152 research outputs found

    Product-service systems scenarios simulation based on G-DEVS/HLA: Generalized discrete event specification/high level architecture

    Get PDF
    International audienceIn the past decade, personal customers expected manufacturing companies to provide them with a physical product with, nonetheless, some basic additional services. Currently, customers expect a more comprehensive solution, integrating both a physical product and non-physical services, which explains why companies have started to propose Product-Service Systems (PSS). The underlying objective of profitability can be attained if the system is designed, based on system use, to avoid waste, and if services are developed jointly with products. Although all the requisite conditions are well-known, the optimal way to satisfy them is not formalized or even guided by any clear methodology. This paper proposes to create PSS models to be simulated in different service scenarios based on G-DEVS/HLA. The simulation results provide pointers to help decision maker choose between several PSS design scenarios to be manufactured. A case study from the toy industry is used to illustrate the proposed methodology

    A Review of Platforms for the Development of Agent Systems

    Full text link
    Agent-based computing is an active field of research with the goal of building autonomous software of hardware entities. This task is often facilitated by the use of dedicated, specialized frameworks. For almost thirty years, many such agent platforms have been developed. Meanwhile, some of them have been abandoned, others continue their development and new platforms are released. This paper presents a up-to-date review of the existing agent platforms and also a historical perspective of this domain. It aims to serve as a reference point for people interested in developing agent systems. This work details the main characteristics of the included agent platforms, together with links to specific projects where they have been used. It distinguishes between the active platforms and those no longer under development or with unclear status. It also classifies the agent platforms as general purpose ones, free or commercial, and specialized ones, which can be used for particular types of applications.Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures, 9 tables, 83 reference

    Drug education in victorian schools (DEVS): the study protocol for a harm reduction focused school drug education trial

    Get PDF
    <p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This study seeks to extend earlier Australian school drug education research by developing and measuring the effectiveness of a comprehensive, evidence-based, harm reduction focused school drug education program for junior secondary students aged 13 to 15 years. The intervention draws on the recent literature as to the common elements in effective school curriculum. It seeks to incorporate the social influence of parents through home activities. It also emphasises the use of appropriate pedagogy in the delivery of classroom lessons.</p> <p>Methods/Design</p> <p>A cluster randomised school drug education trial will be conducted with 1746 junior high school students in 21 Victorian secondary schools over a period of three years. Both the schools and students have actively consented to participate in the study. The education program comprises ten lessons in year eight (13-14 year olds) and eight in year nine (14-15 year olds) that address issues around the use of alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and other illicit drugs. Control students will receive the drug education normally provided in their schools. Students will be tested at baseline, at the end of each intervention year and also at the end of year ten. A self completion questionnaire will be used to collect information on knowledge, patterns and context of use, attitudes and harms experienced in relation to alcohol, tobacco, cannabis and other illicit drug use. Multi-level modelling will be the method of analysis because it can best accommodate hierarchically structured data. All analyses will be conducted on an Intent-to-Treat basis. In addition, focus groups will be conducted with teachers and students in five of the 14 intervention schools, subsequent to delivery of the year eight and nine programs. This will provide qualitative data about the effectiveness of the lessons and the relevance of the materials.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>The benefits of this drug education study derive both from the knowledge gained by trialling an optimum combination of innovative, harm reduction approaches with a large, student sample, and the resultant product. The research will provide better understanding of what benefits can be achieved by harm reduction education. It will also produce an intervention, dealing with both licit and illicit drug use that has been thoroughly evaluated in terms of its efficacy, and informed by teacher and student feedback. This makes available to schools a comprehensive drug education package with prevention characteristics and useability that are well understood.</p> <p>Trial registration</p> <p>Australia and New Zealand Clinical Trials Register (ANZCTR): <a href="http://www.anzctr.org.au/ACTRN12612000079842.aspx">ACTRN12612000079842</a></p

    Scheduling of a Cyber-Physical System Simulation

    Get PDF
    The work carried out in this Ph.D. thesis is part of a broader effort to automate industrial simulation systems. In the aeronautics industry, and more especially within Airbus, the historical application of simulation is pilot training. There are also more recent uses in the design of systems, as well as in the integration of these systems. These latter applications require a very high degree of representativeness, where historically the most important factor has been the pilot’s feeling. Systems are now divided into several subsystems that are designed, implemented and validated independently, in order to maintain their control despite the increase in their complexity, and the reduction in time-to-market. Airbus already has expertise in the simulation of these subsystems, as well as their integration into a simulation. This expertise is empirical; simulation specialists use the previous integrations schedulings and adapt it to a new integration. This is a process that can sometimes be time-consuming and can introduce errors. The current trends in the industry are towards flexible production methods, integration of logistics tools for tracking, use of simulation tools in production, as well as resources optimization. Products are increasingly iterations of older, improved products, and tests and simulations are increasingly integrated into their life cycles. Working empirically in an industry that requires flexibility is a constraint, and nowadays it is essential to facilitate the modification of simulations. The problem is, therefore, to set up methods and tools allowing a priori to generate representative simulation schedules. In order to solve this problem, we have developed a method to describe the elements of a simulation, as well as how this simulation can be executed, and functions to generate schedules. Subsequently, we implemented a tool to automate the scheduling search, based on heuristics. Finally, we tested and verified our method and tools in academic and industrial case studies

    Fools gold? Developer dilemmas in a closed mobile application market platform

    Full text link
    In this paper, we outline some potential conflicts that platform owners and software developers face in mobile application markets. Our arguments are based on comments captured in specialized online discussion forums, in which developers gather to share knowledge and experiences. The key findings indicate conflicts of interests, including 1) intra-platform competition, 2) discriminative promotion, 3) entry prevention, 4) restricted monetization, 5) restricted knowledge sharing, 6) substitution, and 7) strategic technology selection. Opportunistic platform owners may use their power to discriminate between third-part software developers. However, there are also potential strategic solutions that developers can apply; for example diversification (multi-homing), syndication and brand building.Comment: Presented at the 15th International Conference on Electronic Commerce, ICEC 2013, Turku, Finland, August 13-15, 201

    INSTITUTIONAL LOGICS, INDIE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS AND PLATFORM GOVERNANCE

    Get PDF
    This two-essay dissertation aims to study institutional logics in the context of Apple's independent third-party software developers. In essay 1, I investigate the embedded agency aspect of the institutional logics theory. It builds on the premise that logics constrain preferences, interests and behaviors of individuals and organizations, thereby determining the appropriate and legitimate decisions and actions of actors. In the meantime, most social actors operate in fields characterized by multiple institutional logics where contradictions exist, allowing individuals and organizations with opportunities for negotiation and change through exploitation or management of these contradictions. I specifically study two competing institutional logics: professional and market logics when they are experienced simultaneously by independent iOS app entrepreneurs. Using participant observation and semi-structured interviews, I delineate the ways in which logic tension is reconciled through mechanisms of logic synthesis in three entrepreneurial areas - app ideation, app execution and app marketing, and conditions which facilitate or inhibit logic synthesis. In essay 2, I study the emergence and evolution of field-level logics in the context of Apple's desktop developers - Mac indies. Following the cultural emergence model of field-level logics in Thornton et al. (2012), and the argument that "field-level logics are both embedded in societal-level logics and subject to field-level processes that generate distinct forms of instantiation, variation, and combination of societal logics" (p148), I particularly examine the relationship between resource environment and the emergence and evolution of field-level logics. Taking advantage of a critical change in developers' resource environment - Apple's opening of the iOS App Store and subsequently the Mac App Store, and hence its governance model shifting from mainly a technological platform to a platform that includes a market exchange place, I identify developers' logics before and after the change, namely, the software ecosystem logic and platform ecosystem logic. Two ideal types are constructed for the logics along elemental categories, and a content analysis demonstrates the logic shift pattern as resource environments change. A further analysis of the two logics suggests that the software ecosystem logic and platform ecosystem logic are in contestation at this early stage of institutional change

    A Cooperative Architecting Procedure for Systems of Systems Based on Self-Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems

    Get PDF
    Depuis la seconde guerre mondiale, l’ingénierie des systèmes a permis le développement de méthodologies pour contrôler le développement de systèmes et de projets de plus en plus complexes. En 1990, la chute de l’URSS a provoqué un changement de doctrine militaire aux Etats-Unis en passant d’une confrontation bipolaire à une mondialisation des conflits comportant une grande variété de menaces. Sa nouvelle doctrine était de faire collaborer ses systèmes de défense existants pour produire un système de défense de haut niveau, décentralisé, adaptable et composé de systèmes indépendants. C’est l’apparition du concept de Système de Systèmes (SdS).Cette thèse de doctorat propose un nouveau modèle de SdS appelé SApHESIA (SoS ArchitectingHEuriStIc based on Agent), ainsi qu’une nouvelle méthodologie d’architecture. Cette nouvelle méthodologie est basée sur une coopération complète entre tous les composants du SdS, lui permettant d’évoluer de lui-même afin de faire face à des événements inattendus de son environnement tels que des menaces. Enfin, ce travail est testé à travers 4exemples issus de différents domaines (militaire, logistique et exploratoire).Since the World War II, researchers have tended to develop methodologies and tools tobuild and control the development of more and more complex systems and projects. Thisinter-disciplinary research area has been called Systems Engineering (SE) and continues tobe developed nowadays. In 1990, the fall of USSR led the US Department of Defense (DoD)to re-think its defense doctrine and to switch from a one opponent confrontation to a globalizationof conflicts with a huge variety of scenarios. Its idea was to re-use and join itsdefense systems by producing a huge, decentralized and adaptive defense system that iscomposed of existing and independents (complex) systems. This is the apparition of theSystem of Systems (SoS) concept. After 2000’s, this concept spreads in civil domains suchas crisis management or logistic systems. More precisely, a SoS is a complex system characterizedby the particular nature of its components: these latter, which are systems, tend tobe managerially and operationally independent as well as geographically distributed. Thisspecific characterization led to re-think research areas of classic SE such as definition, taxonomy,modeling, architecting and so on. SoS architecting focuses on the way independentcomponents of a SoS can be dynamically structured and can change autonomously theirinteractions in an efficient manner to fulfill the goal of the SoS and to cope with the highdynamics of the environment. This PhD thesis mainly focuses on two SoS research areas: 1)SoS modeling and 2) SoS architecting. To achieve the first point, we propose a new modelcalled SApHESIA (SoS Architecting HEuriStIc based on Agent). We have used set theoryand ABM (Agent-Based Model) paradigm to define this model that takes into account thecharacteristics of SoS. Secondly, we propose a new SoS architecting procedure based on theAdaptive Multi-Agent System (AMAS) approach that advocates full cooperation betweenall the components of the SoS through the concept of criticality. This criticality is a metricthat represents the distance between the current state of a component and its goals. In thisprocedure, the SoS architecture evolves over time to self-adapt to the dynamics of the environmentin which it is plunged, while taking into account the respective local goals of itscomponents. Finally we instantiate this model and this procedure through 4 examples fromdifferent domains (military, logistics and exploratory missions) and validate the feasibility,the efficiency, the effectiveness and the robustness of the SoS architecting procedure we havedeveloped and proposed

    A Cooperative Architecting Procedure for Systems of Systems Based on Self-Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems

    Get PDF
    Depuis la seconde guerre mondiale, l’ingénierie des systèmes a permis le développement de méthodologies pour contrôler le développement de systèmes et de projets de plus en plus complexes. En 1990, la chute de l’URSS a provoqué un changement de doctrine militaire aux Etats-Unis en passant d’une confrontation bipolaire à une mondialisation des conflits comportant une grande variété de menaces. Sa nouvelle doctrine était de faire collaborer ses systèmes de défense existants pour produire un système de défense de haut niveau, décentralisé, adaptable et composé de systèmes indépendants. C’est l’apparition du concept de Système de Systèmes (SdS).Cette thèse de doctorat propose un nouveau modèle de SdS appelé SApHESIA (SoS ArchitectingHEuriStIc based on Agent), ainsi qu’une nouvelle méthodologie d’architecture. Cette nouvelle méthodologie est basée sur une coopération complète entre tous les composants du SdS, lui permettant d’évoluer de lui-même afin de faire face à des événements inattendus de son environnement tels que des menaces. Enfin, ce travail est testé à travers 4exemples issus de différents domaines (militaire, logistique et exploratoire).Since the World War II, researchers have tended to develop methodologies and tools tobuild and control the development of more and more complex systems and projects. Thisinter-disciplinary research area has been called Systems Engineering (SE) and continues tobe developed nowadays. In 1990, the fall of USSR led the US Department of Defense (DoD)to re-think its defense doctrine and to switch from a one opponent confrontation to a globalizationof conflicts with a huge variety of scenarios. Its idea was to re-use and join itsdefense systems by producing a huge, decentralized and adaptive defense system that iscomposed of existing and independents (complex) systems. This is the apparition of theSystem of Systems (SoS) concept. After 2000’s, this concept spreads in civil domains suchas crisis management or logistic systems. More precisely, a SoS is a complex system characterizedby the particular nature of its components: these latter, which are systems, tend tobe managerially and operationally independent as well as geographically distributed. Thisspecific characterization led to re-think research areas of classic SE such as definition, taxonomy,modeling, architecting and so on. SoS architecting focuses on the way independentcomponents of a SoS can be dynamically structured and can change autonomously theirinteractions in an efficient manner to fulfill the goal of the SoS and to cope with the highdynamics of the environment. This PhD thesis mainly focuses on two SoS research areas: 1)SoS modeling and 2) SoS architecting. To achieve the first point, we propose a new modelcalled SApHESIA (SoS Architecting HEuriStIc based on Agent). We have used set theoryand ABM (Agent-Based Model) paradigm to define this model that takes into account thecharacteristics of SoS. Secondly, we propose a new SoS architecting procedure based on theAdaptive Multi-Agent System (AMAS) approach that advocates full cooperation betweenall the components of the SoS through the concept of criticality. This criticality is a metricthat represents the distance between the current state of a component and its goals. In thisprocedure, the SoS architecture evolves over time to self-adapt to the dynamics of the environmentin which it is plunged, while taking into account the respective local goals of itscomponents. Finally we instantiate this model and this procedure through 4 examples fromdifferent domains (military, logistics and exploratory missions) and validate the feasibility,the efficiency, the effectiveness and the robustness of the SoS architecting procedure we havedeveloped and proposed
    • …
    corecore