130 research outputs found
Applications of agent architectures to decision support in distributed simulation and training systems
This work develops the approach and presents the results of a new model for applying intelligent agents to complex distributed interactive simulation for command and control. In the framework of tactical command, control communications, computers and intelligence (C4I), software agents provide a novel approach for efficient decision support and distributed interactive mission training. An agent-based architecture for decision support is designed, implemented and is applied in a distributed interactive simulation to significantly enhance the command and control training during simulated exercises. The architecture is based on monitoring, evaluation, and advice agents, which cooperate to provide alternatives to the dec ision-maker in a time and resource constrained environment. The architecture is implemented and tested within the context of an AWACS Weapons Director trainer tool.
The foundation of the work required a wide range of preliminary research topics to be covered, including real-time systems, resource allocation, agent-based computing, decision support systems, and distributed interactive simulations. The major contribution of our work is the construction of a multi-agent architecture and its application to an operational decision support system for command and control interactive simulation. The architectural design for the multi-agent system was drafted in the first stage of the work. In the next stage rules of engagement, objective and cost functions were determined in the AWACS (Airforce command and control) decision support domain. Finally, the multi-agent architecture was implemented and evaluated inside a distributed interactive simulation test-bed for AWACS Vv\u27Ds. The evaluation process combined individual and team use of the decision support system to improve the performance results of WD trainees.
The decision support system is designed and implemented a distributed architecture for performance-oriented management of software agents. The approach provides new agent interaction protocols and utilizes agent performance monitoring and remote synchronization mechanisms. This multi-agent architecture enables direct and indirect agent communication as well as dynamic hierarchical agent coordination. Inter-agent communications use predefined interfaces, protocols, and open channels with specified ontology and semantics. Services can be requested and responses with results received over such communication modes. Both traditional (functional) parameters and nonfunctional (e.g. QoS, deadline, etc.) requirements and captured in service requests
Service Quality Assessment for Cloud-based Distributed Data Services
The issue of less-than-100% reliability and trust-worthiness of third-party controlled cloud components (e.g., IaaS and SaaS components from different vendors) may lead to laxity in the QoS guarantees offered by a service-support system S to various applications. An example of S is a replicated data service to handle customer queries with fault-tolerance and performance goals. QoS laxity (i.e., SLA violations) may be inadvertent: say, due to the inability of system designers to model the impact of sub-system behaviors onto a deliverable QoS. Sometimes, QoS laxity may even be intentional: say, to reap revenue-oriented benefits by cheating on resource allocations and/or excessive statistical-sharing of system resources (e.g., VM cycles, number of servers). Our goal is to assess how well the internal mechanisms of S are geared to offer a required level of service to the applications. We use computational models of S to determine the optimal feasible resource schedules and verify how close is the actual system behavior to a model-computed \u27gold-standard\u27. Our QoS assessment methods allow comparing different service vendors (possibly with different business policies) in terms of canonical properties: such as elasticity, linearity, isolation, and fairness (analogical to a comparative rating of restaurants). Case studies of cloud-based distributed applications are described to illustrate our QoS assessment methods.
Specific systems studied in the thesis are: i) replicated data services where the servers may be hosted on multiple data-centers for fault-tolerance and performance reasons; and ii) content delivery networks to geographically distributed clients where the content data caches may reside on different data-centers. The methods studied in the thesis are useful in various contexts of QoS management and self-configurations in large-scale cloud-based distributed systems that are inherently complex due to size, diversity, and environment dynamicity
A cyber-enabled mission-critical system for post-flood response:Exploiting TV white space as network backhaul links
A crucial problem in post-flood recovery actions is the ability to rapidly establish communication and collaboration among rescuers to conduct timely and effective search and rescue (SAR) mission given disrupted telecommunication infrastructure to support the service. Aimed at providing such proximity service (ProSe) for mission-critical data exchange in the post-flood environment, the majority of existing solutions rely heavily upon ad-hoc networking approaches, which suffer from restricted communication range and the limited scope of interaction. As an effort to broaden the ProSe coverage and expand integrated global-local information exchange in the post-flood SAR activities, this paper proposes a novel network architecture in the form of a cyber-enabled mission-critical system (CEMCS) for acquiring and communicating post-flood emergency data by exploiting TV white space spectrum as network backhaul links. The primary method of developing the proposed system builds upon a layered architecture of wireless local, regional and wide-area communications, and incorporates collaborative network components among these layers. The desirable functionalities of CEMCS are showcased through formulation and the development of an efficient global search strategy exploiting a wide range of collaboration among network agents. The simulation results demonstrate the capability of CEMCS to provide ProSe in the post-flood scenarios as reflected by reliable network performance (e.g., packet delivery ratio nearing 80%-90%) and the optimality of efficient search algorithm
A comprehensive survey on cooperative intersection management for heterogeneous connected vehicles
Nowadays, with the advancement of technology, world is trending toward high mobility and dynamics. In this context, intersection management (IM) as one of the most crucial elements of the transportation sector demands high attention. Today, road entities including infrastructures, vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as motorcycles, moped, scooters, pedestrians, bicycles, and other types of vehicles such as trucks, buses, cars, emergency vehicles, and railway vehicles like trains or trams are able to communicate cooperatively using vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications and provide traffic safety, efficiency, infotainment and ecological improvements. In this paper, we take into account different types of intersections in terms of signalized, semi-autonomous (hybrid) and autonomous intersections and conduct a comprehensive survey on various intersection management methods for heterogeneous connected vehicles (CVs). We consider heterogeneous classes of vehicles such as road and rail vehicles as well as VRUs including bicycles, scooters and motorcycles. All kinds of intersection goals, modeling, coordination architectures, scheduling policies are thoroughly discussed. Signalized and semi-autonomous intersections are assessed with respect to these parameters. We especially focus on autonomous intersection management (AIM) and categorize this section based on four major goals involving safety, efficiency, infotainment and environment. Each intersection goal provides an in-depth investigation on the corresponding literature from the aforementioned perspectives. Moreover, robustness and resiliency of IM are explored from diverse points of view encompassing sensors, information management and sharing, planning universal scheme, heterogeneous collaboration, vehicle classification, quality measurement, external factors, intersection types, localization faults, communication anomalies and channel optimization, synchronization, vehicle dynamics and model mismatch, model uncertainties, recovery, security and privacy
NDSF technical operations via telecommunications
In 2015, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) commissioned an external study
concerning the use of modern telecommunications and telepresence technologies in the potential
reduction of manpower in National Deep Submergence Operations. That study has been
completed, and the final report is attached as Appendix A.Funding was provided by the Nereus Legacy Fund at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutio
A viability plan of a unit of research in applications of new telecommunications technologies
This project is about to develop a plan to create a dedicated unit in order to monitoring of emerging technologies in the field of telecommunications
Towards the simulation of cooperative perception applications by leveraging distributed sensing infrastructures
With the rapid development of Automated Vehicles (AV), the boundaries of their function alities are being pushed and new challenges are being imposed. In increasingly complex
and dynamic environments, it is fundamental to rely on more powerful onboard sensors and
usually AI. However, there are limitations to this approach. As AVs are increasingly being
integrated in several industries, expectations regarding their cooperation ability is growing,
and vehicle-centric approaches to sensing and reasoning, become hard to integrate. The
proposed approach is to extend perception to the environment, i.e. outside of the vehicle,
by making it smarter, via the deployment of wireless sensors and actuators. This will vastly
improve the perception capabilities in dynamic and unpredictable scenarios and often in a
cheaper way, relying mostly in the use of lower cost sensors and embedded devices, which rely
on their scale deployment instead of centralized sensing abilities. Consequently, to support
the development and deployment of such cooperation actions in a seamless way, we require
the usage of co-simulation frameworks, that can encompass multiple perspectives of control
and communications for the AVs, the wireless sensors and actuators and other actors in the
environment. In this work, we rely on ROS2 and micro-ROS as the underlying technologies
for integrating several simulation tools, to construct a framework, capable of supporting the
development, test and validation of such smart, cooperative environments. This endeavor
was undertaken by building upon an existing simulation framework known as AuNa. We
extended its capabilities to facilitate the simulation of cooperative scenarios by incorporat ing external sensors placed within the environment rather than just relying on vehicle-based
sensors. Moreover, we devised a cooperative perception approach within this framework,
showcasing its substantial potential and effectiveness. This will enable the demonstration of
multiple cooperation scenarios and also ease the deployment phase by relying on the same
software architecture.Com o rápido desenvolvimento dos Veículos Autónomos (AV), os limites das suas funcional idades estão a ser alcançados e novos desafios estão a surgir. Em ambientes complexos
e dinâmicos, é fundamental a utilização de sensores de alta capacidade e, na maioria dos
casos, inteligência artificial. Mas existem limitações nesta abordagem. Como os AVs estão
a ser integrados em várias indústrias, as expectativas quanto à sua capacidade de cooperação estão a aumentar, e as abordagens de perceção e raciocínio centradas no veículo,
tornam-se difíceis de integrar. A abordagem proposta consiste em extender a perceção para
o ambiente, isto é, fora do veículo, tornando-a inteligente, através do uso de sensores e
atuadores wireless. Isto irá melhorar as capacidades de perceção em cenários dinâmicos e
imprevisíveis, reduzindo o custo, pois a abordagem será baseada no uso de sensores low-cost
e sistemas embebidos, que dependem da sua implementação em grande escala em vez da
capacidade de perceção centralizada. Consequentemente, para apoiar o desenvolvimento
e implementação destas ações em cooperação, é necessária a utilização de frameworks de
co-simulação, que abranjam múltiplas perspetivas de controlo e comunicação para os AVs,
sensores e atuadores wireless, e outros atores no ambiente. Neste trabalho será utilizado
ROS2 e micro-ROS como as tecnologias subjacentes para a integração das ferramentas de
simulação, de modo a construir uma framework capaz de apoiar o desenvolvimento, teste e
validação de ambientes inteligentes e cooperativos. Esta tarefa foi realizada com base numa
framework de simulação denominada AuNa. Foram expandidas as suas capacidades para
facilitar a simulação de cenários cooperativos através da incorporação de sensores externos
colocados no ambiente, em vez de depender apenas de sensores montados nos veículos.
Além disso, concebemos uma abordagem de perceção cooperativa usando a framework,
demonstrando o seu potencial e eficácia. Isto irá permitir a demonstração de múltiplos
cenários de cooperação e também facilitar a fase de implementação, utilizando a mesma
arquitetura de software
Beyond 5G Networks: Integration of Communication, Computing, Caching, and Control
In recent years, the exponential proliferation of smart devices with their
intelligent applications poses severe challenges on conventional cellular
networks. Such challenges can be potentially overcome by integrating
communication, computing, caching, and control (i4C) technologies. In this
survey, we first give a snapshot of different aspects of the i4C, comprising
background, motivation, leading technological enablers, potential applications,
and use cases. Next, we describe different models of communication, computing,
caching, and control (4C) to lay the foundation of the integration approach. We
review current state-of-the-art research efforts related to the i4C, focusing
on recent trends of both conventional and artificial intelligence (AI)-based
integration approaches. We also highlight the need for intelligence in
resources integration. Then, we discuss integration of sensing and
communication (ISAC) and classify the integration approaches into various
classes. Finally, we propose open challenges and present future research
directions for beyond 5G networks, such as 6G.Comment: This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of
China Communications Journal in IEEE Xplor
A generic architecture style for self-adaptive cyber-physical systems
Die aktuellen Konzepte zur Gestaltung von Regelungssystemen basieren auf dynamischen
Verhaltensmodellen, die mathematische Ansätze wie Differentialgleichungen zur Ableitung der
entsprechenden Funktionen verwenden. Diese Konzepte stoßen jedoch aufgrund der zunehmenden
Systemkomplexität allmählich an ihre Grenzen. Zusammen mit der Entwicklung dieser Konzepte
entsteht eine Architekturevolution der Regelungssysteme.
In dieser Dissertation wird eine Taxonomie definiert, um die genannte Architekturevolution anhand
eines typischen Beispiels, der adaptiven Geschwindigkeitsregelung (ACC), zu veranschaulichen.
Aktuelle ACC-Varianten, die auf der Regelungstheorie basieren, werden in Bezug auf ihre Architekturen
analysiert. Die Analyseergebnisse zeigen, dass das zukünftige Regelungssystem im ACC eine
umfangreichere Selbstadaptationsfähigkeit und Skalierbarkeit erfordert. Dafür sind kompliziertere
Algorithmen mit unterschiedlichen Berechnungsmechanismen erforderlich. Somit wird die
Systemkomplexität erhöht und führt dazu, dass das zukünftige Regelungssystem zu einem
selbstadaptiven cyber-physischen System wird und signifikante Herausforderungen für die
Architekturgestaltung des Systems darstellt.
Inspiriert durch Ansätze des Software-Engineering zur Gestaltung von Architekturen von
softwareintensiven Systemen wird in dieser Dissertation ein generischer Architekturstil entwickelt. Der
entwickelte Architekturstil dient als Vorlage, um vernetzte Architekturen mit Verfolgung der
entwickelten Designprinzipien nicht nur für die aktuellen Regelungssysteme, sondern auch für
selbstadaptiven cyber-physischen Systeme in der Zukunft zu konstruieren. Unterschiedliche
Auslösemechanismen und Kommunikationsparadigmen zur Gestaltung der dynamischen Verhalten
von Komponenten sind in der vernetzten Architektur anwendbar.
Zur Bewertung der Realisierbarkeit des Architekturstils werden aktuelle ACCs erneut aufgenommen,
um entsprechende logische Architekturen abzuleiten und die Architekturkonsistenz im Vergleich zu
den originalen Architekturen basierend auf der Regelungstheorie (z. B. in Form von Blockdiagrammen)
zu untersuchen. Durch die Anwendung des entwickelten generischen Architekturstils wird in dieser
Dissertation eine künstliche kognitive Geschwindigkeitsregelung (ACCC) als zukünftige ACC-Variante
entworfen, implementiert und evaluiert. Die Evaluationsergebnisse zeigen signifikante
Leistungsverbesserungen des ACCC im Vergleich zum menschlichen Fahrer und aktuellen ACC-Varianten.Current concepts of designing automatic control systems rely on dynamic behavioral
modeling by using mathematical approaches like differential equations to
derive corresponding functions, and slowly reach limitations due to increasing
system complexity. Along with the development of these concepts, an
architectural evolution of automatic control systems is raised.
This dissertation defines a taxonomy to illustrate the aforementioned architectural
evolution relying on a typical example of control application: adaptive cruise control
(ACC). Current ACC variants, with their architectures considering control theory, are
analyzed. The analysis results indicate that the future automatic control system in ACC
requires more substantial self-adaptation capability and scalability. For this purpose,
more complicated algorithms requiring different computation mechanisms must be
integrated into the system and further increase system complexity. This makes the future
automatic control system evolve into a self-adaptive cyber-physical system and
consistitutes significant challenges for the system’s architecture design.
Inspired by software engineering approaches for designing architectures of software-intensive systems, a generic architecture style is proposed. The proposed architecture
style serves as a template by following the developed design principle to construct
networked architectures not only for the current automatic control systems but also for
self-adaptive cyber-physical systems in the future. Different triggering mechanisms and
communication paradigms for designing dynamic behaviors are applicable in the
networked architecture.
To evaluate feasibility of the architecture style, current ACCs are retaken to derive
corresponding logical architectures and examine architectural consistency compared to
the previous architectures considering the control theory (e.g., in the form of block
diagrams). By applying the proposed generic architecture style, an artificial cognitive
cruise control (ACCC) is designed, implemented, and evaluated as a future ACC in this
dissertation. The evaluation results show significant performance improvements in the
ACCC compared to the human driver and current ACC variants
- …