Positionnement des systèmes multi-agents pour les systèmes de transport intelligents

National audienceThe use of new information and communication technologies has become a central solution to improve transport systems. What has led to which is called the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Societal challenges for ensuring their effective implementations are crucial both to respond to users needs, and to design sustainable transport systems. In this paper, we argue that multi-agent paradigm can address the needs of this domain. We introduce ITS, and we emphasize three main issues of ITS which are how to ensure its functionality, how to render it more "intelligent" despite constraints in scalability, and the ethical implications. Some selected research works are provided to illustrate these issuesL’utilisation des nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication pour l’amélioration des systèmes de transport est une solution devenue centrale dans le domaine du transport. Le résultat est ce que l’on appelle les systèmes de transport intelligents (STI). Les enjeux sociétaux de leur mise en œuvre sont cruciaux en termes de réponse aux besoins des usagers mais également pour la conception de systèmes de transports durables. Dans ce papier, nous défendons l’idée que le paradigme multi-agent peut répondre aux besoins de ce domaine. Nous proposons ainsi de présenter le domaine des STI et de focaliser notre attention sur trois problématiques : la manière d’assurer sa fonctionnalité, la manière de le rendre plus « intelligent » malgré des contraintes de passage à l’échelle, et enfin ses conséquences éthiques. Quelques travaux de recherche illustrent notre propos

DRLViz: Understanding Decisions and Memory in Deep Reinforcement Learning

We present DRLViz, a visual analytics interface to interpret the internal memory of an agent (e.g. a robot) trained using deep reinforcement learning. This memory is composed of large temporal vectors updated when the agent moves in an environment and is not trivial to understand due to the number of dimensions, dependencies to past vectors, spatial/temporal correlations, and co-correlation between dimensions. It is often referred to as a black box as only inputs (images) and outputs (actions) are intelligible for humans. Using DRLViz, experts are assisted to interpret decisions using memory reduction interactions, and to investigate the role of parts of the memory when errors have been made (e.g. wrong direction). We report on DRLViz applied in the context of video games simulators (ViZDoom) for a navigation scenario with item gathering tasks. We also report on experts evaluation using DRLViz, and applicability of DRLViz to other scenarios and navigation problems beyond simulation games, as well as its contribution to black box models interpretability and explainability in the field of visual analytics

Institutions and Development Processes: the Role of Strategic Complementarities. A Review of main Literature

This survey is an overview on the literature that investigates the relationship between the institutions and development processes. The attention it has been focus, in sequence, on the ways in which it has been performed the empirical and the theoretical analysis of the relationship between the economic development and the role of institutions. As it is clear the first difficulty is the definition of what an institution is, so the survey gives dig relevance to the different manners to conceptualize the notion of institution. Another difficulty arises from the perplexity about how the efficiency of the institutions can be evaluated. This problem is related to the necessity to close off in the right way the weight and the influence of the institutions respect to the other variables on the economic development. The analysis of the complementarities involved in the development processes, can be a useful way to explain some kinds of relationship between institutions and development processes especially in the short run. The use of more elaborated indices to measure the in�uence of institutions in the economic system and of the coentegration models can improve the reliability of the empirical analysis. In the same manner the supermodularity and the supermodular games can efficiently explain the mechanism of the strategic complementarity between di¤erent kinds of institution generating virtuous development processes from a theoretical point of view. Necessarily, in the future, both the analysis must be integrated but, for the time being, the state of art in the two approaches represent a very good starting point for new outcomes related to the investigation on these type of kind of economic phenomena.Institutions, Complementarities, Development Process

PIM : planning in manufacturing using skeletal plans and features

In order to create a production plan from product model data, a human expert thinks in a special terminology with respect to the given work piece and its production plan: He recognizes certain features and associates fragments of a production plan. By combining these skeletal plans he generates the complete production plan. We present a set of representation formalisms suitable for the modelling of this approach. When an expert\u27s knowledge has been represented using these formalisms, the generation of a production plan can be achieved by a sequence of abstraction, selection and refinement. This is demonstrated in the CAPP-system PIM, which is currently developed as a prototype. The close modelling of the knowledge of the concrete expert (or the accumulated know-how of a concrete factory) facilitate the development of planning systems which are especially tailored to the concrete manufacturing environment and optimally use the expert\u27s knowledge and should also lead to improved acceptance of the system

Investigating social conflicts linked to water resources trhough agent-based modelling

International audienceOver the next decades, natural resources and water resources in particular are likely to be one of the major origins of social conflicts. To date however, no model enables the study of coupled dynamics of hydrology, water use and social conflicts. Building such a model requires identifying the key concepts, entities and processes that are present in much field cases and have to be included into the model. The research presented in this paper takes place in a more general project named MAELIA for Multi-agent for Environmental Norms Impact Assessment. The purpose of MAELIA is to provide a decision-support model helping decision makers and stakeholders to manage water resources. This model aims to be generic enough for it to be applied in various field cases at different scales. We describe the actors involved in water management or water use using an agent-based approach. Water monitoring institutions and water users are described as agents in interaction within a stylised representation of a watershed basin. We propose a conceptual model that describes not only the hydrology in the basin and the water consumption behaviour of users, but also the representation of both the users at the institutional level and the power relationships that determine the arbitration of norms about water use. We propose two possible uses of this model. The first is the analysis of the impacts of several norms for detecting potential conflicts. The second possible use explores the local formulation of norms given the balance of powers in already settled social conflicts. This generic platform modelling conflicts on natural resources may thereby provide new insights into the analysis of well-known natural resource related conflicts, such as the Gauvery dispute in India

Innovative in silico approaches to address avian flu using grid technology

The recent years have seen the emergence of diseases which have spread very quickly all around the world either through human travels like SARS or animal migration like avian flu. Among the biggest challenges raised by infectious emerging diseases, one is related to the constant mutation of the viruses which turns them into continuously moving targets for drug and vaccine discovery. Another challenge is related to the early detection and surveillance of the diseases as new cases can appear just anywhere due to the globalization of exchanges and the circulation of people and animals around the earth, as recently demonstrated by the avian flu epidemics. For 3 years now, a collaboration of teams in Europe and Asia has been exploring some innovative in silico approaches to better tackle avian flu taking advantage of the very large computing resources available on international grid infrastructures. Grids were used to study the impact of mutations on the effectiveness of existing drugs against H5N1 and to find potentially new leads active on mutated strains. Grids allow also the integration of distributed data in a completely secured way. The paper presents how we are currently exploring how to integrate the existing data sources towards a global surveillance network for molecular epidemiology.Comment: 7 pages, submitted to Infectious Disorders - Drug Target