Bioinspired Principles for Large-Scale Networked Sensor Systems: An Overview

Biology has often been used as a source of inspiration in computer science and engineering. Bioinspired principles have found their way into network node design and research due to the appealing analogies between biological systems and large networks of small sensors. This paper provides an overview of bioinspired principles and methods such as swarm intelligence, natural time synchronization, artificial immune system and intercellular information exchange applicable for sensor network design. Bioinspired principles and methods are discussed in the context of routing, clustering, time synchronization, optimal node deployment, localization and security and privacy

Coordination Issues in Complex Socio-technical Systems: Self-organisation of Knowledge in MoK

The thesis proposes the Molecules of Knowledge (MoK) model for self-organisation of knowledge in knowledge-intensive socio-technical systems. The main contribution is the conception, definition, design, and implementation of the MoK model. The model is based on a chemical metaphor for self-organising coordination, in which coordination laws are interpreted as artificial chemical reactions ruling evolution of the molecules of knowledge living in the system (the information chunks), indirectly coordinating the users working with them. In turn, users may implicitly affect system behaviour with their interactions, according to the cognitive theory of behavioural implicit communication, integrated in MoK. The theory states that any interaction conveys tacit messages that can be suitably interpreted by the coordination model to better support users' workflows. Design and implementation of the MoK model required two other contributions: conception, design, and tuning of the artificial chemical reactions with custom kinetic rates, playing the role of the coordination laws, and development of an infrastructure supporting situated coordination, both in time, space, and w.r.t. the environment, along with a dedicated coordination language

Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems: Foundations – A Conceptual Model and Some Derivations: The AMADEOS Legacy

Computer Systems Organization and Communication Networks; Software Engineering; Complex Systems; Information Systems Applications (incl. Internet); Computer Application

Personal mobile grids with a honeybee inspired resource scheduler

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The overall aim of the thesis has been to introduce Personal Mobile Grids (PMGrids) as a novel paradigm in grid computing that scales grid infrastructures to mobile devices and extends grid entities to individual personal users. In this thesis, architectural designs as well as simulation models for PM-Grids are developed. The core of any grid system is its resource scheduler. However, virtually all current conventional grid schedulers do not address the non-clairvoyant scheduling problem, where job information is not available before the end of execution. Therefore, this thesis proposes a honeybee inspired resource scheduling heuristic for PM-Grids (HoPe) incorporating a radical approach to grid resource scheduling to tackle this problem. A detailed design and implementation of HoPe with a decentralised self-management and adaptive policy are initiated. Among the other main contributions are a comprehensive taxonomy of grid systems as well as a detailed analysis of the honeybee colony and its nectar acquisition process (NAP), from the resource scheduling perspective, which have not been presented in any previous work, to the best of our knowledge. PM-Grid designs and HoPe implementation were evaluated thoroughly through a strictly controlled empirical evaluation framework with a well-established heuristic in high throughput computing, the opportunistic scheduling heuristic (OSH), as a benchmark algorithm. Comparisons with optimal values and worst bounds are conducted to gain a clear insight into HoPe behaviour, in terms of stability, throughput, turnaround time and speedup, under different running conditions of number of jobs and grid scales. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of HoPe performance where it has successfully maintained optimum stability and throughput in more than 95% of the experiments, with HoPe achieving three times better than the OSH under extremely heavy loads. Regarding the turnaround time and speedup, HoPe has effectively achieved less than 50% of the turnaround time incurred by the OSH, while doubling its speedup in more than 60% of the experiments. These results indicate the potential of both PM-Grids and HoPe in realising futuristic grid visions. Therefore considering the deployment of PM-Grids in real life scenarios and the utilisation of HoPe in other parallel processing and high throughput computing systems are recommended

An agent based layered framework to facilitate intelligent Wireless Sensor Networks

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-80).Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are networks of small, typically low-cost hardware devices which are able to sense various physical phenomenon in their surrounding environments. These simple nodes are also able to perform basic processing and wirelessly communicate with each other. The power of these networks arise from their ability to combine their many vantage points of the individual nodes and to work together. This allows for behaviour to emerge which is greater than the sum of the ability of all the nodes in the network. The complexity of these networks varies based on the application domain and the physical phenomenon being sensed. Although sensor networks are currently well understood and used in a number of real world applications, a number limitations still exit. This research aims to overcome a number of issues faced by current WSNs, the largest of which is their monolithic or tightly coupled structure which result in static and application specific WSNs. We aim to overcome these issues by designing a dynamically reconfigurable system which is application neutral. The proposed system is also required to facilitate intelligence and be sufficiently efficient for low power sensor node hardware

Personal mobile grids with a honeybee inspired resource scheduler

The overall aim of the thesis has been to introduce Personal Mobile Grids (PMGrids) as a novel paradigm in grid computing that scales grid infrastructures to mobile devices and extends grid entities to individual personal users. In this thesis, architectural designs as well as simulation models for PM-Grids are developed. The core of any grid system is its resource scheduler. However, virtually all current conventional grid schedulers do not address the non-clairvoyant scheduling problem, where job information is not available before the end of execution. Therefore, this thesis proposes a honeybee inspired resource scheduling heuristic for PM-Grids (HoPe) incorporating a radical approach to grid resource scheduling to tackle this problem. A detailed design and implementation of HoPe with a decentralised self-management and adaptive policy are initiated. Among the other main contributions are a comprehensive taxonomy of grid systems as well as a detailed analysis of the honeybee colony and its nectar acquisition process (NAP), from the resource scheduling perspective, which have not been presented in any previous work, to the best of our knowledge. PM-Grid designs and HoPe implementation were evaluated thoroughly through a strictly controlled empirical evaluation framework with a well-established heuristic in high throughput computing, the opportunistic scheduling heuristic (OSH), as a benchmark algorithm. Comparisons with optimal values and worst bounds are conducted to gain a clear insight into HoPe behaviour, in terms of stability, throughput, turnaround time and speedup, under different running conditions of number of jobs and grid scales. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of HoPe performance where it has successfully maintained optimum stability and throughput in more than 95% of the experiments, with HoPe achieving three times better than the OSH under extremely heavy loads. Regarding the turnaround time and speedup, HoPe has effectively achieved less than 50% of the turnaround time incurred by the OSH, while doubling its speedup in more than 60% of the experiments. These results indicate the potential of both PM-Grids and HoPe in realising futuristic grid visions. Therefore considering the deployment of PM-Grids in real life scenarios and the utilisation of HoPe in other parallel processing and high throughput computing systems are recommended.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Security in Mobile Multiagent Systems

This report contains the Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Security on Security of Mobile Multiagent Systems (SEMAS2002). The Workshop was held in Montreal, Canada as a satellite event to the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents in 2001. The far reaching influence of the Internet has resulted in an increased interest in agent technologies, which are poised to play a key role in the implementation of successful Internet and WWW-based applications in the future. While there is still considerable hype concerning agent technologies, there is also an increasing awareness of the problems involved. In particular, that these applications will not be successful unless security issues can be adequately handled. Although there is a large body of work on cryptographic techniques that provide basic building-blocks to solve specific security problems, relatively little work has been done in investigating security in the multiagent system context. Related problems are secure communication between agents, implementation of trust models/authentication procedures or even reflections of agents on security mechanisms. The introduction of mobile software agents significantly increases the risks involved in Internet and WWW-based applications. For example, if we allow agents to enter our hosts or private networks, we must offer the agents a platform so that they can execute correctly but at the same time ensure that they will not have deleterious effects on our hosts or any other agents / processes in our network. If we send out mobile agents, we should also be able to provide guarantees about specific aspects of their behaviour, i.e., we are not only interested in whether the agents carry out-out their intended task correctly. They must defend themselves against attacks initiated by other agents, and survive in potentially malicious environments. Agent technologies can also be used to support network security. For example in the context of intrusion detection, intelligent guardian agents may be used to analyse the behaviour of agents on a firewall or intelligent monitoring agents can be used to analyse the behaviour of agents migrating through a network. Part of the inspiration for such multi-agent systems comes from primitive animal behaviour, such as that of guardian ants protecting their hill or from biological immune systems

Testing Self-Adaptive Systems

Autonomy is the most demanded yet hard-to-achieve feature of recent and future software systems. Self-driving cars, mail-delivering drones, automated guided vehicles in production sites, and housekeeping robots need to decide autonomously during most of their operation time. As soon as human intervention becomes necessary, the cost of ownership increases, and this must be avoided. Although the algorithms controlling autonomous systems become more and more intelligent, their hardest opponent is their inflexibility. The more environmental situations such a system is confronted with, the more complexity the control of the autonomous system will have to master. To cope with this challenge, engineers have approached a system design, which adopts feedback loops from nature. The resulting architectural principle, which they call self-adaptive systems, follows the idea of iteratively gathering sensor data, analyzing it, planning new adaptations of the system, and finally executing the plan. Often, adaptation means to alter the system setup, re-wire components, or even exchange control algorithms to keep meeting goals and requirements in the newly appeared situation. Although self-adaptivity helps engineers to organize the vast amount of information in a self-deciding system, it remains hard to deal with the variety of contexts, which involve both environmental influences and knowledge about the system\'s internals. This challenge not only holds for the construction phase but also for verification and validation, including software test. To assure sufficient quality of a system, it must be tested under an enormous and, thus, unmanageable, number of different contextual situations and manual test-cases. This thesis proposes a novel set of methods and model types, which help test engineers to specify precisely what they expect from a self-adaptive system under test. The formal nature of the introduced artifacts allows for automatically generating test-suites or running simulations in the loop so that a qualitative verdict on the system\'s correctness can be gained. Additional to these conceptional contributions, the thesis describes a model-based adaptivity test environment, which test engineers can use for testing actual self-adaptive systems. The implementation includes comprehensive tooling for creating the introduced types of models, generating test-cases, simulating them in the loop, automating tests, and reporting. Composing all enabling components for these tasks constitutes a reference architecture of integrated test environments for self-adaptive systems. We demonstrate the completeness and accuracy of the technical approach together with the underlying concepts by evaluating them in an experimental case study where an autonomous robot interacts with human co-workers. In summary, this thesis proposes concepts for automatically and, thus, efficiently testing self-adaptive systems. The quality, which is fostered by this novel approach, is resilience: the ability of a system to maintain its promises while facing changing environments.:1 Introduction 1 1.1 Problem Description 1 1.2 Overview of Adopted Methods 3 1.3 Hypothesis and Main Contributions 4 1.4 Organization of This Thesis 5 I Foundations 7 2 Background 9 2.1 Self-adaptive Software and Autonomic Computing 9 2.1.1 Common Principles and Components of SAS 10 2.1.2 Concrete Implementations and Applications of SAS 12 2.2 Model-based Testing 13 2.2.1 Testing for Dependability 14 2.2.2 The Basics of Testing 15 2.2.3 Automated Test Design 18 2.3 Dynamic Variability Management 22 2.3.1 Software Product Lines 23 2.3.2 Dynamic Software Product Lines 25 3 Related Work: Existing Research on Testing Self-Adaptive Systems 29 3.1 Testing Context-Aware Applications 30 3.2 The SimSOTA Project 31 3.3 Dynamic Variability in Complex Adaptive Systems (DiVA) 33 3.4 Other Early-Stage Research 34 3.5 Taxonomy of Requirements of Model-based SAS Testing 36 II Methods 39 4 Model-driven SAS Testing 41 4.1 Problem/Solution Fit 41 4.2 Example: Surveillance Drone 43 4.3 Concepts and Models for Testing Self-Adaptive Systems 44 4.3.1 Test Case Generation vs. Simulation in the Loop 44 4.3.2 Incremental Modeling Process 45 4.3.3 Basic Representation Format: Petri Nets 46 4.3.4 Context Variation 50 4.3.5 Modeling Adaptive Behavior 53 4.3.6 Dynamic Context Change 57 4.3.7 Interfacing Context from Behavioral Representation 62 4.3.8 Adaptation Mode Variation 64 4.3.9 Context-Dependent Recon guration 67 4.4 Adequacy Criteria for SAS Test Models 71 4.5 Discussion on the Viability of the Employed Models 71 4.6 Comparison to Related Work 73 4.7 Summary and Discussion 74 5 Model-based Adaptivity Test Environment 75 5.1 Technological Foundation 76 5.2 MATE Base Components 77 5.3 Metamodel Implementation 78 5.3.1 Feature-based Variability Model 79 5.3.2 Abstract and Concrete Syntax for Textual Notations 80 5.3.3 Adaptive Petri Nets 86 5.3.4 Stimulus and Recon guration Automata 87 5.3.5 Test Suite and Report Model 87 5.4 Test Generation Framework 87 5.5 Test Automation Framework 91 5.6 MATE Tooling and the SAS Test Process 93 5.6.1 Test Modeling 94 5.6.2 Test Case Generation 95 5.6.3 Test Case Execution and Test Reporting 96 5.6.4 Interactive Simulation Frontend 96 5.7 Summary and Discussion 97 III Evaluation 99 6 Experimental Study: Self-Adaptive Co-Working Robots 101 6.1 Robot Teaching and Co-Working with WEIR 103 6.1.1 WEIR Hardware Components 104 6.1.2 WEIR Software Infrastructure 105 6.1.3 KUKA LBR iiwa as WEIR Manipulator 106 6.1.4 Self-Adaptation Capabilities of WEIR 107 6.2 Cinderella as Testable Co-Working Application 109 6.2.1 Cinderella Setup and Basic Functionality 109 6.2.2 Co-Working with Cinderella 110 6.3 Testing Cinderella with MATE 112 6.3.1 Automating Test Execution 112 6.3.2 Modeling Cinderella in MATE 113 6.3.3 Testing Cinderella in the Loop 121 6.4 Evaluation Verdict and Summary 123 7 Summary and Discussion 125 7.1 Summary of Contributions 126 7.2 Open Research Questions 127 Bibliography 129 Appendices 137 Appendix Cinderella De nitions 139 1 Cinderella Adaptation Bounds 139 2 Cinderella Self-adaptive Workflow 14