P. Tichý, Vladimir Marik, Pavel Vrba, Filip Macurek, P. Šlechta, R. Staron, F. Maturana, K. Hall
{"title":"Deployment of Agent Technologies in Industrial Applications","authors":"P. Tichý, Vladimir Marik, Pavel Vrba, Filip Macurek, P. Šlechta, R. Staron, F. Maturana, K. Hall","doi":"10.1109/DIS.2006.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/DIS.2006.22","url":null,"abstract":"This paper summarizes lessons learned from real-life deployment of multi-agent systems developed by Rockwell Automation in the area of industrial applications. We mainly focus on fault tolerance, scalability, and reconfiguration aspects in both the design and runtime parts of the system life cycle. We also describe the tools that were essential for testing and debugging the entire distributed system","PeriodicalId":318812,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems: Collective Intelligence and Its Applications (DIS'06)","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121219670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
L. Barnes, W. Alvis, M. Fields, K. Valavanis, W. Moreno
{"title":"Heterogeneous Swarm Formation Control Using Bivariate Normal Functions to Generate Potential Fields","authors":"L. Barnes, W. Alvis, M. Fields, K. Valavanis, W. Moreno","doi":"10.1109/DIS.2006.33","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/DIS.2006.33","url":null,"abstract":"A novel method is presented for dynamic heterogeneous swarm formation control with potential fields generated from bivariate normal probability density functions (pdfs) used to construct the surface which swarm members move on, controlling swarm geometry, individual member spacing, and managing obstacle avoidance. Limiting functions are defined to provide tighter swarm control by modifying and adjusting a set of control variables forcing the swarm to behave according to set constraints. Bivariate normal functions and limiting functions are combined to guarantee obstacle avoidance and control swarm member orientation and swarm movement as a whole. This approach compared to others, is simple, computationally efficient, scales well to different swarm sizes, to heterogeneous systems, and to both centralized and decentralized swarm models. The method is applied to a simple vehicle model and simulation results are presented for a heterogeneous swarm of ten robot vehicles following line and ellipse formations","PeriodicalId":318812,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems: Collective Intelligence and Its Applications (DIS'06)","volume":"105 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124719603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
G. Grabmair, R. Froschauer, T. Strasser, Alois Zoitl
{"title":"Modelling Execution Order and Real-time Constraints in IEC 61499 Control Applications","authors":"G. Grabmair, R. Froschauer, T. Strasser, Alois Zoitl","doi":"10.1109/DIS.2006.51","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/DIS.2006.51","url":null,"abstract":"The complexity of automation and control systems is fast increasing in order to satisfy the arising needs of the manufacturing industry. The central exigencies for new production facilities are flexibility, adaptability and reconfigurability in combination with guarantees for downtime less operation. Additionally modern automation systems are supposed to execute control applications distributed across heterogeneous networks. The standard IEC 61499 introduces a function block oriented architecture which should be able to satisfy most of these new requirements. Still some of the open issues within the standards definition are the consideration of real-time constrained applications, the missing possibilities and conventions to define an explicit execution order and the absence of an appropriate modelling technique for real-time constraint specification. Therefore the main topic of this paper discusses investigations on possibilities to define execution order and real-time constraints in IEC 61499","PeriodicalId":318812,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems: Collective Intelligence and Its Applications (DIS'06)","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125761958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Roman Froschauer, F. Auinger, G. Grabmair, Thomas Strasser
{"title":"Automatic control application recovery in distributed IEC 61499 based automation and control systems","authors":"Roman Froschauer, F. Auinger, G. Grabmair, Thomas Strasser","doi":"10.1109/DIS.2006.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/DIS.2006.14","url":null,"abstract":"Modern industrial automation systems are supposed to execute applications distributed across heterogeneous networks. Additionally the market has raised a demand for downtime less operation and change of automation and control for such systems. Consequently appropriate concepts for recovering and reconfiguring devices during full operation are needed. The open standard IEC 61499 provides a scalable architecture to model applications for such distributed control systems. It supports interoperability, configurability and portability of control applications and therefore delivers the basis for online-configuration and recovery of heterogeneous systems. The main goal of this paper is to present a concept for autonomous recovery of applications within the context of distributed systems. The proposed concept facilitates the exchange of devices without any need for extra configuration. It supports an automatic recognition of new components in a distributed automation & control system and an automated up & download of control applications, user data and configuration data. The introduced approach is tested using an Ethernet-interconnected distributed demonstration system, consisting of standard personal computers with a running IEC 61499 function block development kit","PeriodicalId":318812,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems: Collective Intelligence and Its Applications (DIS'06)","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126909708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Posing Some Design Questions for Crafting Agent Simulat","authors":"M. Fletcher, P. Vrba","doi":"10.1109/DIS.2006.59","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/DIS.2006.59","url":null,"abstract":"Today there is a proliferation of research into systems based on the autonomous agent, multi-agent and holonic paradigms. These systems are being applied to environments including manufacturing, logistics, defense, and supply chain management to increase the flexibility, realism, openness and mass-customization of real-world decentralized operations. It is now well recognized that prior to deploying agents into any physical environment where machines or any form of hardware is controlled by the agents, a key step in verifying the functionality and reliability of the agent-based control system must take place, namely simulation of the agents' actions and their interactions. However, there is very little formal basis or methodological practice for creating a robust simulation of the distributed agent-based control system that would be used in a physical setting. This paper takes an initial step in trying to identify a set of design questions that must be answered by the agent system developer as part of the instantiation of the agents in the simulation","PeriodicalId":318812,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems: Collective Intelligence and Its Applications (DIS'06)","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123811827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"LS/ATN: Reporting on a Successful Agent-Based Solution for Transport Logistics Optimization","authors":"N. Neagu, K. Dorer, D. Greenwood, M. Calisti","doi":"10.1109/DIS.2006.46","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/DIS.2006.46","url":null,"abstract":"A considerable volume of research exists concerning the domain of automatic planning and scheduling, hut many real-world scheduling problems, and especially that of transportation logistics, remain difficult to solve. In particular, this domain demands schedule-solving for every vehicle in a transportation fleet where pick-up and delivery of customer orders is distributed across multiple geographic locations, while satisfying time-window constraints on pickup and delivery per location. This paper presents a successful commercial-grade solution to this problem called living systems adaptive transportation networks (LS/ATN), which has been proven through real-world deployment to reduce transportation costs through the optimization of route solving for both small and large fleets. LS/ATN is a novel agent-based resource management and decision system designed to address this highly dynamic and complex domain in commercial settings. We show how LS/ATN employs agent cooperation algorithms to derive truck schedules that optimize the use of available resources leading to significant cost savings. The solution is designed to support, rather than replace, the day-to-day activities of human dispatchers","PeriodicalId":318812,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems: Collective Intelligence and Its Applications (DIS'06)","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121943013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to the Special Session on Autonomic and Situation-Aware Communication Services","authors":"F. Bellifemine","doi":"10.1109/DIS.2006.42","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/DIS.2006.42","url":null,"abstract":"The pervasive and ubiquitous computing discipline envisions the instrumentation of the physical world: our every-day life environments and physical objects are expected to be pervaded by computing and communicating resources and applications. However, composing, orchestrating, and, in general, exploiting such a large scale, heterogeneous, distributed variety of resources in order to provide meaningful, useful, and usable services might require high integration, configuration, and management costs. If not properly addressed, these costs and complexities might become the main obstacle for technology adoption.","PeriodicalId":318812,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems: Collective Intelligence and Its Applications (DIS'06)","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127133624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
T. Pirttioja, A. Halme, A. Pakonen, I. Seilonen, K. Koskinen
{"title":"Multi-Agent System Enhanced Supervision of Process Automation","authors":"T. Pirttioja, A. Halme, A. Pakonen, I. Seilonen, K. Koskinen","doi":"10.1109/DIS.2006.53","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/DIS.2006.53","url":null,"abstract":"This paper studies issues concerning the application of user configurable cooperative information agents for monitoring tasks in process automation. Within this application area the amount of information gathered from the processes has been growing vastly and the supervising personnel has been minimized in the production plants. As this trend seems to keep going further, the end users need more effective information handling tools. However, the information overflow problem has also shown up in other application domains, and it is useful to discuss the similarities and differences with solutions used in these areas. This paper proposes an agent-based architecture to support active monitoring of the changes in process related data situated in various heterogeneous information sources. This approach is based on a BDI agent model, where individual user-configurable information processing modules are flexibly linked. The approach is demonstrated with an industrially inspired test scenario","PeriodicalId":318812,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems: Collective Intelligence and Its Applications (DIS'06)","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126634901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Agent-based coalition formation in disaster response applications","authors":"Ladislau Bölöni, M. Khan, D. Turgut","doi":"10.1109/DIS.2006.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/DIS.2006.8","url":null,"abstract":"We present an agent-based coalition formation approach for disaster response applications. We assume that agents are operating in a dynamic and dangerous environment, and they need to form convoys to efficiently traverse unsafe areas and rendezvous at task locations. We assume a dynamic model of multilevel coalition formation where agents can dynamically join and leave the convoy, and the goals of the convoy (as reflected in its physical path and schedule) is determined by its current members. We demonstrate our approach in a simulation study located in the environment of New Orleans in the hurricane Katrina aftermath","PeriodicalId":318812,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems: Collective Intelligence and Its Applications (DIS'06)","volume":"65 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115236043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Order-Disorder Oscillations in the Populations of Faulty Repulsive Agents","authors":"J. Collet","doi":"10.1109/DIS.2006.56","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/DIS.2006.56","url":null,"abstract":"We study the temporal evolution of populations including thousands of mobile repulsive agents. In the first part, the agents follow the rules of a deterministic automaton. We show that, the population may evolve toward different types of high-symmetry steady distributions, depending on the agent-agent repulsion law, and on the presence (or absence) of borders around the playground. We observe the formation of hexagonal-condensed lattices that maximize the potential function of the agent distribution. In the second part, agents are faulty. They violate the repulsion law and follow the rule of a non-deterministic automaton. We observe fast and random oscillations between the ordered phase and a strongly disorganized state when the number of agents is small (say for population involving a few tens of agents). These oscillations are essentially averaged and disappear in the large populations, resulting in a partially-ordered homogeneous distribution","PeriodicalId":318812,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems: Collective Intelligence and Its Applications (DIS'06)","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115359221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}