacing the traditional centralized control approach. The MAS solutions provide modularity, flexibility and robustness, thus addressing the responsiveness property, but usually do not consider true adaptation and re-configuration. Understanding how, in nature, complex things are performed in a simple and effective way allows us to mimic nature’s insights and develop powerful adaptive systems that able to evolve, thus dealing with the current challenges imposed on manufactur- ing systems. The paper provides an overview of some of the principles found in nature and biology and analyses the effectiveness of bio-inspired methods, which are used to enhance multi-agent systems to solve complex engineering problems, especially in the manufacturing field. An industrial automation case study is used to illustrate a bio-inspired method based on potential fields to dynamically route pallets

Agent-Based Medical Diagnosis Systems

Medical diagnostics elaboration many times is a distributed and cooperative work, which involves more medical human specialists and different medical systems. Recent results described in the literature prove that medical diagnosis problems can be solved efficiently by large-scale medical multi-agent systems. Cooperative diagnosing of medical diagnosis problems by large-scale multi-agent systems makes the diagnoses elaborations easier and may increase the accuracy of elaborated diagnostics. The purpose of the study described in this paper consists in the development of a novel large-scale hybrid medical diagnosis system called LMDS. The LMDS system is composed from physicians, medical expert system agents developed in our previous works and medical ICMA agents. Medical ICMA agents represent a novel class of agents with the ICMA architecture developed in our previous works, endowed with medical diagnosis capability. The main novelty of the LMDS system consists in the novel classes of agent members of the system and the manner in which the members of the system contribute to the problems solving. Each diagnostics can be elaborated cooperatively by more members of the system. The diagnosis system can solve difficult medical diagnosis problems whose solving must be discovered cooperatively by the members of the system. Many difficult medical problem solving requires medical knowledge that cannot be detained by a single physician or a medical computational system. Simulations prove the correctness in operation of the LMDS system

Open research issues on multi-models for complex technological systems

Abstract -We are going to report here about state of the art works on multi-models for complex technological systems both from the theoretical and practical point of view. A variety of algorithmic approaches (k-mean, dss, etc.) and applicative domains (wind farms, neurological diseases, etc.) are reported to illustrate the extension of the research area

Skill-based reconfiguration of industrial mobile robots

Caused by a rising mass customisation and the high variety of equipment versions, the exibility of manufacturing systems in car productions has to be increased. In addition to a exible handling of production load changes or hardware breakdowns that are established research areas in literature, this thesis presents a skill-based recon guration mechanism for industrial mobile robots to enhance functional recon gurability. The proposed holonic multi-agent system is able to react to functional process changes while missing functionalities are created by self-organisation. Applied to a mobile commissioning system that is provided by AUDI AG, the suggested mechanism is validated in a real-world environment including the on-line veri cation of the recon gured robot functionality in a Validity Check. The present thesis includes an original contribution in three aspects: First, a recon - guration mechanism is presented that reacts in a self-organised way to functional process changes. The application layer of a hardware system converts a semantic description into functional requirements for a new robot skill. The result of this mechanism is the on-line integration of a new functionality into the running process. Second, the proposed system allows maintaining the productivity of the running process and exibly changing the robot hardware through provision of a hardware-abstraction layer. An encapsulated Recon guration Holon dynamically includes the actual con guration each time a recon guration is started. This allows reacting to changed environment settings. As the resulting agent that contains the new functionality, is identical in shape and behaviour to the existing skills, its integration into the running process is conducted without a considerable loss of productivity. Third, the suggested mechanism is composed of a novel agent design that allows implementing self-organisation during the encapsulated recon guration and dependability for standard process executions. The selective assignment of behaviour-based and cognitive agents is the basis for the exibility and e ectiveness of the proposed recon guration mechanism

Worker-robot cooperation and integration into the manufacturing workcell via the holonic control architecture

Cooperative manufacturing is a new field of research, which addresses new challenges beyond the physical safety of the worker. Those new challenges appear due to the need to connect the worker and the cobot from the informatics point of view in one cooperative workcell. This requires developing an appropriate manufacturing control system, which fits the nature of both the worker and the cobot. Furthermore, the manufacturing control system must be able to understand the production variations, to guide the cooperation between worker and the cobot and adapt with the production variations.Die kooperative Fertigung ist ein neues Forschungsgebiet, das sich neuen Herausforderungen stellt. Diese neuen Herausforderungen ergeben sich aus der Notwendigkeit, den Arbeiter und den Cobot aus der Sicht der Informatik in einem kooperativen Arbeitsplatz zu verbinden. Dies erfordert die Entwicklung eines geeigneten Produktionskontrollsystems, das sowohl der Natur des Arbeiters als auch der des Cobots entspricht. Darüber hinaus muss die Fertigungssteuerung in der Lage sein, die Produktionsschwankungen zu verstehen, um die Zusammenarbeit zwischen Arbeiter und Cobot zu steuern

Advances in Robotics, Automation and Control

The book presents an excellent overview of the recent developments in the different areas of Robotics, Automation and Control. Through its 24 chapters, this book presents topics related to control and robot design; it also introduces new mathematical tools and techniques devoted to improve the system modeling and control. An important point is the use of rational agents and heuristic techniques to cope with the computational complexity required for controlling complex systems. Through this book, we also find navigation and vision algorithms, automatic handwritten comprehension and speech recognition systems that will be included in the next generation of productive systems developed by man

An introduction of small-scale intelligent manufacturing system

Embargoed OA, manuscript version after 24 months from publishing date. Link to publishers version: http://doi.org/10.1109/SIMS.2016.7802896Manufacturing companies in Northern Peripheral and Arctic region are predominately small and medium-sized and face considerable challenges like geographical isolation and a lack of benefits offered by industrial clusters. For the ultimate goal of enhancing their competitiveness in a global market, it is imperative for companies to innovate or adopt innovations in order to quickly response to changes in market, meet customer demands, reduce time-to-market and lower cost. A novel concept for small-scale intelligent manufacturing systems (SIMS) is introduced, in which diverse methods and innovative technologies can be applied and integrated. This paper gives an introduction of SIMS, defines its design objectives, and summarizes major relevant tools, techniques and paradigms for the development of SIMS, to generate a facilitative environment for small and medium-scale manufacturing enterprises to embrace new and innovative technologies