Coalition based approach for shop floor agility – a multiagent approach

Dissertation submitted for a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, speciality of Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaThis thesis addresses the problem of shop floor agility. In order to cope with the disturbances and uncertainties that characterise the current business scenarios faced by manufacturing companies, the capability of their shop floors needs to be improved quickly, such that these shop floors may be adapted, changed or become easily modifiable (shop floor reengineering). One of the critical elements in any shop floor reengineering process is the way the control/supervision architecture is changed or modified to accommodate for the new processes and equipment. This thesis, therefore, proposes an architecture to support the fast adaptation or changes in the control/supervision architecture. This architecture postulates that manufacturing systems are no more than compositions of modularised manufacturing components whose interactions when aggregated are governed by contractual mechanisms that favour configuration over reprogramming. A multiagent based reference architecture called Coalition Based Approach for Shop floor Agility – CoBASA, was created to support fast adaptation and changes of shop floor control architectures with minimal effort. The coalitions are composed of agentified manufacturing components (modules), whose relationships within the coalitions are governed by contracts that are configured whenever a coalition is established. Creating and changing a coalition do not involve programming effort because it only requires changes to the contract that regulates it

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Approaches to Energy Demand-Side Response: A Systematic Review

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in Demand Response (DR) as a means to provide flexibility, and hence improve the reliability of energy systems in a cost-effective way. Yet, the high complexity of the tasks associated with DR, combined with their use of large-scale data and the frequent need for near real-time de-cisions, means that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) — a branch of AI — have recently emerged as key technologies for enabling demand-side response. AI methods can be used to tackle various challenges, ranging from selecting the optimal set of consumers to respond, learning their attributes and pref-erences, dynamic pricing, scheduling and control of devices, learning how to incentivise participants in the DR schemes and how to reward them in a fair and economically efficient way. This work provides an overview of AI methods utilised for DR applications, based on a systematic review of over 160 papers, 40 companies and commercial initiatives, and 21 large-scale projects. The papers are classified with regards to both the AI/ML algorithm(s) used and the application area in energy DR. Next, commercial initiatives are presented (including both start-ups and established companies) and large-scale innovation projects, where AI methods have been used for energy DR. The paper concludes with a discussion of advantages and potential limitations of reviewed AI techniques for different DR tasks, and outlines directions for future research in this fast-growing area

Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. Multi-agent systems have been brought up and used in several application domains

Intelligent business processes composition based on mas, semantic and cloud integration (IPCASCI)

[EN]Component reuse is one of the techniques that most clearly contributes to the evolution of the software industry by providing efficient mechanisms to create quality software. Reuse increases both software reliability, due to the fact that it uses previously tested software components, and development productivity, and leads to a clear reduction in cost. Web services have become are an standard for application development on cloud computing environments and are essential in business process development. These services facilitate a software construction that is relatively fast and efficient, two aspects which can be improved by defining suitable models of reuse. This research work is intended to define a model which contains the construction requirements of new services from service composition. To this end, the composition is based on tested Web services and artificial intelligent tools at our disposal. It is believed that a multi-agent architecture based on virtual organizations is a suitable tool to facilitate the construction of cloud computing environments for business processes from other existing environments, and with help from ontological models as well as tools providing the standard BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). In the context of this proposal, we must generate a new business process from the available services in the platform, starting with the requirement specifications that the process should meet. These specifications will be composed of a semi-free description of requirements to describe the new service. The virtual organizations based on a multi-agent system will manage the tasks requiring intelligent behaviour. This system will analyse the input (textual description of the proposal) in order to deconstruct it into computable functionalities, which will be subsequently treated. Web services (or business processes) stored to be reused have been created from the perspective of SOA architectures and associated with an ontological component, which allows the multi-agent system (based on virtual organizations) to identify the services to complete the reuse process. The proposed model develops a service composition by applying a standard BPEL once the services that will compose the solution business process have been identified. This standard allows us to compose Web services in an easy way and provides the advantage of a direct mapping from Business Process Management Notation diagrams

Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments

This book presents the collection of fifty papers which were presented in the Second International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY 2011 - Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments , held in Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, from 22ndto 24thof June, 2011.The main motive of the meeting was growing awareness of the importance of the sustainability issue. This importance had emerged from the growing uncertainty of the market behaviour that leads to the characterization of the market, i.e. environment, as turbulent. Actually, the characterization of the environment as uncertain and turbulent reflects the fact that the traditional technocratic and/or socio-technical approaches cannot effectively and efficiently lead with the present situation. In other words, the rise of the sustainability issue means the quest for new instruments to deal with uncertainty and/or turbulence. The sustainability issue has a complex nature and solutions are sought in a wide range of domains and instruments to achieve and manage it. The domains range from environmental sustainability (referring to natural environment) through organisational and business sustainability towards social sustainability. Concerning the instruments for sustainability, they range from traditional engineering and management methodologies towards “soft” instruments such as knowledge, learning, and creativity. The papers in this book address virtually whole sustainability problems space in a greater or lesser extent. However, although the uncertainty and/or turbulence, or in other words the dynamic properties, come from coupling of management, technology, learning, individuals, organisations and society, meaning that everything is at the same time effect and cause, we wanted to put the emphasis on business with the intention to address primarily companies and their businesses. Due to this reason, the main title of the book is “Business Sustainability 2.0” but with the approach of coupling Management, Technology and Learning for individuals, organisations and society in Turbulent Environments. Also, the notation“2.0” is to promote the publication as a step further from our previous publication – “Business Sustainability I” – as would be for a new version of software. Concerning the Second International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, its particularity was that it had served primarily as a learning environment in which the papers published in this book were the ground for further individual and collective growth in understanding and perception of sustainability and capacity for building new instruments for business sustainability. In that respect, the methodology of the conference work was basically dialogical, meaning promoting dialog on the papers, but also including formal paper presentations. In this way, the conference presented a rich space for satisfying different authors’ and participants’ needs. Additionally, promoting the widest and global learning environment and participation, in accordance with the Conference's assumed mission to promote Proactive Generative Collaborative Learning, the Conference Organisation shares/puts open to the community the papers presented in this book, as well as the papers presented on the previous Conference(s). These papers can be accessed from the conference webpage (http://labve.dps.uminho.pt/bs11). In these terms, this book could also be understood as a complementary instrument to the Conference authors’ and participants’, but also to the wider readerships’ interested in the sustainability issues. The book brought together 107 authors from 11 countries, namely from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Serbia, Switzerland, and United States of America. The authors “ranged” from senior and renowned scientists to young researchers providing a rich and learning environment. At the end, the editors hope, and would like, that this book to be useful, meeting the expectation of the authors and wider readership and serving for enhancing the individual and collective learning, and to incentive further scientific development and creation of new papers. Also, the editors would use this opportunity to announce the intention to continue with new editions of the conference and subsequent editions of accompanying books on the subject of BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, the third of which is planned for year 2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Comunidades Inteligentes para la Construcción y Gestión de Arquitecturas Optimizadas de de Sistemas Multiagente

[ES] El desarrollo de sistemas informáticos es una labor más o menos costosa en función de su complejidad. El hecho de poder reutilizar, parcial o totalmente, trozos de un sistema para otros desarrollos, implica una reducción en el tiempo empleado, una mayor facilidad de implementación y evita la redundancia de funcionalidades. Este planteamiento llevado a los sistemas multiagente ha de tener en cuenta las características propias de los agentes, para lo cual se requiere que la reutilización pueda llevarse a cabo a partir de pequeños subsistemas de agentes especializados con una organización establecida. Además, para explotar la capacidad de estos pequeños subsistemas de agentes es necesaria una arquitectura que tenga como finalidad la coordinación de los mismos, y que de forma modular y escalada, pueda desarrollarse para lograr objetivos de mayor complejidad. A lo largo de este trabajo se llevará a cabo un estudio de las características de los agentes y sistemas multiagente, asi como de las organizaciones humanas y su implementación a partir de las organizaciones virtuales, destacando su importancia y efectividad en el desarrollo actual de sistemas multiagente. Llegado este punto se realizará el diseño de SCODA (Distributed and Specialized Agent COmmunities), una nueva arquitectura modular para el desarrollo de sistemas multiagente. Mediante SCODA se permite el desarrollo de sistemas multiagente bajo una filosofía modular especializada, a través de la cual las funcionalidades del sistema puedan ir ampliándose, de forma escalada, en función de las necesidades. SCODA se compone de pequeños subsistemas de agentes, denominados Comunidades Inteligentes Especializadas (CIE), los cuales proveen las funcionalidades necesarias para resolver las necesidades requeridas a través de servicios distribuidos. Mediante estas CIE se permite una escalabilidad de los sistemas de forma que puedan ser reutilizadas en diferentes desarrollos, independientemente de su finalidad. La validación de esta arquitectura se realizará a partir de un caso de estudio centrado en tareas principalmente logísticas, debido a la variedad de situaciones que pueden darse en este tipo de ambientes. A partir de este caso de estudio se analizará y evaluará el comportamiento de la arquitectura y podrá llevarse a cabo su validaciónComputers systems development is more or less difficult task according to its complexity. The fact of being able to re-use, partially or completely, pieces of a system for other developments, involves a time reduction, a major implementation facility and avoids the functionalities redundancy. This aim applied to multiagent systems has to bear in mind the own characteristics of the agents, for which it is needed that the re-using could be carried out from small subsystems of specialized agents with an established organization. Also, to improve the capacity of these small subsystems of agents, is necessary an architecture, that has the objective to take the coordination of the same ones, and in a modular and scalable way, could develop to achieve aims with a major complexity. Throughout this work will be carried out a study of the characteristics of the agents and multiagent systems, as well as of human organizations and its deployment on virtual organizations, highlighting its importance and effectiveness in the current development of multiagent systems. From here it will be developed the design of SCODA (Distributed and Specialized Agent Communities), a new modular architecture for the development of multiagent systems. By means of SCODA, is allowed that multiagent systems could be developed from a specialized modular philosophy, across it the functionalities of the system can be extended in scaled form according to the objectives. SCODA is composed by small subsystems of agents named, Specialized Intelligent Communities (SCI), which provide the necessary functionalities to solve the objectives needed across distributed services. By means of these CIE, scalability of the systems is allowed, so that they could be re-used in different developments, independently of his purpose. SCODA is integrated by smaller subsystems of agents, called Intelligent Communities Specialized (SCI), which provide the functionality necessary to resolve the aims, using distributed services. These SCI allow a scalability of the systems so that can be reused in different developments, regardless of its purpose. The validation of this architecture will be realized through a case of study, focused on logistical tasks mainly due to the variety of situations that may arise in this kind of environments. From this case of study, we will analyze and assess the behaviour of the architecture and will carry out its validation

Programmation dynamique avec approximation de la fonction valeur

L'utilisation d'outils pour l'approximation de la fonction de valeur est essentielle pour pouvoir traiter des problèmes de prise de décisions séquentielles de grande taille. Les méthodes de programmation dynamique (PD) et d'apprentissage par renforcement (A/R) introduites aux chapitres 1 et 2 supposent que la fonction de valeur peut être représentée (mémorisée) en attribuant une valeur à chaque état (dont le nombre est supposé fini), par exemple sous la forme d'un tableau. Ces méthodes de résolution, dites exactes, permettent de déterminer la solution optimale du problème considéré (ou tout au moins de converger vers cette solution optimale). Cependant, elles ne s'appliquent souvent qu'à des problèmes jouets, car pour la plupart des applications intéressantes, le nombre d'états possibles est si grand (voire infini dans le cas d'espaces continus) qu'une représentation exacte de la fonction ne peut être parfaitement mémorisée. Il devient alors nécessaire de représenter la fonction de valeur, de manière approchée, à l'aide d'un nombre modéré de coefficients, et de redéfinir et analyser des méthodes de résolution, dites approchées pour la PD et l'A/R, afin de prendre en compte les conséquences de l'utilisation de telles approximations dans les problèmes de prise de décisions séquentielles

Anales del XIII Congreso Argentino de Ciencias de la Computación (CACIC)

Contenido: Arquitecturas de computadoras Sistemas embebidos Arquitecturas orientadas a servicios (SOA) Redes de comunicaciones Redes heterogéneas Redes de Avanzada Redes inalámbricas Redes móviles Redes activas Administración y monitoreo de redes y servicios Calidad de Servicio (QoS, SLAs) Seguridad informática y autenticación, privacidad Infraestructura para firma digital y certificados digitales Análisis y detección de vulnerabilidades Sistemas operativos Sistemas P2P Middleware Infraestructura para grid Servicios de integración (Web Services o .Net)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI