671 research outputs found
Adaptability Checking in Multi-Level Complex Systems
A hierarchical model for multi-level adaptive systems is built on two basic
levels: a lower behavioural level B accounting for the actual behaviour of the
system and an upper structural level S describing the adaptation dynamics of
the system. The behavioural level is modelled as a state machine and the
structural level as a higher-order system whose states have associated logical
formulas (constraints) over observables of the behavioural level. S is used to
capture the global and stable features of B, by a defining set of allowed
behaviours. The adaptation semantics is such that the upper S level imposes
constraints on the lower B level, which has to adapt whenever it no longer can
satisfy them. In this context, we introduce weak and strong adaptabil- ity,
i.e. the ability of a system to adapt for some evolution paths or for all
possible evolutions, respectively. We provide a relational characterisation for
these two notions and we show that adaptability checking, i.e. deciding if a
system is weak or strong adaptable, can be reduced to a CTL model checking
problem. We apply the model and the theoretical results to the case study of
motion control of autonomous transport vehicles.Comment: 57 page, 10 figures, research papaer, submitte
The evolution of retail banking services in United Kingdom: a retrospective analysis
The purpose of this paper is to assess the sequence of technological changes occurred in the retail banking sector of the United Kingdom against the emergence of customer services by developing an evolutionary argument. The historical paradigm of Information Technology provides useful insights into the âlearning opportunitiesâ that opened the way to endogenous changes in the banking activity such as the reconfiguration of its organizational structure and the diversification of the product line. The central idea of this paper is that innovation never occurs without simultaneous structural change. Thus, a defining property of the banking activity is the diachronic adaptation of formal and informal practices to an evolving technological dimension reflecting the extent to which the diffusion of innovation (re)generates variety of micro level processes and induces industry evolution.Information Technology; Retail Banking; History of Technology; Innovation Systems.
The new territorial paradigm of rural development: theoretical foundations from systems and institutional theories
In recent decades, a new paradigm for public policies in rural areas has made headway. This new approach aims to support economic and institutional transformation processes designed and implemented by local rural actors themselves. It argues for the building of local partnerships as atoolfor the governance of rural change. This paper reflects about the governance of development and change in rural areas. It builds a conceptual framework from two complementary theoretical sources: (a) complexity theory views on the governance of resilience and (b) institutional theories. Given the impossibility to predict and plan social change in a top-down fashion, it stresses that change requires that actors of a social system construct a sufficiently shared vision of a desired future state and manage to act together in order to ânavigateâ the pathway towards that aim. Capacity for territorial governance is also critical in rural governance of resilience. System resilience refers to the capacity of actors to adjust the desired pathway whenever external shocks threaten its viability, or in certain cases, impose the need for a more fundamental change in the prevailing system and the desired pathways of change. We argue that these theoretical inspirations provide a useful substantiated underpinning for the territorial paradigm of rural development and allow us to show why and how the local partnership has the potential to improve the governance and the resilience of rural territories. We also develop a number of further reflections about the challenges of such partnerships, in particular the difficulties emerging from heterogeneous interest and power of local actors.
Evolutionary Service Composition and Personalization Ecosystem for Elderly Care
Current demographic trends suggest that people are living longer, while
the ageing process entails many necessities, calling for care services tailored to
the individual seniorâs needs and life style. Personalized provision of care
services usually involves a number of stakeholders, including relatives, friends,
caregivers, professional assistance organizations, enterprises, and other support
entities. Traditional Information and Communication Technology based care and
assistance services for the elderly have been mainly focused on the development
of isolated and generic services, considering a single service provider, and
excessively featuring a techno-centric approach.
In contrast, advances on collaborative networks for elderly care suggest the
integration of services from multiple providers, encouraging collaboration as a
way to provide better personalized services. This approach requires a support
system to manage the personalization process and allow ranking the {service,
provider} pairs.
An additional issue is the problem of service evolution, as individualâs care
needs are not static over time. Consequently, the care services need to evolve
accordingly to keep the elderlyâs requirements satisfied. In accordance with these
requirements, an Elderly Care Ecosystem (ECE) framework, a Service
Composition and Personalization Environment (SCoPE), and a Service Evolution
Environment (SEvol) are proposed.
The ECE framework provides the context for the personalization and
evolution methods. The SCoPE method is based on the match between the
customer´s profile and the available {service, provider} pairs to identify suitable
services and corresponding providers to attend the needs. SEvol is a method to build an adaptive and evolutionary system based on the MAPE-K methodology
supporting the solution evolution to cope with the elderly's new life stages.
To demonstrate the feasibility, utility and applicability of SCoPE and SEvol,
a number of methods and algorithms are presented, and illustrative scenarios are
introduced in which {service, provider} pairs are ranked based on a
multidimensional assessment method. Composition strategies are based on
customerâs profile and requirements, and the evolutionary solution is
determined considering customerâs inputs and evolution plans.
For the ECE evaluation process the following steps are adopted: (i) feature
selection and software prototype development; (ii) detailing the ECE framework
validation based on applicability and utility parameters; (iii) development of a
case study illustrating a typical scenario involving an elderly and her care needs;
and (iv) performing a survey based on a modified version of the technology
acceptance model (TAM), considering three contexts: Technological,
Organizational and Collaborative environment
âBy-product synergyâ changes in the industrial symbiosis dynamics at the Altamira-Tampico industrial corridor: 20 years of industrial ecology in Mexico
The Industrial symbiosis emergence constitute a complex and dynamic process that we set in four different phases in this paper: Emergence, Regional efficiency, Regional learning, and Sustainable Industrial District. Embedded in a theoretical framework concerning the industrial symbiosis dynamic, this paper triggers a historical sequence of consequences in the industrial ecosystem evolution encompassing micro and macro elements, which also depends upon the individual actorsâ intervention in the network. The industrial symbiosis at Altamira is depicted here as a centralized and ancillary industrial symbiosis embedding a socio-technical and environmental model, one of the most complete biophysical, social, and economic symbiotic case studies in Latin America. The further historical analysis uses the number of actors composing the industrial network and the amount of material and energy exchange flows as a proxy for the success of the Altamira By-Products Industrial Symbiosis as a way to approach sustainability in the industrial ecosystem and attractiveness in the territory. According to the analysis of those proxies in Altamira, the actors involved in the network decrease at the Regional efficiency stage, with the highest synergies rate. The Regional learning phase follows the dynamic through an eco-innovative ecosystem strategy, encompassing small and medium size firms in the region, as the mechanisms for improving learning and innovation, decreasing transaction costs and boosting sustainabilityPostprint (author's final draft
Stepping Beyond the Newtonian Paradigm in Biology. Towards an Integrable Model of Life: Accelerating Discovery in the Biological Foundations of Science
The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines
who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative
step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the
world. It is INBIOSAâs purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an
interdisciplinary community of original thinkers.
This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the
transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit
that biology to date has been more fact-oriented and less theoretical than
physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the
science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our
most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from
abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and
demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated
for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology
can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging
new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The
latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known
and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic
means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this
sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort.
The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions
within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the
explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the
abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam;
much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry)
and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized
by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed
are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions ânativeâ to biology
and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as
we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete
and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology
and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge
is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations
that is truly native to living systems.
Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically
recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted
Newtonian mechanics.
This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to
apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between
multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the
basic terms or tools needed.
The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set
of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its
early stages, this will seem to be a ânew scienceâ.
This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information
and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology
and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological,
ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science
of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to
be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic
information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic
systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that
there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at
this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches
to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows.
Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical
problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting
Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge
we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to
formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have
today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists
in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time
in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory
of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary
problems and multiple domains spanning both âhardâ and
âsoftâ sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated
mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project
proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability
of our approach to address âwicked problemsâ which span across physics,
chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions
require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as âgrand
challengesâ to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal
for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the
INBIOSA program.
The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging
research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The
efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently.
Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and
measured as it progresses
Characterising and modeling the co-evolution of transportation networks and territories
The identification of structuring effects of transportation infrastructure on
territorial dynamics remains an open research problem. This issue is one of the
aspects of approaches on complexity of territorial dynamics, within which
territories and networks would be co-evolving. The aim of this thesis is to
challenge this view on interactions between networks and territories, both at
the conceptual and empirical level, by integrating them in simulation models of
territorial systems.Comment: Doctoral dissertation (2017), Universit\'e Paris 7 Denis Diderot.
Translated from French. Several papers compose this PhD thesis; overlap with:
arXiv:{1605.08888, 1608.00840, 1608.05266, 1612.08504, 1706.07467,
1706.09244, 1708.06743, 1709.08684, 1712.00805, 1803.11457, 1804.09416,
1804.09430, 1805.05195, 1808.07282, 1809.00861, 1811.04270, 1812.01473,
1812.06008, 1908.02034, 2012.13367, 2102.13501, 2106.11996
UBIDEV: a homogeneous service framework for pervasive computing environments
This dissertation studies the heterogeneity problem of pervasive computing system from the viewpoint of an infrastructure aiming to provide a service-oriented application model. From Distributed System passing through mobile computing, pervasive computing is presented as a step forward in ubiquitous availability of services and proliferation of interacting autonomous entities. To better understand the problems related to the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of pervasive computing environments, we need to analyze the structure of a pervasive computing system from its physical and service dimension. The physical dimension describes the physical environment together wit the technology infrastructure that characterizes the interactions and the relations within the environment; the service dimension represents the services (being them software or not) the environment is able to provide [Nor99]. To better separate the constrains and the functionalities of a pervasive computing system, this dissertation classifies it in terms of resources, context, classification, services, coordination and application. UBIDEV, as the key result of this dissertation, introduces a unified model helping the design and the implementation of applications for heterogeneous and dynamic environments. This model is composed of the following concepts: ⢠Resource: all elements of the environment that are manipulated by the application, they are the atomic abstraction unit of the model. ⢠Context: all information coming from the environment that is used by the application to adapts its behavior. Context contains resources and services and defines their role in the application. ⢠Classification: the environment is classified according to the application ontology in order to ground the generic conceptual model of the application to the specific environment. It defines the basic semantic level of interoperability. ⢠Service: the functionalities supported by the system; each service manipulates one or more resources. Applications are defined as a coordination and adaptation of services. ⢠Coordination: all aspects related to service composition and execution as well as the use of the contextual information are captured by the coordination concept. ⢠Application Ontology: represents the viewpoint of the application on the specific context; it defines the high level semantic of resources, services and context. Applying the design paradigm proposed by UBIDEV, allows to describe applications according to a Service Oriented Architecture[Bie02], and to focus on application functionalities rather than their relations with the physical devices. Keywords: pervasive computing, homogenous environment, service-oriented, heterogeneity problem, coordination model, context model, resource management, service management, application interfaces, ontology, semantic services, interaction logic, description logic.Questa dissertazione studia il problema della eterogeneit`a nei sistemi pervasivi proponendo una infrastruttura basata su un modello orientato ai servizi. I sistemi pervasivi sono presentati come unâevoluzione naturale dei sistemi distribuiti, passando attraverso mobile computing, grazie ad una disponibilit`a ubiqua di servizi (sempre, ovunque ed in qualunque modo) e ad loro e con lâambiente stesso. Al fine di meglio comprendere i problemi legati allintrinseca eterogeneit`a dei sistemi pervasivi, dobbiamo prima descrivere la struttura fondamentale di questi sistemi classificandoli attraverso la loro dimensione fisica e quella dei loro servizi. La dimensione fisica descrive lâambiente fisico e tutti i dispositivi che fanno parte del contesto della applicazione. La dimensione dei servizi descrive le funzionalit`a (siano esse software o no) che lâambiente `e in grado di fornire [Nor99]. I sistemi pervasivi vengono cos`Äą classificati attraverso una metrica pi `u formale del tipo risorse, contesto, servizi, coordinazione ed applicazione. UBIDEV, come risultato di questa dissertazione, introduce un modello uniforme per la descrizione e lo sviluppo di applicazioni in ambienti dinamici ed eterogenei. Il modello `e composto dai seguenti concetti di base: ⢠Risorse: gli elementi dellâambiente fisico che fanno parte del modello dellapplicazione. Questi rappresentano lâunit`a di astrazione atomica di tutto il modello UBIDEV. ⢠Contesto: le informazioni sullo stato dellâambiente che il sistema utilizza per adattare il comportamento dellâapplicazione. Il contesto include informazioni legate alle risorse, ai servizi ed alle relazioni che li legano. ⢠Classificazione: lâambiente viene classificato sulla base di una ontologia che rappresenta il punto di accordo a cui tutti i moduli di sistema fanno riferimento. Questa classificazione rappresenta il modello concettuale dellâapplicazione che si riflette sullâintero ambiente. Si definisce cos`Äą la semantica di base per tutto il sistema. ⢠Servizi: le funzionalit`a che il sistema `e in grado di fornire; ogni servizio `e descritto in termini di trasformazione di una o pi `u risorse. Le applicazioni sono cos`Äą definite in termini di cooperazione tra servizi autonomi. ⢠Coordinazione: tutti gli aspetti legati alla composizione ed alla esecuzione di servizi cos`Äą come lâelaborazione dellâinformazione contestuale. ⢠Ontologia dellâApplicazione: rappresenta il punto di vista dellâapplicazione; definisce la semantica delle risorse, dei servizi e dellâinformazione contestuale. Applicando il paradigma proposto da UBIDEV, si possono descrivere applicazioni in accordo con un modello Service-oriented [Bie02] ed, al tempo stesso, ridurre lâapplicazione stessa alle sue funzionalit`a di alto livello senza intervenire troppo su come queste funzionalit` a devono essere realizzate dalle singole componenti fisiche
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