Multi-Agent Systems and Complex Networks: Review and Applications in Systems Engineering

Systems engineering is an ubiquitous discipline of Engineering overlapping industrial, chemical, mechanical, manufacturing, control, software, electrical, and civil engineering. It provides tools for dealing with the complexity and dynamics related to the optimisation of physical, natural, and virtual systems management. This paper presents a review of how multi-agent systems and complex networks theory are brought together to address systems engineering and management problems. The review also encompasses current and future research directions both for theoretical fundamentals and applications in the industry. This is made by considering trends such as mesoscale, multiscale, and multilayer networks along with the state-of-art analysis on network dynamics and intelligent networks. Critical and smart infrastructure, manufacturing processes, and supply chain networks are instances of research topics for which this literature review is highly relevant

Path protection switching in information centric networking

Since its formation, the Internet has experienced tremendous growth, constantly increasing traffic and new applications, including voice and video. However, it still keeps its original architecture drafted almost 40 years ago built on the end-to-end principle; this has proven to be problematic when there are failures as routing convergence is slow for unicast networks and even slower for multicast which has to rely upon slow multicast routing as no protection switching exists for multicast}. This thesis investigates protection in an alternative approach for network communication, namely information centric networking (ICN) using the architecture proposed by the PSIRP/PURSUIT projects. This uses Bloom Filters to allow both unicast and multicast forwarding. However, the PSIRP/PURSUIT ICN approach did not investigate protection switching and this problem forms the main aim of this thesis. The work builds on the research by Grover and Stamatelakis who introduced the concept of pre-configured protection p-cycles in 2000 for optical networks and, with modification, applicable to unicast IP or packet networks. This thesis shows how the p-cycle concept can be directly applied to packet networks that use PSIRP/PURSUIT ICN and extends the approach to encompass both unicast and multicast protection switching. Furthermore, it shows how the chosen p-cycles can be optimised to reduce the redundancy overhead introduced by the protection mechanism. The work evaluates the approach from two aspects, the first is how the proposed approach compares to existing switching state and traffic in an MPLS multicast architecture. The second considers the redundancy overhead in three known network topologies for synthetic traffic matrices. The thesis is the first work to demonstrate the efficiency of Bloom filter based switching for multicast (and unicast) protection switching

Network analysis and algorithm solutions in critical emergency scenarios

Critical emergency scenarios in network communication, mobile wireless sensor networks and Smart Grids. Network recovery after massive disruption, algorithms for damaged networks, protocols for damaged networks, progressive monitoring of a damaged network, progressive flow restoration of a damaged network. Analysis of the vulnerabilities of the deployment algorithm for Mobile Wireless Sensor Netowkrs in human hostile environment, Algorithms for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks under attack. Analysis of the cascading failures phenomenon in the Smart Grids, Prevents Large Blackout in the Smart Grids, Reduce the energy demand on the Smart Grids using the Internet of Things

Planarity of data networks

A planar graph is one that can be drawn (say on a piece of paper) without any crossing links. In this paper we show, using a new data set, that data-network graphs show a surprisingly high likelihood of being planar. The data set — the Internet Topology Zoo — is a store of network data created from the information that network operators make public. As such, it includes meta-data that we could never have derived from automated network measurements. A surprising number of graphs in the Zoo are planar, many more than can be explained through the models for graph formation we tested. We speculate that planarity results from the requirement to build transparent networks that network operators can understand easily.Rhys Bowden, Hung X. Nguyen, Nickolas Falkner, Simon Knight and Matthew Roughanhttp://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6038489&tag=