2,986 research outputs found
Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological
ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital
Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems
to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital
Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems,
where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of
agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating
continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on
evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at
finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital
Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures
originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological
ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from
the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity).
Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating
Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a
metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa
Recommended from our members
Carbon Catcher Design Report
Overview. The design of the overall Carbon Catcher project can be separated into four distinct systems, each of which is assigned a specialized committee. The committee names and responsibilities are listed below:
Air Mover
The overall goal for the Air Mover committee is the design of the turbine assembly. As the overall goal of the project is to collect and separate carbon dioxide from the air, one of the most important parts is to actually get the air to pass through the carbon-catching
membrane. Passive air would not give a significant enough yield rate to make the carbon dioxide collection rate impactful, thus air must be sucked through a vacuum/turbine.
Membrane
The goal of Membrain is to create a membrane that can filter out CO2 through various methods. These methods are limited, due to there being such variety, to certain techniques and membrane material types that have been decided, prior, by the committee. Most membranes will be geared towards utilizing temperature and pressure along with gaseous speed and flow rate. In addition, examining certain treatments, such as regeneration of material, and replacements will be looked into as well, to see how it fares in sustainability.
Carbon Storer
The Carbon Storer committee will design a store and transport system for fluid CO2 after it is extracted from the atmosphere. Primary considerations include geological solutions, cost-effective materials, and analysis methods to improve overall capacity and efficiency. Additionally, the committee will select an environmentally and economically sustainable method of recycling the captured CO2.
PyControl
The PyControl committee will design a series of sensors and actuators, which will primarily support the sequestration and pipeline systems present in the Carbon Storer Committee and direct air capture system in Air Mover. The design can be broken into four control layers: Input/Output, Field Controllers, Data, and Supervisory.
Goal
The overarching goal of Carbon Catcher is to design a cost-effective, scalable atmospheric carbon dioxide removal system that is capable of being deployed in a variety of urban environments and may fit a variety of different customer requirements or requests
Service-oriented control architecture for reconfigurable production systems
Evolvable and collaborative production systems are becoming an emergent paradigm towards flexibility and automatic re-configurability. The reconfiguration of those systems requires the existence of distributed and modular control components that interact in order to accomplish control activities. This paper focuses on service-oriented production systems, which behavior is regulated by the coordination of services that are provided and required by control components with different roles. Internally, these components are independent of the implementations, but an internal modular and event based structure is presented. Individual control and interaction is achieved by using embedded or inter-service control processes for which High-Level Petri Nets are proposed. Supporting the predefined control, decision support systems are used to provide conflict resolution and other decision-making functions
Modeling and Executing Production Processes with Capabilities and Skills using Ontologies and BPMN
Current challenges of the manufacturing industry require modular and
changeable manufacturing systems that can be adapted to variable conditions
with little effort. At the same time, production recipes typically represent
important company know-how that should not be directly tied to changing plant
configurations. Thus, there is a need to model general production recipes
independent of specific plant layouts. For execution of such a recipe however,
a binding to then available production resources needs to be made. In this
contribution, select a suitable modeling language to model and execute such
recipes. Furthermore, we present an approach to solve the issue of recipe
modeling and execution in modular plants using semantically modeled
capabilities and skills as well as BPMN. We make use of BPMN to model
\emph{capability processes}, i.e. production processes referencing abstract
descriptions of resource functions. These capability processes are not bound to
a certain plant layout, as there can be multiple resources fulfilling the same
capability. For execution, every capability in a capability process is replaced
by a skill realizing it, effectively creating a \emph{skill process} consisting
of various skill invocations. The presented solution is capable of
orchestrating and executing complex processes that integrate production steps
with typical IT functionalities such as error handling, user interactions and
notifications. Benefits of the approach are demonstrated using a flexible
manufacturing system.Comment: To be submitted to ETFA 202
Engineering framework for service-oriented automation systems
Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Informática. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201
Innovation Games: A new approach to the competitive challenge
Firms need to be innovative to stay ahead of the competition. But what form does innovation take in today's fast-moving world? The conventional view is that innovation is confined to the R&D departments of large firms, where boffins labour to perfect new products that meet presently unmet customer needs, and patents and copyrights protect market supremacy. In this ‘closed system’ scenario, all managers are striving to follow universal best practices, and as a consequence can find themselves trapped in competition that ultimately gets no one very far. The authors argue that in reality, 21st century innovation is a much more fluid affair. For example, rather than being released as a finished product, the first generation of a new product may be a prototype with corners still to be rubbed off when it enters the market: adventurous early customers themselves help to hone performance over time. Similarly, rather than R&D being an internal business, an entire ecosystem of smaller firms may collaborate and interact, under the direction of the lead company, in the innovation process. Analysing data collected from a large number of firms across different industry sectors, the authors set out to create a more holistic, multi-dimensional approach to understanding innovation. To this end, they draw up a typology of seven ‘games of innovation’ with different characteristics; games cut across industries and sectors, and different firms may play one or more. Their empirical findings highlight the fact that ‘design rules’ are not always drawn up in R&D laboratories but in many cases emerge as a result of negotiations and competition between many players. Rather than imitating competitors, managers should focus on identifying the games their own firm is playing and the strategic issues that shape those games
- …