SISO Space Reference FOM - Tools and Testing

The Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) Space Reference Federation Object Model (SpaceFOM) version 1.0 is nearing completion. Earlier papers have described the use of the High Level Architecture (HLA) in Space simulation as well as technical aspects of the SpaceFOM. This paper takes a look at different SpaceFOM tools and how they were used during the development and testing of the standard.The first organizations to develop SpaceFOM-compliant federates for SpaceFOM development and testing were NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC), the University of Calabria (UNICAL), and Pitch Technologies.JSC is one of NASA's lead centers for human space flight. Much of the core distributed simulation technology development, specifically associated with the SpaceFOM, is done by the NASA Exploration Systems Simulations (NExSyS) team. One of NASA's principal simulation development tools is the Trick Simulation Environment. NASA's NExSyS team has been modifying and using Trick and TrickHLA to help develop and test the SpaceFOM.The System Modeling And Simulation Hub Laboratory (SMASH-Lab) at UNICAL has developed the Simulation Exploration Experience (SEE) HLA Starter kit, that has been used by most SEE teams involved in the distributed simulation of a Moon base. It is particularly useful for the development of federates that are compatible with the SpaceFOM. The HLA Starter Kit is a Java based tool that provides a well-structured framework to simplify the formulation, generation, and execution of SpaceFOM-compliant federates.Pitch Technologies, a company specializing in distributed simulation, is utilizing a number of their existing HLA tools to support development and testing of the SpaceFOM. In addition to the existing tools, Pitch has developed a few SpaceFOM specific federates: Space Master for managing the initialization, execution and pacing of any SpaceFOM federation; EarthEnvironment, a simple Root Reference Publisher; and Space Monitor, a graphical tool for monitoring reference frames and physical entities.Early testing of the SpaceFOM was carried out in the SEE university outreach program, initiated in SISO. Students were given a subset of the FOM, that was later extended. Sample federates were developed and frameworks were developed or adapted to the early FOM versions.As drafts of the standard matured, testing was performed using federates from government, industry, and academia. By mixing federates developed by different teams the standard could be tested with respect to functional correctness, robustness and clarity.These frameworks and federates have been useful when testing and verifying the design of the standard. In addition to this, they have since formed a starting point for developing SpaceFOM-compliant federations in several projects, for example for NASA, ESA as well as SEE

Parallel and distributed cyber-physical system simulation

textThe traditions of real-time and embedded system engineering have evolved into a new field of cyber-physical systems (CPSs). The increase in complexity of CPS components and the multi-domain engineering composition of CPSs challenge the current best practices in design and simulation. To address the challenges of CPS simulation, this work introduces a simulator coordination method drawing from strengths of the field of parallel and distributed simulation (PADS), yet offering benefits aimed towards the challenges of coordinating CPS engineering design simulators. The method offers the novel concept of Interpolated Event data types applied to Kahn Process Networks in order to provide simulator coordination. This can enable conservative and optimistic coordination of multiple heterogeneous and homogeneous simulators, but provide important benefits for CPS simulation, such as the opportunity to reduce functional requirements for simulator interfacing compared to existing solutions. The method is analyzed in theoretical properties and instantiated in software tools SimConnect and SimTalk. Finally, an experimental study applies the method and tools to accelerate Spice circuit simulation with tradeoffs in speed versus accuracy, and demonstrates the coordination of three heterogeneous simulators for a CPS simulation with increasing component model refinement and realism.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

INTEROPERABILITY FOR MODELING AND SIMULATION IN MARITIME EXTENDED FRAMEWORK

This thesis reports on the most relevant researches performed during the years of the Ph.D. at the Genova University and within the Simulation Team. The researches have been performed according to M&S well known recognized standards. The studies performed on interoperable simulation cover all the environments of the Extended Maritime Framework, namely Sea Surface, Underwater, Air, Coast & Land, Space and Cyber Space. The applications cover both the civil and defence domain. The aim is to demonstrate the potential of M&S applications for the Extended Maritime Framework, applied to innovative unmanned vehicles as well as to traditional assets, human personnel included. A variety of techniques and methodology have been fruitfully applied in the researches, ranging from interoperable simulation, discrete event simulation, stochastic simulation, artificial intelligence, decision support system and even human behaviour modelling

Modelling and Co-simulation of Multi-Energy Systems: Distributed Software Methods and Platforms

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Immunoceptive inference: why are psychiatric disorders and immune responses intertwined?

There is a steadily growing literature on the role of the immune system in psychiatric disorders. So far, these advances have largely taken the form of correlations between specific aspects of inflammation (e.g. blood plasma levels of inflammatory markers, genetic mutations in immune pathways, viral or bacterial infection) with the development of neuropsychiatric conditions such as autism, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and depression. A fundamental question remains open: why are psychiatric disorders and immune responses intertwined? To address this would require a step back from a historical mind-body dualism that has created such a dichotomy. We propose three contributions of active inference when addressing this question: translation, unification, and simulation. To illustrate these contributions, we consider the following questions. Is there an immunological analogue of sensory attenuation? Is there a common generative model that the brain and immune system jointly optimise? Can the immune response and psychiatric illness both be explained in terms of self-organising systems responding to threatening stimuli in their external environment, whether those stimuli happen to be pathogens, predators, or people? Does false inference at an immunological level alter the message passing at a psychological level (or vice versa) through a principled exchange between the two systems

Molecular interactions and their impact on life sciences

The behaviour and function of biomolecules represent a fundamental aspect in modulating the activity of micro and macro-scale complexes evolved in cells and tissues. The network of interactions of such biomolecules allow for the formation and regulation of the basic machinery of life, yet is commonly studied under non-physiological conditions. In order to characterise the behaviour and function of such biomolecules, they have to be analysed under relevant conditions, ideally in biofluids, cells or artificial systems which mainly imitate these properties. Recent microfluidic applications present an orthogonal approach for determining the interactions between a wide range of biomolecules, thus allow the study of molecular binding in the condensed phase with no need for extensive dilution, sample immobilisation or changes to the molecular environment from the liquid to the gas phase. As part of my PhD, I capitalised on microfluidic diffusion approaches, developed in the Knowles lab to systematically study the binding and thermodynamics of small heat shock proteins, such as clusterin, αB-crystallin and the Brichos chaperone domain, to aggregated forms of amyloid-beta and α-synuclein, protein aggregates that are associated with a wide range of neurodegenerative diseases. The three chaperones are crucial components of the cellular proteostasis network and characteristically overexpressed during cell stress. Each chaperone type shows distinct binding behaviour to protein aggregates, which can be related to its inhibitory function. While αB-crystallin binding to α-synuclein is entropically driven by conformational rearrangement, the binding of Brichos to amyloid-beta fibrils is shown to be enthalpically driven as it inhibits specifically secondary nucleation processes. In contrast to the specific secondary nucleation inhibition by Brichos, clusterin inhibits specifically fibril elongation of amyloid-beta. I could show that these two specific aggregation processes are affected by the two chaperones, Brichos and clusterin, in a non-cooperative manner. These molecular details are particularly relevant in the context of the rational design of drug molecules that could, potentially in combination, target multiple specific aggregation steps in a selective manner. Therefore, I further screened the binding of a wide range of monoclonal antibodies to either amyloid-beta monomers or fibrils, which are currently at different stages of clinical phase trials for Alzheimer's therapy. I thus show that the obtained stoichiometry and affinity information of the drug correlates with the distinct inhibition mechanisms and consequently provides mechanistic and structural information. In contrast to studying disease related model systems in vitro under homogeneous conditions, measurements in complex body fluids are key in medical applied science, e.g. cancer treatment or immunological characterisation. In my research, I have undertaken the challenge of extending the platform developed above to characterise the binding of a wide range of molecules under complex solution conditions. Preliminary data obtained during my PhD underlines the extraordinary capability of the diffusion-based microfluidics to being applicable for investigating the binding parameters of molecules involved in alloimmunisation in human serum. Along with my main focus on measuring protein interactions with diffusion-based microfluidics, I further developed a technique using selective separation properties, such as particle charge, hydrophobicity, size or immunoaffinity and coupled it with a series of microfluidic devices for an instantaneous and full biophysical characterisation of heterogeneous solutions. This new technique can be used to explore the formation of protein oligomers or protein complexation, characterisation and identification of complex mixtures in the context of amyloid formation and protein homeostasis

An OpenEaagles Framework Extension for Hardware-in-the-Loop Swarm Simulation

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm applications, algorithms, and control strategies have experienced steady growth and development over the past 15 years. Yet, to this day, most swarm development efforts have gone untested and thus unimplemented. Cost of aircraft systems, government imposed airspace restrictions, and the lack of adequate modeling and simulation tools are some of the major inhibitors to successful swarm implementation. This thesis examines how the OpenEaagles simulation framework can be extended to bridge this gap. This research aims to utilize Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulation to provide developers a functional capability to develop and test the behaviors of scalable and modular swarms of autonomous UAVs in simulation with high confidence that these behaviors will prop- agate to real/live ight tests. Demonstrations show the framework enhances and simplifies swarm development through encapsulation, possesses high modularity, pro- vides realistic aircraft modeling, and is capable of simultaneously accommodating four hardware-piloted swarming UAVs during HIL simulation or 64 swarming UAVs during pure simulation

Development of Original and Notable Techniques for Protein Analysis, Native Identification, and Characterisation

This thesis is a compilation of multiple techniques developed to characterise solutions of proteins, or proteins themselves. Proteins are the building blocks of life, and thus they are interesting to study for a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of life but also for developing diagnostic tools as well as medical therapies. The first chapter is a general overview of the thesis with an explanation of the different points developed further in the thesis such as proteins, protein aggregation, microfluidics, and optics. The second chapter describes a microfluidic platform for performing a 2D characterisation, separating the particles using capillary electrophoresis and diffusional sizing. This allowed to characterise the components of heterogenous solutions in function of their size and the mobility of the proteins. The third chapter is looking at existing well-known microfluidic techniques, like free-flow electrophoresis and diffusional sizing, combined with confocal microscopy. The single molecule detection allows to distinguish particles in function of their brightness, breaking the homogenous limitation of these microfluidic techniques under classical epifluorescence microscopy. The fourth chapter shows an elegantly simple way to characterise an exponential decrease of the residence time distribution within a nanocavity trap. The explanation is based only on a random walk assumption without requesting potential interactions. The fifth chapter describes a new method to size particles in solution based on interferometry scattering microscopy by looking at the correlation of the intensity of the interferometric term. The last chapter before the overall conclusion is based on a study of SARS-COV2 seroprevalence in the swiss canton of Zürich between December 2019 and January 2021. This study was conducted on two cohorts, the University Hospital patients, and the blood donation services of Zürich.EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Sensor Technologies and Application; EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Sensor Technologies for a Healthy and Sustainable Future; Fluidic Analytics Lt