Meeting the challenges of decentralized embedded applications using multi-agent systems

International audienceToday embedded applications become large scale andstrongly constrained. They require a decentralized embedded intelligencegenerating challenges for embedded systems. A multi-agent approach iswell suited to model and design decentralized embedded applications.It is naturally able to take up some of these challenges. But somespecific points have to be introduced, enforced or improved in multiagentapproaches to reach all features and all requirements. In thisarticle, we present a study of specific activities that can complementmulti-agent paradigm in the ”embedded” context.We use our experiencewith the DIAMOND method to introduce and illustrate these featuresand activities

Intelligent Embedded Software: New Perspectives and Challenges

Intelligent embedded systems (IES) represent a novel and promising generation of embedded systems (ES). IES have the capacity of reasoning about their external environments and adapt their behavior accordingly. Such systems are situated in the intersection of two different branches that are the embedded computing and the intelligent computing. On the other hand, intelligent embedded software (IESo) is becoming a large part of the engineering cost of intelligent embedded systems. IESo can include some artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems such as expert systems, neural networks and other sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) models to guarantee some important characteristics such as self-learning, self-optimizing and self-repairing. Despite the widespread of such systems, some design challenging issues are arising. Designing a resource-constrained software and at the same time intelligent is not a trivial task especially in a real-time context. To deal with this dilemma, embedded system researchers have profited from the progress in semiconductor technology to develop specific hardware to support well AI models and render the integration of AI with the embedded world a reality

Key Contributing Factors to the Acceptance of Agents in Industrial Environments

Multiple software agent-based solutions have been developed during the last decades, and applied with varying success to different domains offering control, reconfiguration, diagnosis, monitoring, etc. However, the promise that they once posed in terms of a new alternative decentralized approach offering modularity, flexibility and robustness, is only partially fulfilled. This paper investigates some key factors, i.e., design, technology, intelligence/algorithms, standardization, hardware, challenges, application and cost, which are hypothesized to be linked to the Industrial Agent acceptance. Empirical data was acquired via a conducted survey, and statistically analyzed to investigate the support of the posed hypotheses. The results indicate that all the factors are seen important issues that play a role toward deciding for or against an industrial agent solution.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

CoMMA Corporate Memory Management through Agents Corporate Memory Management through Agents: The CoMMA project final report

This document is the final report of the CoMMA project. It gives an overview of the different search activities that have been achieved through the project. First, a description of the general requirements is proposed through the definition of two scenarios. Then it shows the different technical aspects of the projects and the solution that has been proposed and implemented

Governance, scale and the environment: the importance of recognizing knowledge claims in transdisciplinary arenas

Any present day approach of the world’s most pressing environmental problems involves both scale and governance issues. After all, current local events might have long-term global consequences (the scale issue) and solving complex environmental problems requires policy makers to think and govern beyond generally used time-space scales (the governance issue). To an increasing extent, the various scientists in these fields have used concepts like social-ecological systems, hierarchies, scales and levels to understand and explain the “complex cross-scale dynamics” of issues like climate change. A large part of this work manifests a realist paradigm: the scales and levels, either in ecological processes or in governance systems, are considered as “real”. However, various scholars question this position and claim that scales and levels are continuously (re)constructed in the interfaces of science, society, politics and nature. Some of these critics even prefer to adopt a non-scalar approach, doing away with notions such as hierarchy, scale and level. Here we take another route, however. We try to overcome the realist-constructionist dualism by advocating a dialogue between them on the basis of exchanging and reflecting on different knowledge claims in transdisciplinary arenas. We describe two important developments, one in the ecological scaling literature and the other in the governance literature, which we consider to provide a basis for such a dialogue. We will argue that scale issues, governance practices as well as their mutual interdependencies should be considered as human constructs, although dialectically related to nature’s materiality, and therefore as contested processes, requiring intensive and continuous dialogue and cooperation among natural scientists, social scientists, policy makers and citizens alike. They also require critical reflection on scientists’ roles and on academic practices in general. Acknowledging knowledge claims provides a common ground and point of departure for such cooperation, something we think is not yet sufficiently happening, but which is essential in addressing today’s environmental problems

Some conversational challenges of talking with machines

A surge of interest in the capabilities of so-called 'conversational' technologies—both from research and industrial contexts—furnishes CSCW and HCI with opportunities to enrich and leverage its historic connection to conversation analysis (and relatedly, ethnomethodology) in novel ways. This paper explores a number of preliminary interactional troubles one might encounter when 'talking to' conversational agents, and in doing so sketches out possible routes forward in the empirical study of agents as collaborative technologies, as well as touching on further conceptual challenges that face research in this area

A Multi-Site NFV Testbed for Experimentation With SUAV-Based 5G Vertical Services

[EN] With the advent of 5G technologies, vertical markets have been placed at the forefront, as fundamental drivers and adopters of technical developments and new business models. Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs) are gaining traction in multiple vertical sectors, as key assets to generate, process, and distribute relevant information for the provision of value-added services. However, the enormous potential of SUAVs to support a exible, rapid, and cost-effective deployment of vertical applications is still to be exploited. In this paper, we leverage our prior work on Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and SUAVs to design and build a multi-site experimentation testbed based on open-source technologies. The goal of this testbed is to explore synergies among NFV, SUAVs, and vertical services, following a practical approach primarily governed by experimentation. To verify our testbed design, we realized a reference use case where a number of SUAVs, cloud infrastructures, and communication protocols are used to provide a multi-site vertical service. Our experimentation results suggest the potential of NFV and SUAVs to exibly support vertical services. The lessons learned have served to identify missing elements in our NFV platform, as well as challenging aspects for potential improvement. These include the development of speci c mechanisms to limit processing load and delays of service deployment operations.This work was supported in part by the European Commission under the European Union's Horizon 2020 program (5GRANGE Project, grant agreement number 777137), and in part by the 5GCity Project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Grant TEC2016-76795-C6-1R, Grant TEC2016-76795-C6-3R, and Grant TEC2016-76795-C6-5R