Enhancing service-oriented holonic multi-agent systems with self-organization

Multi-agents systems and holonic manufacturing systems are suitable approaches to design a new and alternative class of production control systems, based on the decentralization of control functions over distributed autonomous and cooperative entities. However, in spite of their enormous potential they lack some aspects related to interoperability, migration, optimisation in decentralised structures and truly self-adaptation. This paper discusses the advantages of combining these paradigms with complementary paradigms, such as service-oriented architectures, and enhancing them with biologically inspired algorithms and techniques, such as emergent behaviour and self-organization, to reach a truly robust, agile and adaptive control system. An example of applying a stigmergy-based algorithm to dynamically route pallets in a production system is also provided

Characterization of new flexible players: Deliverable D3.2

Project TradeRES - New Markets Design & Models for 100% Renewable Power Systems: https://traderes.eu/about/ABSTRACT: The subject matter of this report is the analysis of the electricity markets’ actors’ scene, through the identification of actor classes and the characterisation of actors from a behavioural and an operational perspective. The technoeconomic characterization of market participants aims to support the upcoming model enhancements by aligning the agent-based model improvements with the modern market design challenges and the contemporary characteristics of players. This work has been conducted in the context of task T3.2, which focuses on the factorization of the distinctive operational and behavioural characteristics of players in market structures. Traditional parties have been considered together with new and emerging roles, while special focus has been given on new actors related to flexible technologies and demand-side response. Among the main objectives have been the characterization of individual behaviours, objectives and requirements of different electricity market players, considering both the traditional entities and the new distributed ones, and the detailed representation of the new actors.N/

Climate Risk Assessment and Adaptation Considerations for Municipal Governance

Within the last 10 years, four of the 10 most extreme and extremely expensive weather- related disasters in Canada have occurred in Alberta, and climate modelling for Western Canada projects increasing changes and weather extremes. Changing and extreme conditions will continue to affect many aspects of municipal operations over the next 10 to 30 years. The major risks and impacts of changing climate conditions directly affecting municipalities involve infrastructure performance, increasing water stress, land use change and asset management. Long-term seasonal temperature and precipitation changes punctuated by extreme weather conditions are a costly combination affecting local governments and communities. Alberta has a diverse range of climate risks, and risk assessment, adaptation and disaster response needs to reflect this diversity. Surveys done in 2019 and 2021 identified common barriers affecting municipal effectiveness in managing and adapting to climate risk which include: available staff time; access to climate risk and adaptation expertise; access to financial resources; and access to locally relevant and credible climate informationand data. Municipalities in Alberta with populations less than 10,000 are more likely to experience these barriers than larger and urban municipalities better positioned to have access to the specialized resources necessary. All Alberta local authorities are required to have an emergency management plan to respond to extreme weather events of relatively short duration. However, longer term, extreme shifts in seasonal temperatures and precipitation are projected over the next 20to 30 years that will continue to impact municipal land use planning, water availability and infrastructure costs. Climate risk and adaptation need to be integrated into municipal plans, infrastructure maintenance, capital budgets and asset management to strengthen local resilience. Municipalities in Alberta have a provincial statutory framework that can address climate risk assessment and adaptation. Eight opportunities are identified that can be used within Alberta’s municipal government model to increase municipal effectiveness including: greater use of Intermunicipal Collaboration Frameworks (ICFs) and development of a Climate Adaptation Research and Decision Support (CARDS) network to provide multi- disciplinary decision support to local government decision-makers in different geographic areas of Alberta

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table

UBIDEV: a homogeneous service framework for pervasive computing environments

This dissertation studies the heterogeneity problem of pervasive computing system from the viewpoint of an infrastructure aiming to provide a service-oriented application model. From Distributed System passing through mobile computing, pervasive computing is presented as a step forward in ubiquitous availability of services and proliferation of interacting autonomous entities. To better understand the problems related to the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of pervasive computing environments, we need to analyze the structure of a pervasive computing system from its physical and service dimension. The physical dimension describes the physical environment together wit the technology infrastructure that characterizes the interactions and the relations within the environment; the service dimension represents the services (being them software or not) the environment is able to provide [Nor99]. To better separate the constrains and the functionalities of a pervasive computing system, this dissertation classifies it in terms of resources, context, classification, services, coordination and application. UBIDEV, as the key result of this dissertation, introduces a unified model helping the design and the implementation of applications for heterogeneous and dynamic environments. This model is composed of the following concepts: • Resource: all elements of the environment that are manipulated by the application, they are the atomic abstraction unit of the model. • Context: all information coming from the environment that is used by the application to adapts its behavior. Context contains resources and services and defines their role in the application. • Classification: the environment is classified according to the application ontology in order to ground the generic conceptual model of the application to the specific environment. It defines the basic semantic level of interoperability. • Service: the functionalities supported by the system; each service manipulates one or more resources. Applications are defined as a coordination and adaptation of services. • Coordination: all aspects related to service composition and execution as well as the use of the contextual information are captured by the coordination concept. • Application Ontology: represents the viewpoint of the application on the specific context; it defines the high level semantic of resources, services and context. Applying the design paradigm proposed by UBIDEV, allows to describe applications according to a Service Oriented Architecture[Bie02], and to focus on application functionalities rather than their relations with the physical devices. Keywords: pervasive computing, homogenous environment, service-oriented, heterogeneity problem, coordination model, context model, resource management, service management, application interfaces, ontology, semantic services, interaction logic, description logic.Questa dissertazione studia il problema della eterogeneit`a nei sistemi pervasivi proponendo una infrastruttura basata su un modello orientato ai servizi. I sistemi pervasivi sono presentati come un’evoluzione naturale dei sistemi distribuiti, passando attraverso mobile computing, grazie ad una disponibilit`a ubiqua di servizi (sempre, ovunque ed in qualunque modo) e ad loro e con l’ambiente stesso. Al fine di meglio comprendere i problemi legati allintrinseca eterogeneit`a dei sistemi pervasivi, dobbiamo prima descrivere la struttura fondamentale di questi sistemi classificandoli attraverso la loro dimensione fisica e quella dei loro servizi. La dimensione fisica descrive l’ambiente fisico e tutti i dispositivi che fanno parte del contesto della applicazione. La dimensione dei servizi descrive le funzionalit`a (siano esse software o no) che l’ambiente `e in grado di fornire [Nor99]. I sistemi pervasivi vengono cos`ı classificati attraverso una metrica pi `u formale del tipo risorse, contesto, servizi, coordinazione ed applicazione. UBIDEV, come risultato di questa dissertazione, introduce un modello uniforme per la descrizione e lo sviluppo di applicazioni in ambienti dinamici ed eterogenei. Il modello `e composto dai seguenti concetti di base: • Risorse: gli elementi dell’ambiente fisico che fanno parte del modello dellapplicazione. Questi rappresentano l’unit`a di astrazione atomica di tutto il modello UBIDEV. • Contesto: le informazioni sullo stato dell’ambiente che il sistema utilizza per adattare il comportamento dell’applicazione. Il contesto include informazioni legate alle risorse, ai servizi ed alle relazioni che li legano. • Classificazione: l’ambiente viene classificato sulla base di una ontologia che rappresenta il punto di accordo a cui tutti i moduli di sistema fanno riferimento. Questa classificazione rappresenta il modello concettuale dell’applicazione che si riflette sull’intero ambiente. Si definisce cos`ı la semantica di base per tutto il sistema. • Servizi: le funzionalit`a che il sistema `e in grado di fornire; ogni servizio `e descritto in termini di trasformazione di una o pi `u risorse. Le applicazioni sono cos`ı definite in termini di cooperazione tra servizi autonomi. • Coordinazione: tutti gli aspetti legati alla composizione ed alla esecuzione di servizi cos`ı come l’elaborazione dell’informazione contestuale. • Ontologia dell’Applicazione: rappresenta il punto di vista dell’applicazione; definisce la semantica delle risorse, dei servizi e dell’informazione contestuale. Applicando il paradigma proposto da UBIDEV, si possono descrivere applicazioni in accordo con un modello Service-oriented [Bie02] ed, al tempo stesso, ridurre l’applicazione stessa alle sue funzionalit`a di alto livello senza intervenire troppo su come queste funzionalit` a devono essere realizzate dalle singole componenti fisiche

Resourcing Global LGBTI Movements: Systems Philanthropy for Social Justice

Foundations seeking to have an impact on the most intractable of problems have spent the last half century experimenting with ways to become more strategic in their efforts. Though commendable, the resultant growth of the strategic philanthropy movement has instead become self-limiting, too often unable to grasp the true complexity of social change and therefore remaining inadequate to address it. In response, this thesis reviews the expanding literature of systems thinking, specifically excavating the contribution of social systems methodologies to the design of philanthropic portfolios. Global foundation grantmaking regarding the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex (LGBTI) communities is presented as a praxis in this respect. Comparing the theory of systems philanthropy with the evolving practice of LGBTI funders demonstrates the extent to which complex problems require a less rigid approach—one more attuned to the lifecycle of emergent solutions, a networked landscape, and the necessity of strategic decisionmaking being located on the frontlines rather than in the boardroom