Towards Real-Time Crowd Simulation Under Uncertainty Using an Agent-Based Model and an Unscented Kalman Filter

Agent-based modelling (ABM) is ideally suited to simulating crowds of people as it captures the complex behaviours and interactions between individuals that lead to the emergence of crowding. Currently, it is not possible to use ABM for real-time simulation due to the absence of established mechanisms for dynamically incorporating real-time data. This means that, although models are able to perform useful offline crowd simulations, they are unable to simulate the behaviours of crowds in real time. This paper begins to address this drawback by demonstrating how a data assimilation algorithm, the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF), can be used to incorporate pseudo-real data into an agent-based model at run time. Experiments are conducted to test how well the algorithm works when a proportion of agents are tracked directly under varying levels of uncertainty. Notably, the experiments show that the behaviour of unobserved agents can be inferred from the behaviours of those that are observed. This has implications for modelling real crowds where full knowledge of all individuals will never be known. In presenting a new approach for creating real-time simulations of crowds, this paper has important implications for the management of various environments in global cities, from single buildings to larger structures such as transportation hubs, sports stadiums, through to entire city regions

Orchestrating the Cognitive Internet of Things

The introduction of pervasive and ubiquitous instrumentation within Internet of Things (IoT) leads to unprecedented real-time visibility of the power grid, traffic, transportation, water, oil & gas. Interconnecting those distinct physical, people, and business worlds through ubiquitous instrumentation, even though still in its embryonic stage, has the potential to create intelligent IoT solutions that are much greener, more efficient, comfortable, and safer. An essential new direction to materialize this potential is to develop comprehensive models of such systems dynamically interacting with the instrumentation in a feed-back control loop. We describe here opportunities in applying cognitive computing on interconnected and instrumented worlds (CIoT) and call out the system-of-systems trend on interconnecting these distinct but interdependent worlds, and methods for advanced understanding, analysis, and real-time decision support capabilities with the accuracy of full-scale model

Textual Alignment in SPMD Programs

We provide a formal definition of textual alignment of collective operations in a simple imperative language extended with minimal spmd constructs. The definition relies on a instrumented operational semantics in which we record suitable informations about the execution flow.We prove that this property entails proper the absence of deadlocks and we claim that it provides an intuitiveprogramming model

Green Symbiotic Cloud Communications

Cloud computing, a TCP/IP based development, is essentially an integration of computer technologies such as HPC, massive memory resource handling, high-speed networks and reliable system architecture. A unified definition of cloud computing doesn’t exist with researchers and industrialists globally having listed up to 22 definitions to provide a comprehensive analysis of all the characteristics of Cloud Computing. However Cloud Computing mainly entails as a service that is outsourced, and does not symbolically represent a cloud as we observe in Nature. Classified exhaustively, clouds fit into the following categories—public, private, community and hybrid—however, without much exclusivity. This chapter views the emblem of cloud computing from a different perspective by emulating the geographical cloud as it appears in nature with properties of abstraction and virtualization. The chapter further introduces a first of its kind concept of Cloud Communications. To the best of our knowledge this is an archetype approach of incorporating the communications infrastructure into the cloud. The chapter proposes a Green Symbiotic Cloud (GSC) paradigm, which is an amalgamation of all sorts of clouds, with the elimination/minimization of reliance on data-centers, agent-based cooperative approaches and self-managed platforms inherent to systems of the future. Backed by concepts of abstraction and virtualized infrastructure and shared resource pools in one’s own local area network, the proposed paradigm offers impetus to revolutionize cloud computing. Taking virtualization to an entirely new level by offering a more local, energy-efficient, synergistic system comprised of individual agents sharing not just resources but knowledge/intelligence in the cloud, it basically emulates the cloud as it appears in nature