Swarm shape manipulation through connection control

The control of a large swarm of distributed agents is a well known challenge within the study of unmanned autonomous systems. However, it also presents many new opportunities. The advantages of operating a swarm through distributed means has been assessed in the literature for efficiency from both operational and economical aspects; practically as the number of agents increases, distributed control is favoured over centralised control, as it can reduce agent computational costs and increase robustness on the swarm. Distributed architectures, however, can present the drawback of requiring knowledge of the whole swarm state, therefore limiting the scalability of the swarm. In this paper a strategy is presented to address the challenges of distributed architectures, changing the way in which the swarm shape is controlled and providing a step towards verifiable swarm behaviour, achieving new configurations, while saving communication and computation resources. Instead of applying change at agent level (e.g. modify its guidance law), the sensing of the agents is addressed to a portion of agents, differentially driving their behaviour. This strategy is applied for swarms controlled by artificial potential functions which would ordinarily require global knowledge and all-to-all interactions. Limiting the agents' knowledge is proposed for the first time in this work as a methodology rather than obstacle to obtain desired swarm behaviour

Infinite Kinematic Self-Similarity and Perfect Fluid Spacetimes

Perfect fluid spacetimes admitting a kinematic self-similarity of infinite type are investigated. In the case of plane, spherically or hyperbolically symmetric space-times the field equations reduce to a system of autonomous ordinary differential equations. The qualitative properties of solutions of this system of equations, and in particular their asymptotic behavior, are studied. Special cases, including some of the invariant sets and the geodesic case, are examined in detail and the exact solutions are provided. The class of solutions exhibiting physical self-similarity are found to play an important role in describing the asymptotic behavior of the infinite kinematic self-similar models.Comment: 38 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in General Relativity & Gravitatio

Separating Agent-Functioning and Inter-Agent Coordination by Activated Modules: The DECOMAS Architecture

The embedding of self-organizing inter-agent processes in distributed software applications enables the decentralized coordination system elements, solely based on concerted, localized interactions. The separation and encapsulation of the activities that are conceptually related to the coordination, is a crucial concern for systematic development practices in order to prepare the reuse and systematic integration of coordination processes in software systems. Here, we discuss a programming model that is based on the externalization of processes prescriptions and their embedding in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). One fundamental design concern for a corresponding execution middleware is the minimal-invasive augmentation of the activities that affect coordination. This design challenge is approached by the activation of agent modules. Modules are converted to software elements that reason about and modify their host agent. We discuss and formalize this extension within the context of a generic coordination architecture and exemplify the proposed programming model with the decentralized management of (web) service infrastructures

A multidimensionally consistent version of Hirota's discrete KdV equation

A multidimensionally consistent generalisation of Hirota's discrete KdV equation is proposed, it is a quad equation defined by a polynomial that is quadratic in each variable. Soliton solutions and interpretation of the model as superposition principle are given. It is discussed how an important property of the defining polynomial, a factorisation of discriminants, appears also in the few other known discrete integrable multi-quadratic models.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure