An Agent-Based Approach to Self-Organized Production

The chapter describes the modeling of a material handling system with the production of individual units in a scheduled order. The units represent the agents in the model and are transported in the system which is abstracted as a directed graph. Since the hindrances of units on their path to the destination can lead to inefficiencies in the production, the blockages of units are to be reduced. Therefore, the units operate in the system by means of local interactions in the conveying elements and indirect interactions based on a measure of possible hindrances. If most of the units behave cooperatively ("socially"), the blockings in the system are reduced. A simulation based on the model shows the collective behavior of the units in the system. The transport processes in the simulation can be compared with the processes in a real plant, which gives conclusions about the consequencies for the production based on the superordinate planning.Comment: For related work see http://www.soms.ethz.c

Search based software engineering: Trends, techniques and applications

© ACM, 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version is available from the link below.In the past five years there has been a dramatic increase in work on Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE), an approach to Software Engineering (SE) in which Search-Based Optimization (SBO) algorithms are used to address problems in SE. SBSE has been applied to problems throughout the SE lifecycle, from requirements and project planning to maintenance and reengineering. The approach is attractive because it offers a suite of adaptive automated and semiautomated solutions in situations typified by large complex problem spaces with multiple competing and conflicting objectives. This article provides a review and classification of literature on SBSE. The work identifies research trends and relationships between the techniques applied and the applications to which they have been applied and highlights gaps in the literature and avenues for further research.EPSRC and E

Strategic Learning for Active, Adaptive, and Autonomous Cyber Defense

The increasing instances of advanced attacks call for a new defense paradigm that is active, autonomous, and adaptive, named as the \texttt{`3A'} defense paradigm. This chapter introduces three defense schemes that actively interact with attackers to increase the attack cost and gather threat information, i.e., defensive deception for detection and counter-deception, feedback-driven Moving Target Defense (MTD), and adaptive honeypot engagement. Due to the cyber deception, external noise, and the absent knowledge of the other players' behaviors and goals, these schemes possess three progressive levels of information restrictions, i.e., from the parameter uncertainty, the payoff uncertainty, to the environmental uncertainty. To estimate the unknown and reduce uncertainty, we adopt three different strategic learning schemes that fit the associated information restrictions. All three learning schemes share the same feedback structure of sensation, estimation, and actions so that the most rewarding policies get reinforced and converge to the optimal ones in autonomous and adaptive fashions. This work aims to shed lights on proactive defense strategies, lay a solid foundation for strategic learning under incomplete information, and quantify the tradeoff between the security and costs.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1906.1218

Scheduling in the industry 4.0: a systematic literature review

Industry 4.0 is characterised for being a new way of organising the supply chains, coordinating smart factories that should be capable of a higher adaptivity, making them more responsive to a continuously changing demand. This paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) with three main objectives. First, to identify in the literature on Industry 4.0, the need for new job scheduling methods for the factories of the digital era. Second, to identify in the literature of scheduling, which of these issues have been accomplished and what are the most critical gaps. Third, to propose a new research agenda on scheduling methodology, that fulfils the needs of scheduling in the field of Industry 4.0. The results show that literature related to the subject of study is rapidly growing and the needs of new methods for job scheduling in the digital factories concern two main ideas. First, the need to create and implement a digital architecture where data can be appropriately processed and second, the need of giving a decentralised machine scheduling solution inside such a framework. Although we can find some studies on small production lines, research with practical results remains scarce in the literature to date

Reinforcement Learning and Game Theory for Smart Grid Security

This dissertation focuses on one of the most critical and complicated challenges facing electric power transmission and distribution systems which is their vulnerability against failure and attacks. Large scale power outages in Australia (2016), Ukraine (2015), India (2013), Nigeria (2018), and the United States (2011, 2003) have demonstrated the vulnerability of power grids to cyber and physical attacks and failures. These incidents clearly indicate the necessity of extensive research efforts to protect the power system from external intrusion and to reduce the damages from post-attack effects. We analyze the vulnerability of smart power grids to cyber and physical attacks and failures, design different gametheoretic approaches to identify the critical components vulnerable to attack and propose their associated defense strategy, and utilizes machine learning techniques to solve the game-theoretic problems in adversarial and collaborative adversarial power grid environment. Our contributions can be divided into three major parts:Vulnerability identification: Power grid outages have disastrous impacts on almost every aspect of modern life. Despite their inevitability, the effects of failures on power grids’ performance can be limited if the system operator can predict and identify the vulnerable elements of power grids. To enable these capabilities we study machine learning algorithms to identify critical power system elements adopting a cascaded failure simulator as a threat and attack model. We use generation loss, time to reach a certain percentage of line outage/generation loss, number of line outages, etc. as evaluation metrics to evaluate the consequences of threat and attacks on the smart power grid.Adversarial gaming in power system: With the advancement of the technologies, the smart attackers are deploying different techniques to supersede the existing protection scheme. In order to defend the power grid from these smart attackers, we introduce an adversarial gaming environment using machine learning techniques which is capable of replicating the complex interaction between the attacker and the power system operators. The numerical results show that a learned defender successfully narrows down the attackers’ attack window and reduce damages. The results also show that considering some crucial factors, the players can independently execute actions without detailed information about each other.Deep learning for adversarial gaming: The learning and gaming techniques to identify vulnerable components in the power grid become computationally expensive for large scale power systems. The power system operator needs to have the advanced skills to deal with the large dimensionality of the problem. In order to aid the power system operator in finding and analyzing vulnerability for large scale power systems, we study a deep learning technique for adversary game which is capable of dealing with high dimensional power system state space with less computational time and increased computational efficiency. Overall, the results provided in this dissertation advance power grids’ resilience and security by providing a better understanding of the systems’ vulnerability and by developing efficient algorithms to identify vulnerable components and appropriate defensive strategies to reduce the damages of the attack

A Framework for the Measurement of Simulated Behavior Performance

Recent development in video games, simulation, training, and robotics has seen a push for greater visual and behavioral realism. As the reliance on high fidelity models in the education, training, and simulation communities to provide information used for strategic and tactical decisions rises, the importance of accuracy and credibility of simulated behavior increases. Credibility is typically established through verification and validation techniques. Increased interest exists in bringing behavior realism to the same level as the visual. Thus far validation process for behavioral models is unclear. With real world behavior a major goal, this research investigates the validation problem and provides a process for quantifying behavioral correctness. We design a representation of behavior based on kinematic features capturable from persistent sensors and develop a domain independent classification framework for the measuring of behavior replication. We demonstrate functionality through correct behavior comparison and evaluation of sample simulated behaviors

Planning to ‘Hear the Farmer’s Voice’: an Agent-Based Modelling Approach to Agricultural Land Use Planning

Agricultural land use is influenced not only by multiple aspects of biophysical and socio-economic processes, but also the cumulative impacts of individual farmer decisions. Farmers’ activities and decisions at farm scale shape land use and water utilisation at regional scale, yet land use planning processes do not take into account farmers’ knowledge and decision-making processes as they respond to, and in turn shape, change. Farmers’ voices are missing in the planning system. In this paper, we address the complexity of agricultural land use planning and examine the possibility of agricultural land use planning from the bottom-up via simulation to integrate environmental, economic and human factors that influence land use change. We present an innovative approach to model the interactions between government policy, market signals, and farmers’ land use decisions, and how the accumulated effects of these individual decisions change agricultural land use patterns at regional scale, using spatial and temporal agent-based modeling. A multi-stage mixed method spatial agent-based modeling (ABM) approach, aligned with the Geodesign framework, can incorporate local knowledge and decision-making into models of regional land use change. To illustrate the new approach, we examine the impact of milk market price on changes in land use in Tasmania, Australia. This approach brings together local knowledge with scientific, planning, and policy knowledge to generate dynamic scenarios for informed agricultural land-use planning decisions