Self-organising management of Grid environments

This paper presents basic concepts, architectural principles and algorithms for efficient resource and security management in cluster computing environments and the Grid. The work presented in this paper is funded by BTExacT and the EPSRC project SO-GRM (GR/S21939)

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

Decision-focussed resource modelling for design decision support

Resource management including resource allocation, levelling, configuration and monitoring has been recognised as critical to design decision making. It has received increasing research interests in recent years. Different definitions, models and systems have been developed and published in literature. One common issue with existing research is that the resource modelling has focussed on the information view of resources. A few acknowledged the importance of resource capability to design management, but none has addressed the evaluation analysis of resource fitness to effectively support design decisions. This paper proposes a decision-focused resource model framework that addresses the combination of resource evaluation with resource information from multiple perspectives. A resource management system constructed on the resource model framework can provide functions for design engineers to efficiently search and retrieve the best fit resources (based on the evaluation results) to meet decision requirements. Thus, the system has the potential to provide improved decision making performance compared with existing resource management systems

A Direct Reputation Model for VO Formation

We show that reputation is a basic ingredient in the Virtual Organisation (VO) formation process. Agents can use their experiences gained in direct past interactions to model other’s reputation and deciding on either join a VO or determining who is the most suitable set of partners. Reputation values are computed using a reinforcement learning algorithm, so agents can learn and adapt their reputation models of their partners according to their recent behaviour. Our approach is especially powerful if the agent participates in a VO in which the members can change their behaviour to exploit their partners. The reputation model presented in this paper deals with the questions of deception and fraud that have been ignored in current models of VO formation

Complex Dynamics of Autonomous Communication Networks and the Intelligent Communication Paradigm

Dynamics of arbitrary communication system is analysed as unreduced interaction process. The applied generalised, universally nonperturbative method of effective potential reveals the phenomenon of dynamic multivaluedness of competing system configurations forced to permanently replace each other in a causally random order, which leads to universally defined dynamical chaos, complexity, fractality, self-organisation, and adaptability. We demonstrate the origin of huge, exponentially high efficiency of the unreduced, complex network dynamics and specify the universal symmetry of complexity as the fundamental guiding principle for creation and control of such qualitatively new kind of networks and devices. The emerging intelligent communication paradigm and its practical realisation in the form of knowledge-based networks involve the properties of true, unreduced intelligence and consciousness (http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00003857/) appearing in the complex (multivalued) network dynamics and results