28,897 research outputs found
Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms
The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications
Mixed Initiative Systems for Human-Swarm Interaction: Opportunities and Challenges
Human-swarm interaction (HSI) involves a number of human factors impacting
human behaviour throughout the interaction. As the technologies used within HSI
advance, it is more tempting to increase the level of swarm autonomy within the
interaction to reduce the workload on humans. Yet, the prospective negative
effects of high levels of autonomy on human situational awareness can hinder
this process. Flexible autonomy aims at trading-off these effects by changing
the level of autonomy within the interaction when required; with
mixed-initiatives combining human preferences and automation's recommendations
to select an appropriate level of autonomy at a certain point of time. However,
the effective implementation of mixed-initiative systems raises fundamental
questions on how to combine human preferences and automation recommendations,
how to realise the selected level of autonomy, and what the future impacts on
the cognitive states of a human are. We explore open challenges that hamper the
process of developing effective flexible autonomy. We then highlight the
potential benefits of using system modelling techniques in HSI by illustrating
how they provide HSI designers with an opportunity to evaluate different
strategies for assessing the state of the mission and for adapting the level of
autonomy within the interaction to maximise mission success metrics.Comment: Author version, accepted at the 2018 IEEE Annual Systems Modelling
Conference, Canberra, Australi
AI and OR in management of operations: history and trends
The last decade has seen a considerable growth in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for operations management with the aim of finding solutions to problems that are increasing in complexity and scale. This paper begins by setting the context for the survey through a historical perspective of OR and AI. An extensive survey of applications of AI techniques for operations management, covering a total of over 1200 papers published from 1995 to 2004 is then presented. The survey utilizes Elsevier's ScienceDirect database as a source. Hence, the survey may not cover all the relevant journals but includes a sufficiently wide range of publications to make it representative of the research in the field. The papers are categorized into four areas of operations management: (a) design, (b) scheduling, (c) process planning and control and (d) quality, maintenance and fault diagnosis. Each of the four areas is categorized in terms of the AI techniques used: genetic algorithms, case-based reasoning, knowledge-based systems, fuzzy logic and hybrid techniques. The trends over the last decade are identified, discussed with respect to expected trends and directions for future work suggested
An approach to control collaborative processes in PLM systems
Companies that collaborate within the product development processes need to
implement an effective management of their collaborative activities. Despite
the implementation of a PLM system, the collaborative activities are not
efficient as it might be expected. This paper presents an analysis of the
problems related to the collaborative work using a PLM system. From this
analysis, we propose an approach for improving collaborative processes within a
PLM system, based on monitoring indicators. This approach leads to identify and
therefore to mitigate the brakes of the collaborative work
Engineering of next generation cyber-physical automation system architectures
Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS) enable flexible and reconfigurable realization
of automation system architectures, utilizing distributed control architectures
with non-hierarchical modules linked together through different communication
systems. Several control system architectures have been developed and validated in
the past years by research groups. However, there is still a lack of implementation
in industry. The intention of this work is to provide a summary of current alternative
control system architectures that could be applied in industrial automation domain
as well as a review of their commonalities. The aim is to point out the differences
between the traditional centralized and hierarchical architectures to discussed ones,
which rely on decentralized decision-making and control. Challenges and impacts
that industries and engineers face in the process of adopting decentralized control
architectures are discussed, analysing the obstacles for industrial acceptance and the
new necessary interdisciplinary engineering skills. Finally, an outlook of possible
mitigation and migration actions required to implement the decentralized control
architectures is addressed.The authors would like to thank the European Commission for the support,
and the partners of the EU Horizon 2020 project PERFoRM (2016b) for the fruitful discussions.
The PERFoRM project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research
and innovation programme under grant agreement No 680435.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
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