Special Issue: Agents and Robots for Reliable Engineered Autonomy

From MDPI via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: accepted 2021-07-06, pub-electronic 2021-07-13Publication status: PublishedThe study of autonomous agents is a well-established area that has been researched for decades, both from a design and implementation viewpoint [...

A Scalable Runtime Platform for Multiagent-Based Simulation

Abstract. Using purely agent-based platforms for any kind of simulation requires to address the following challenges: (1) scalability (efficient scheduling of agent cycles is difficult), (2) efficient memory management (when and which data should be fetched, cached, or written to/from disk), and (3) modelling (no generally accepted meta-models exist: what are essential concepts, what just implementation details?). While dedicated professional simulation tools usually provide rich domain libraries and advanced visualisation techniques, and support the simulation of large scenarios, they do not allow for "agentization" of single components. We are trying to bridge this gap by developing a distributed, scalable runtime platform for multiagent simulation, MASeRaTi, addressing the three problems mentioned above. It allows to plug-in both dedicated simulation tools (for the macro view ) as well as the agentization of certain components of the system (to allow a micro view ). If no agent-related features are used, its performance should be as close as possible to the legacy system used

Agents and Robots for Reliable Engineered Autonomy:A Perspective from the Organisers of AREA 2020

From MDPI via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: accepted 2021-05-13, pub-electronic 2021-05-14Publication status: PublishedFunder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; Grant(s): EP/R026092, EP/R026173, EP/R026084, 694277Multi-agent systems, robotics and software engineering are large and active research areas with many applications in academia and industry. The First Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA), organised the first time in 2020, aims at encouraging cross-disciplinary collaborations and exchange of ideas among researchers working in these research areas. This paper presents a perspective of the organisers that aims at highlighting the latest research trends, future directions, challenges, and open problems. It also includes feedback from the discussions held during the AREA workshop. The goal of this perspective is to provide a high-level view of current research trends for researchers that aim at working in the intersection of these research areas

Automatic Deployment of Embedded Real-time Software Systems to Hypervisor-managed Platforms

The deterministic integration of concurrent func- tions on shared multicore platforms is a challenging yet important task. Especially in safety-critical environments, hypervisors can be used to achieve time and space partitioning, but their sole application is often insufficient to guarantee deterministic timing and data flow behavior. Considering the growing complexity of modern embedded systems, for example in terms of functionality and mixed-criticality requirements, model-based approaches are a promising starting point to tackle this issue. In this work, we bridge the gap between a model-based behavior specification methodology based on the Logical Execution Time (LET) concept and target platforms running a commercially available bare- metal hypervisor. Therefore, this paper describes a runtime environment that implements LET semantics at the level of hypervisor partitions and a tool-supported design methodology that deploys software to this runtime environment. From a be- havior specification provided as a system model with annotated C code, the presented deployment tool generates binary images with guaranteed timing and data-flow behavior for the XtratuM hypervisor. The approach is finally validated by applying it to a Flight Assistance System (FAS) from the avionics domain