Landscape Economics : The Road Ahead

The aims of this paper are to delineate some important topics in landscape economics, and also to take stock of the works and debates presented during the life of the CEEP project (from the first meeting in Angers (2006) , to the present one in Vienna). The objective of the research progamm initiated by the MEEDAT was to put landscape policy in the perspective of the sustainable development. The research issue is about the relationships between the development paths and landscape changes, paved with examples of consensus, controversies, and conflicts. This perspective was challenging for economists, due to the two gaps observed between the development of landscape research in geography, ecology or sociology and the absence of a corresponding corpus in economics, on one hand, and the development of landscape policies compared to the development of research in economics, on the other one. Precursors in landscape economics are certainly Von Thünen, who created the first model explaining the role of dispersing forces in the landscape making up, and C. Price, for the analysis of landscape preferences and the evaluation of landscape projects.[...]

e-Governance: Supporting pragmatic direct deliberative action through online communities of interest

Authors often report on the limited success of e-Government initiatives in developing nations. Top down, national strategies are developed to target improved government services, but maintain hierarchical, citizen-state conceptions of governance through representative democracy. An alternative conception, direct deliberative democracy, frames the potential role of the internet in governance differently. Web based platforms might support locally animated deliberations, which target pragmatic outcomes, while the resulting social networks afford collective learning through connections across traditional boundaries. This paper presents an investigation of direct deliberative governance as it occurs in online 'communities of interest', and is based on research with such a community in southern Africa. We investigate contributions to the online governance process and develop an action typology distinguishing between degrees of 'agency freedom'. Network analytic techniques are then used to understand how acts of varying degree are expressed in terms of the structure of a social network. The aim, more broadly, is to understand how the environment shapes acts of direct deliberative governance, and, in turn, how the acts shape the evolution and effectiveness of the community. The preliminary results suggest design considerations for online governance communities, and highlight their role to not only provide deliberative space, but to mediate social network connections

Embodied Evolution in Collective Robotics: A Review

This paper provides an overview of evolutionary robotics techniques applied to on-line distributed evolution for robot collectives -- namely, embodied evolution. It provides a definition of embodied evolution as well as a thorough description of the underlying concepts and mechanisms. The paper also presents a comprehensive summary of research published in the field since its inception (1999-2017), providing various perspectives to identify the major trends. In particular, we identify a shift from considering embodied evolution as a parallel search method within small robot collectives (fewer than 10 robots) to embodied evolution as an on-line distributed learning method for designing collective behaviours in swarm-like collectives. The paper concludes with a discussion of applications and open questions, providing a milestone for past and an inspiration for future research.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

Model of Multilayer Knowledge Diffusion for Competence Development in an Organization

Growing role of intellectual capital within organizations is affecting new strategies related to knowledge management and competence development. Among different aspects related to this field, knowledge diffusion has become one of interesting areas from both practitioner and researchers perspective. Several models were proposed with main goal to simulate diffusion and to explain the nature of these processes. Existing models are focused on knowledge diffusion and they assume diffusion within a single layer using knowledge representation. From the organizational perspective connecting several types of knowledge and modelling changes of competence can bring additional value. In the article we extended existing approaches by using multilayer diffusion model and focused on analysis of competence development process. The proposed model describes competence development process in a new way through horizontal and vertical knowledge diffusion in multilayer network. In the network, agents collaborate and interchange various kind of knowledge through different layers and this mutual activities affect the competences in a positive or negative way. Taking under consideration workers cognitive and social abilities and the previous level of competence the new competence level can be estimated. The model is developed to support competence management in different organizations

On the Modeling and Verification of Collective and Cooperative Systems

none1noThe formal description and verification of networks of cooperative and interacting agents is made difficult by the interplay of several different behavioral patterns, models of communication, scalability issues. In this paper, we will explore the functionalities and the expressiveness of a general-purpose process algebraic framework for the specification and model checking based analysis of collective and cooperative systems. The proposed syntactic and semantic schemes are general enough to be adapted with small modifications to heterogeneous application domains, like, e.g., crowdsourcing systems, trustworthy networks, and distributed ledger technologies.Aldini, AlessandroAldini, Alessandr

Diagnosis of an EPS module

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e ComputadoresThis thesis addresses and contextualizes the problem of diagnostic of an Evolvable Production System (EPS). An EPS is a complex and lively entity composed of intelligent modules that interact through bio-inspired mechanisms, to ensure high system availability and seamless reconfiguration. The actual economic situation together with the increasing demand of high quality and low priced customized products imposed a shift in the production policies of enterprises. Shop floors have to become more agile and flexible to accommodate the new production paradigms. Rather than selling products enterprises are establishing a trend of offering services to explore business opportunities. The new production paradigms, potentiated by the advances in Information Technologies (IT), especially in web related standards and technologies as well as the progressive acceptance of the multi-agent systems (MAS) concept and related technologies, envision collections of modules whose individual and collective function adapts and evolves ensuring the fitness and adequacy of the shop floor in tackling profitable but volatile business opportunities. Despite the richness of the interactions and the effort set in modelling them, their potential to favour fault propagation and interference, in these complex environments, has been ignored from a diagnostic point of view. With the increase of distributed and autonomous components that interact in the execution of processes current diagnostic approaches will soon be insufficient. While current system dynamics are complex and to a certain extent unpredictable the adoption of the next generation of approaches and technologies comes at the cost of a yet increased complexity.Whereas most of the research in such distributed industrial systems is focused in the study and establishment of control structures, the problem of diagnosis has been left relatively unattended. There are however significant open challenges in the diagnosis of such modular systems including: understanding fault propagation and ensuring scalability and co-evolution. This work provides an implementation of a state-of-the-art agent-based interaction-oriented architecture compliant with the EPS paradigm that supports the introduction of a new developed diagnostic algorithm that has the ability to cope with the modern manufacturing paradigm challenges and to provide diagnostic analysis that explores the network dimension of multi-agent systems

Industrial Clusters and the Knowledge Based Economy : from open to distributed structures ?

Document de Travail GREQAM ; 2007-07During the recent years, clusters have been at the heart of a vast literature supposed to bring new arguments and perspectives to local development preoccupations. Two complementary factors are stressing for firms and territories the importance of governing the interactions of industrial actors: the globalisation of the economy and the technology and the emergence of a knowledge based economy. In local systems, agents are mostly connected with agents situated in their spatial proximity, while these local networks, as open systems, benefit from the long distance connections that some of their members are able to activate. Co-location of actors in a geographical proximity by itself is not a sufficient condition for co-ordination but can contribute to its efficiency, provided the existence of other shared dimensions among agents: organic level, representations, projects, ... As far as efficiency and performances of "classical" clusters are not only the result of the intensity and quality of internal but also external interactions and coordination, into which extent can we still consider the relevance of interaction structures restricted to bounded geographical areas? In this paper we turn our attention to the way industrial actors take into account the question of the local-global articulation for the strategic building of their own ego-network, that is the set of links they may build in order to achieve efficient interactions with partners and competitors. Thus interfaces between local and global relationships are a key feature that can be achieved through different approaches. To this aim we introduce the two concepts of knowledge gatekeeper and temporary proximity that appear as providing alternative approaches of actors partnering, likely to provide a better flexibility in the local-global trade-off. We will then present the basic form of the ego-networks on which the individual firm is able to build her relational neighbourhood. This raises the question of the combination of individual ego-networks into a consistent networked structure into which local networks are articulated by the way of local-global interfaces. On this basis we present a typology of the basic new forms of clustering where time and space can be alternatively and complementarily combined in order to achieve more flexibility and costs reduction of the localisation game