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A survey of simulation techniques in commerce and defence
Despite the developments in Modelling and Simulation (M&S) tools and techniques over the past years, there has been a gap in the M&S research and practice in healthcare on developing a toolkit to assist the modellers and simulation practitioners with selecting an appropriate set of techniques. This study is a preliminary step towards this goal. This paper presents some results from a systematic literature survey on applications of M&S in the commerce and defence domains that could inspire some improvements in the healthcare. Interim results show that in the commercial sector Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has been the most widely used technique with System Dynamics (SD) in second place. However in the defence sector, SD has gained relatively more attention. SD has been found quite useful for qualitative and soft factors analysis. From both the surveys it becomes clear that there is a growing trend towards using hybrid M&S approaches
Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields
This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous
computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways
From Holistic to Discrete Speech Sounds: The Blind Snow-Flake Maker Hypothesis
Sound is a medium used by humans to carry information.
The existence of this kind of
medium is a pre-requisite for language. It is organized
into a code, called speech, which
provides a repertoire of forms that is shared in each
language community. This code is necessary to support the linguistic
interactions that allow humans to communicate.
How then may a speech code be formed prior to the
existence of linguistic interactions?
Moreover, the human speech code is characterized by several
properties: speech is digital and compositional (vocalizations
are made of units re-used systematically in other syllables);
phoneme inventories have precise regularities as well as
great diversity in human languages; all the speakers of a
language community categorize sounds in the same manner,
but each language has its own system of categorization,
possibly very different from every other.
How can a speech code with these properties form?
These are the questions we will approach in the paper. We will
study them using the method of the artificial. We will
build a society of artificial agents, and study what mechanisms
may provide answers. This will not prove directly what mechanisms
were used for humans, but rather give ideas about what kind
of mechanism may have been used. This allows us to shape the
search space of possible answers, in particular by showing
what is sufficient and what is not necessary.
The mechanism we present is based on a low-level model of
sensory-motor interactions. We show that the integration of certain very
simple and non language-specific neural devices
allows a population of agents to build a speech code that
has the properties mentioned above. The originality is
that it pre-supposes neither a functional pressure for
communication, nor the ability to have coordinated
social interactions (they do not play language or imitation
games). It relies on the self-organizing properties of a generic
coupling between perception and production both
within agents, and on the interactions between agents
Simulation modelling and visualisation: toolkits for building artificial worlds
Simulations users at all levels make heavy use of compute resources to drive computational
simulations for greatly varying applications areas of research using different simulation
paradigms. Simulations are implemented in many software forms, ranging from highly standardised
and general models that run in proprietary software packages to ad hoc hand-crafted
simulations codes for very specific applications. Visualisation of the workings or results of a
simulation is another highly valuable capability for simulation developers and practitioners.
There are many different software libraries and methods available for creating a visualisation
layer for simulations, and it is often a difficult and time-consuming process to assemble a
toolkit of these libraries and other resources that best suits a particular simulation model. We
present here a break-down of the main simulation paradigms, and discuss differing toolkits and
approaches that different researchers have taken to tackle coupled simulation and visualisation
in each paradigm
From Analogue to Digital Vocalizations
Sound is a medium used by humans to carry information.
The existence of this kind of
medium is a pre-requisite for language. It is organized
into a code, called speech, which
provides a repertoire of forms that is shared in each
language community. This code is necessary to support the linguistic
interactions that allow humans to communicate.
How then may a speech code be formed prior to the
existence of linguistic interactions?
Moreover, the human speech code is characterized by several
properties: speech is digital and compositional (vocalizations
are made of units re-used systematically in other syllables);
phoneme inventories have precise regularities as well as
great diversity in human languages; all the speakers of a
language community categorize sounds in the same manner,
but each language has its own system of categorization,
possibly very different from every other.
How can a speech code with these properties form?
These are the questions we will approach in the paper. We will
study them using the method of the artificial. We will
build a society of artificial agents, and study what mechanisms
may provide answers. This will not prove directly what mechanisms
were used for humans, but rather give ideas about what kind
of mechanism may have been used. This allows us to shape the
search space of possible answers, in particular by showing
what is sufficient and what is not necessary.
The mechanism we present is based on a low-level model of
sensory-motor interactions. We show that the integration of certain very
simple and non language-specific neural devices
allows a population of agents to build a speech code that
has the properties mentioned above. The originality is
that it pre-supposes neither a functional pressure for
communication, nor the ability to have coordinated
social interactions (they do not play language or imitation
games). It relies on the self-organizing properties of a generic
coupling between perception and production both
within agents, and on the interactions between agents
Norm-based and commitment-driven agentification of the Internet of Things
There are no doubts that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has conquered the ICT industry to the extent that many governments and organizations are already rolling out many anywhere,anytime online services that IoT sustains. However, like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down IoT practical adoption including the passive nature and privacy invasion of things. This paper examines how to empower things with necessary capabilities that would make them proactive and responsive. This means things can, for instance reach out to collaborative peers, (un)form dynamic communities when necessary, avoid malicious peers, and be “questioned” for their actions. To achieve such empowerment, this paper presents an approach for agentifying things using norms along with commitments that operationalize these norms. Both norms and commitments are specialized into social (i.e., application independent) and business (i.e., application dependent), respectively. Being proactive, things could violate commitments at run-time, which needs to be detected through monitoring. In this paper, thing agentification is illustrated with a case study about missing children and demonstrated with a testbed that uses different IoT-related technologies such as Eclipse Mosquitto broker and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol. Some experiments conducted upon this testbed are also discussed
Testability of a swarm robot using a system of systems approach and discrete event simulation
A simulation framework using discrete event system specification (DEVS) and data encoded with Extensible Markup Language (XML) is presented to support agent-in-the-loop (AIL) simulations for large, complex, and distributed systems. A System of Systems (SoS) approach organizes the complex systems hierarchically. AIL simulations provide a necessary step in maintaining model continuity methods to achieve a greater degree of accuracy in systems analysis. The proposed SoS approach enables the simulation and analysis of these independent and cooperative systems by concentrating on the data transferred among systems to achieve interoperability instead of requiring the software modeling of global state spaces. The information exchanged is wrapped in XML to facilitate system integration and interoperability. A Groundscout is deployed as a real agent working cooperatively with virtual agents to form a robotic swarm in an example threat detection scenario. This scenario demonstrates the AIL framework\u27s ability to successfully test a swarm robot for individual performance and swarm behavior. Results of the testing process show an increase of robot team size increases the rate of successfully investigating a threat while critical violations of the algorithm remained low despite packet loss
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