11,455 research outputs found
Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study
Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software
industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more
reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated
by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving
value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research
still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the
principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper,
we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views,
approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to
microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the
transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and
technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical
activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then
shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice
granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This
study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about
microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered,
guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This
study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to
reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table
Catching Cheats: Detecting Strategic Manipulation in Distributed Optimisation of Electric Vehicle Aggregators
Given the rapid rise of electric vehicles (EVs) worldwide, and the ambitious
targets set for the near future, the management of large EV fleets must be seen
as a priority. Specifically, we study a scenario where EV charging is managed
through self-interested EV aggregators who compete in the day-ahead market in
order to purchase the electricity needed to meet their clients' requirements.
With the aim of reducing electricity costs and lowering the impact on
electricity markets, a centralised bidding coordination framework has been
proposed in the literature employing a coordinator. In order to improve privacy
and limit the need for the coordinator, we propose a reformulation of the
coordination framework as a decentralised algorithm, employing the Alternating
Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). However, given the self-interested
nature of the aggregators, they can deviate from the algorithm in order to
reduce their energy costs. Hence, we study the strategic manipulation of the
ADMM algorithm and, in doing so, describe and analyse different possible attack
vectors and propose a mathematical framework to quantify and detect
manipulation. Importantly, this detection framework is not limited the
considered EV scenario and can be applied to general ADMM algorithms. Finally,
we test the proposed decentralised coordination and manipulation detection
algorithms in realistic scenarios using real market and driver data from Spain.
Our empirical results show that the decentralised algorithm's convergence to
the optimal solution can be effectively disrupted by manipulative attacks
achieving convergence to a different non-optimal solution which benefits the
attacker. With respect to the detection algorithm, results indicate that it
achieves very high accuracies and significantly outperforms a naive benchmark
Intelligent Agents for Disaster Management
ALADDIN [1] is a multi-disciplinary project that is developing novel techniques, architectures, and mechanisms for multi-agent systems in uncertain and dynamic environments. The application focus of the project is disaster management. Research within a number of themes is being pursued and this is considering different aspects of the interaction between autonomous agents and the decentralised system architectures that support those interactions. The aim of the research is to contribute to building more robust multi-agent systems for future applications in disaster management and other similar domains
New Shop Floor Control Approaches for Virtual Enterprises
The virtual enterprise paradigm seems a fit response to face market instability and the volatile nature of business opportunities increasing enterpriseâs interest in similar forms of networked organisations. The dynamic environment of a virtual enterprise requires that partners in the consortium own reconfigurable shop floors. This paper presents new approaches to shop floor control that meet the requirements of the new industrial paradigms and argues on work re-organization at shop floor level.virtual enterprise; networked organisations
The imperfect hiding : some introductory concepts and preliminary issues on modularity
In this work we present a critical assessment of some problems and open questions on the debated notion of modularity. Modularity is greatly in fashion nowadays, being often proposed as the new approach to complex artefact production that enables to combine fast innovation pace, enhanced product variety and reduced need for co-ordination. In line with recent critical assessments of the managerial literature on modularity, we sustain that modularity is only one among several arrangements to cope with the complexity inherent in most high-technology artefact production, and by no means the best one. We first discuss relations between modularity and the broader (and much older within economics) notion of division of labour. Then we sustain that a modular approach to labour division aimed at eliminating technological interdependencies between components or phases of a complex production process may have, as a by-product, the creation of other types of interdependencies which may subsequently result in inefficiencies of various types. Hence, the choice of a modular design strategy implies the resolution of various tradeoffs. Depending on how such tradeoffs are solved, different organisational arrangements may be created to cope with âresidualâ interdependencies. Hence, there is no need to postulate a perfect isomorphism, as some recent literature has proposed, between modularity at the product level and modularity at the organisational level
ADACOR: a holonic architecture for agile and adaptive manufacturing control
In the last decades significant changes in the manufacturing environment have been noticed: moving from a local economy towards a global economy, with markets asking for products with higher quality at lower costs, highly customised and with short life cycle. In these circumstances, the challenge is to develop manufacturing control systems with intelligence capabilities, fast adaptation to the environment changes and more robustness against the occurrence of disturbances. This paper presents an agile and adaptive manufacturing control architecture that addresses the need for the fast reaction to disturbances at the shop floor level, increasing the agility and flexibility of the enterprise, when it works in volatile environments. The proposed architecture introduces an adaptive control that balances dynamically between a more centralised structure and a more decentralised one, allowing combining the global production optimisation with agile reaction to unexpected disturbances
A generic holonic control architecture for heterogeneous multi-scale and multi-objective smart microgrids
Designing the control infrastructure of future âsmartâ power grids is a challenging task. Future grids will integrate a wide variety of heterogeneous producers and consumers that are unpredictable and operate at various scales. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions will have to control these in order to attain global objectives at the macrolevel, while also considering private interests at the microlevel. This article proposes a generic holonic architecture to help the development of ICT control systems that meet these requirements. We show how this architecture can integrate heterogeneous control designs, including state-of-the-art smart grid solutions. To illustrate the applicability and utility of this generic architecture, we exemplify its use via a concrete proof-of-concept implementation for a holonic controller, which integrates two types of control solutions and manages a multiscale, multiobjective grid simulator in several scenarios. We believe that the proposed contribution is essential for helping to understand, to reason about, and to develop the âsmartâ side of future power grids
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