Towards a Theory for Bio - Cyber Physical Systems Modelling

International audienceCurrently, CyberPhysical Systems (CPS) represents a great challenge for automatic control and smart systems engineering on both theoretical and practical levels. Designing CPS requires approaches involving multidisciplinary competences. However they are designed to be autonomous, the CPS present a part of uncertainty, which requires interaction with human for engineering, monitoring, controlling, performing operational maintenance, etc. This human-CPS interaction led naturally to the human in-the-loop (HITL) concept. Nevertheless, this HITL concept , which stems from a reductionist point of view, exhibits limitations due to the different natures of the systems involved. As opposed to this classical approach, we propose, in this paper, a model of Bio-CPS (i.e. systems based on an integration of computational elements within biological systems) grounded on theoretical biology, physics and computer sciences and based on the key concept of human systems integration

Mechanisms for environments in multi-agent systems: Survey and opportunities

The environment has been recognized as an explicit and exploitable element to design multi-agent systems (MAS). It can be assigned a number of responsibilities that would be more difficult to design with the sole notion of agents. To support the engineering of these responsibilities, we identify a set of mechanisms that offer solutions to software designers. We describe the mechanisms, their usage in representative projects, and potential opportunities for further research and applications. The purpose of this article is to clarify the notion of environment in terms of mechanisms, from their abstract description to their practical exploitation. Mechanisms are expected to provide agent-based software designers with a set of design elements to build MAS that take advantage of the environment

Dynamic Scheduling of Steel Casting and Milling using Multi-agents

NoThis paper presents a case study on the use of multi-agents for integrated dynamic scheduling of steel milling and casting. Steel production is an extremely complex problem requiring the consideration of several different constraints and objectives of a range of processes in a dynamic environment. Most research in steel production scheduling considers static scheduling of processes in isolation. In contrast to earlier approaches, the multi-agent architecture proposed consists of a set of heterogeneous agents which integrate and optimize a range of scheduling objectives related to different processes of steel production, and can adapt to changes in the environment while still achieving overall system goals. Each agent embodies its own scheduling model and realizes its local predictive-reactive schedule taking into account local objectives, real-time information and information received from other agents. Agents cooperate in order to find a globally good schedule, which is able to effectively react to real-time disruptions, and to optimize the original production goals whilst minimising disruption carried by unexpected events occurring in real-time. The inter-agent cooperation is based on the Contract Net Protocol with commitmen