A dynamic case-based planning system for space station application

We are currently investigating the use of a case-based reasoning approach to develop a dynamic planning system. The dynamic planning system (DPS) is designed to perform resource management, i.e., to efficiently schedule tasks both with and without failed components. This approach deviates from related work on scheduling and on planning in AI in several aspects. In particular, an attempt is made to equip the planner with an ability to cope with a changing environment by dynamic replanning, to handle resource constraints and feedback, and to achieve some robustness and autonomy through plan learning by dynamic memory techniques. We briefly describe the proposed architecture of DPS and its four major components: the PLANNER, the plan EXECUTOR, the dynamic REPLANNER, and the plan EVALUATOR. The planner, which is implemented in Smalltalk, is being evaluated for use in connection with the Space Station Mobile Service System (MSS)

Event-B Patterns for Specifying Fault-Tolerance in Multi-Agent Interaction

Interaction in a multi-agent system is susceptible to failure. A rigorous development of a multi-agent system must include the treatment of fault-tolerance of agent interactions for the agents to be able to continue to function independently. Patterns can be used to capture fault-tolerance techniques. A set of modelling patterns is presented that specify fault-tolerance in Event-B specifications of multi-agent interactions. The purpose of these patterns is to capture common modelling structures for distributed agent interaction in a form that is re-usable on other related developments. The patterns have been applied to a case study of the contract net interaction protocol

Dynamic application loading and unloading on Pocket PCs

A problem small with devices, such as the iPAQ Pocket PC, is that their small amounts of memory limits the number of applications that can be stored on them. A simple solution to this problem is to have applications load when needed and then unload when not in use. In this paper, we describe how to repackage Eclipse's OSGi plug-ins with some custom software to provide a dynamic application loader and unloader for the iPAQ Pocket PC

JSF performance

JavaServer Faces is a new technology that helps developers build web applications using Java. With every new technology comes a concern about performance. We wanted to know what type of performance one can expect from an open source web application consisting of Tomcat, Hibernate, MySQL and JSF. We describe a minimal web application and evaluate its transaction rate. Our goal is determine expected transaction times by minimizing network latency and behavioral processing, so that we can identify a best case scenario and a best case transaction rate

A distributed algorithm as mobile agents

We present a technique for mapping a distributed algorithm to a set of homogeneous mobile agents that solves the distributed control problem known as election. Our solution is as efficient as the corresponding distributed algorithm, but does not rely on message passing between custom protocols located on communicating nodes. Rather, the proposed solution relies on mobile agents. We also present an environment model that supports not only the mapping to election agents but other agent-based solutions to distributed control problems based on distributed algorithms