Distributed environmental control

We present an architecture of distributed, independent control agents designed to work with the Computer Aided System Engineering and Analysis (CASE/A) simulation tool. CASE/A simulates behavior of Environmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS). We describe a lattice of agents capable of distributed sensing and overcoming certain sensor and effector failures. We address how the architecture can achieve the coordinating functions of a hierarchical command structure while maintaining the robustness and flexibility of independent agents. These agents work between the time steps of the CASE/A simulation tool to arrive at command decisions based on the state variables maintained by CASE/A. Control is evaluated according to both effectiveness (e.g., how well temperature was maintained) and resource utilization (the amount of power and materials used)

The Horrific “Mother/ Monster” and the Spaces Between in Ridley Scott\u27s Alien and James Cameron\u27s Aliens

Despite the wealth of scholarship on the films in the Alien series, the first two films connect the most to the universe created in the original film and effectively complete the primary narrative arc for the series hero, Ellen Ripley. A preponderance of the research offered on the Alien film series focuses on Ripley, the iconic xenomorphs, and their Alien Queen. However, I also explore the roles of other liminal characters in the films, such as synthetic humans Ash and Bishop. Addressing the recurring motifs in the films, I discuss the sliding signifier of mother and track how the signifier “child” undergoes many other interesting distinctions. The outcomes of the liminal beings and the mother/ child relationships provide another range of perspectives for analyzing these films. Furthermore, the Weyland-Yutani company exemplifies one of the more powerful motifs of the film: the power of corporations and governments to define our bodies

Application of Ant Colony optimization for MANETS

All networks tend to become more and more complicated. They can be wired, with lots of routers, or wireless, with lots of mobile nodes… The problem remains the same: in order to get the best from the network, there is a need to find the shortest path. The more complicated the network is, the more difficult it is to manage the routes and indicate which one is the best. The Nature gives us a solution to find the shortest path. The ants, in their necessity to find food and brings it back to the nest, manage not only to explore a vast area, but also to indicate to their peers the location of the food while bringing it back to the nest. Thus, they know where their nest is, and also their destination, without having a global view of the ground. Most of the time, they will find the shortest path and adapt to ground changes, hence proving their great efficiency toward this difficult task. The purpose of this project is to provide a clear understanding of the Ants-based algorithm, by giving a formal and comprehensive systematization of the subject. The simulation developed in Java will be a support of a deeper analysis of the factors of the algorithm, its potentialities and its limitations

Disembodied characters

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, September 1999."August 1999."Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-73).A colony of social insects as a whole can be regarded as an organism that reproduces, maintains its internal structure, and survives in a hostile an unpredictable environment. Such superorganism - an entity that consists of smaller component organisms - is able to perform remarkable feats, decentralized information processing among them. For instance, a swarm of bees is able to choose the best possible nesting cavity even though only a few of the individuals have any knowledge of the available sites, and no single bee has a full knowledge of the situation. This decentralized decision making is remarkably similar to that performed by hypothetical functional agents, frequently featured in decentralist theories of the human mind. In this thesis I argue that comparing a superorganism to the mind is useful. In particular, this comparison opens up an enchanting opportunity for the creation of expressive synthetic characters that may become important incremental stepping stones on the way to complex artificial intelligence. In order to explore the space between metaphors - the human mind as a collection of interconnected mindless agents, and the superorganism as a unitary whole that exhibits functional characteristics beyond those of its component parts - I present the design and implementation of the Mask of the Hive, a character that is based on a model of a bee colony. My emphasis lies on graphic design and information visualization in order to develop a set of visuals that are informative, expressive, and artistically satisfying.by Michal Hlavac.S.M

Synergy between biology and systems resilience

Resilient systems have the ability to endure and successfully recover from disturbances by identifying problems and mobilizing the available resources to cope with the disturbance. Resiliency lets a system recover from disruptions, variations, and a degradation of expected working conditions. Biological systems are resilient. Immune systems are highly adaptive and scalable, with the ability to cope with multiple data sources, fuse information together, makes decisions, have multiple interacting agents, operate in a distributed manner over a multiple scales, and have a memory structure to facilitate learning. Ecosystems are resilient since they have the capacity to absorb disturbance and are able to tolerate the disturbances. Ants build colonies that are dispersed, modular, fine grained, and standardized in design, yet they manage to forage intelligently for food and also organize collective defenses by the property of resilience. Are there any rules that we can identify to explain the resilience in these systems? The answer is yes. In insect colonies, rules determine the division of labor and how individual insects act towards each other and respond to different environmental possibilities. It is possible to group these rules based on attributes. These attributes are distributability, redundancy, adaptability, flexibility, interoperability, and diversity. It is also possible to incorporate these rules into engineering systems in their design to make them resilient. It is also possible to develop a qualitative model to generate resilience heuristics for engineering system based on a given attribute. The rules seen in nature and those of an engineering system are integrated to incorporate the desired characteristics for system resilience. The qualitative model for systems resilience will be able to generate system resilience heuristics. This model is simple and it can be applied to any system by using attribute based heuristics that are domain dependent. It also provides basic foundation for building computational models for designing resilient system architectures. This model was tested on recent catastrophes like the Mumbai terror attack and hurricane Katrina. With the disturbances surrounding the current world this resilience model based on heuristics will help a system to deal with crisis and still function in the best way possible by depending mainly on internal variables within the system --Abstract, page iii