Towards adaptive multi-robot systems: self-organization and self-adaptation

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.The development of complex systems ensembles that operate in uncertain environments is a major challenge. The reason for this is that system designers are not able to fully specify the system during specification and development and before it is being deployed. Natural swarm systems enjoy similar characteristics, yet, being self-adaptive and being able to self-organize, these systems show beneficial emergent behaviour. Similar concepts can be extremely helpful for artificial systems, especially when it comes to multi-robot scenarios, which require such solution in order to be applicable to highly uncertain real world application. In this article, we present a comprehensive overview over state-of-the-art solutions in emergent systems, self-organization, self-adaptation, and robotics. We discuss these approaches in the light of a framework for multi-robot systems and identify similarities, differences missing links and open gaps that have to be addressed in order to make this framework possible

A distributed knowledge-based approach to flexible automation : the contract-net framework

Includes bibliographical references (p. 26-29)

Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud

With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes, i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions supporting them. In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00

Private Data System Enabling Self-Sovereign Storage Managed by Executable Choreographies

With the increased use of Internet, governments and large companies store and share massive amounts of personal data in such a way that leaves no space for transparency. When a user needs to achieve a simple task like applying for college or a driving license, he needs to visit a lot of institutions and organizations, thus leaving a lot of private data in many places. The same happens when using the Internet. These privacy issues raised by the centralized architectures along with the recent developments in the area of serverless applications demand a decentralized private data layer under user control. We introduce the Private Data System (PDS), a distributed approach which enables self-sovereign storage and sharing of private data. The system is composed of nodes spread across the entire Internet managing local key-value databases. The communication between nodes is achieved through executable choreographies, which are capable of preventing information leakage when executing across different organizations with different regulations in place. The user has full control over his private data and is able to share and revoke access to organizations at any time. Even more, the updates are propagated instantly to all the parties which have access to the data thanks to the system design. Specifically, the processing organizations may retrieve and process the shared information, but are not allowed under any circumstances to store it on long term. PDS offers an alternative to systems that aim to ensure self-sovereignty of specific types of data through blockchain inspired techniques but face various problems, such as low performance. Both approaches propose a distributed database, but with different characteristics. While the blockchain-based systems are built to solve consensus problems, PDS's purpose is to solve the self-sovereignty aspects raised by the privacy laws, rules and principles.Comment: DAIS 201