ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)最新文献

{"title":"Loosening Control—A Hybrid Approach to Controlling Heterogeneous Swarms","authors":"L. Esterle, David W. King","doi":"10.1145/3502725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3502725","url":null,"abstract":"Large pervasive systems, deployed in dynamic environments, require flexible control mechanisms to meet the demands of chaotic state changes while accomplishing system goals. As centralized control approaches may falter in environments where centralized communication and knowledge may be impossible to implement, researchers have proposed decentralized control methods that leverage agent-driven, self-organizing behaviors, to achieve reliable, flexible systems. This article presents and compares the performance of three decentralized control approaches in the online multi-object k-assignment problem. In this domain, a set of sensors is tasked to detect and track an unknown and changing set of targets. Results show that a proposed hybrid approach that incorporates supervisory devices within the population while allowing semi-autonomous operations in non-supervisory devices produces a flexible and reliable system capable of both high detection and coverage rates.","PeriodicalId":377078,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)","volume":"93 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130219781","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":"Dynamic Evaluation of Microservice Granularity Adaptation","authors":"S. Hassan, R. Bahsoon, Leandro L. Minku, Nour Ali","doi":"10.1145/3502724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3502724","url":null,"abstract":"Microservices have gained acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. Among the critical microservice architecture design decisions is when to adapt the granularity of a microservice architecture by merging/decomposing microservices. No existing work investigates the following question: How can we reason about the trade-off between predicted benefits and cost of pursuing microservice granularity adaptation under uncertainty? To address this question, we provide a novel formulation of the decision problem to pursue granularity adaptation as a real options problem. We propose a novel evaluation process for dynamically evaluating granularity adaptation design decisions under uncertainty. Our process is based on a novel combination of real options and the concept of Bayesian surprises. We show the benefits of our evaluation process by comparing it to four representative industrial microservice runtime monitoring tools, which can be used for retrospective evaluation for granularity adaptation decisions. Our comparison shows that our process can supersede and/or complement these tools. We implement a microservice application—Filmflix—using Amazon Web Service Lambda and use this implementation as a case study to show the unique benefit of our process compared to traditional application of real options analysis.","PeriodicalId":377078,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128185341","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":"Computing Contingent Plan Graphs using Online Planning","authors":"Shlomi Maliah, Radimir Komarnitski, Guy Shani","doi":"10.1145/3488903","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3488903","url":null,"abstract":"In contingent planning under partial observability with sensing actions, agents actively use sensing to discover meaningful facts about the world. Recent successful approaches translate the partially observable contingent problem into a non-deterministic fully observable problem, and then use a planner for non-deterministic planning. However, the translation may become very large, encumbering the task of the non-deterministic planner. We suggest a different approach—using an online contingent solver repeatedly to construct a plan tree. We execute the plan returned by the online solver until the next observation action, and then branch on the possible observed values, and replan for every branch independently. In many cases a plan tree can have an exponential width in the number of state variables, but the tree may have a structure that allows us to compactly represent it using a directed graph. We suggest a mechanism for tailoring such a graph that reduces both the computational effort and the storage space. Our method also handles non-deterministic domains, by identifying cycles in the plans. We present a set of experiments, showing our approach to scale better than state-of-the-art offline planners.","PeriodicalId":377078,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)","volume":"34 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114099983","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":"A Flexible Framework for Diverse Multi-Robot Task Allocation Scenarios Including Multi-Tasking","authors":"M. U. Arif, Sajjad Haider","doi":"10.1145/3502200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3502200","url":null,"abstract":"In a multi-robot operation, multi-tasking resources are expected to simultaneously perform multiple tasks, thus, reducing the overall time/energy requirement of the operation. This paper presents a task allocation framework named Rostam that efficiently utilizes multi-tasking capable robots. Rostam uses a task clustering mechanism to form robot specific task maps. The customized maps identify tasks that can be multi-tasked by individual robots and mark them for simultaneous execution. The framework then uses an Evolutionary Algorithm along with the customized maps to make quality task allocations. The most prominent contribution of this work is Rostam's flexible design which enables it to handle a range of task allocation scenarios seamlessly. Rostam's performance is evaluated against an auction-based scheme; the results demonstrate its effective use of multi-tasking robots. The paper also demonstrates Rostam's flexibility towards a number of MRTA scenarios through a case study.","PeriodicalId":377078,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)","volume":"242 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121812019","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":"Gist Trace-based Learning: Efficient Convention Emergence from Multilateral Interactions","authors":"Shuyue Hu, Chin-wing Leung, Ho-fung Leung, Jiamou Liu","doi":"10.1145/3502199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3502199","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of conventions has attracted much attention in the multi-agent system research. In this article, we study the emergence of conventions from repeated n-player coordination games. Distributed agents learn their policies independently and are capable of observing their neighbours in a network topology. We distinguish two types of information representation about the observations: gist trace and verbatim trace. We conjecture that learning based on the gist trace, which overlooks the details and focuses only on the general choice of action of a neighbourhood, should achieve efficient convention emergence. To this end, a novel learning method that makes use of the gist trace is proposed. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method establishes conventions much faster than the state-of-the-art learning methods across diverse settings of multi-agent systems. In particular, the use of gist trace derived at a low level of abstraction further improves the efficiency of convention emergence.","PeriodicalId":377078,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)","volume":"61 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115531184","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":"Information Reuse and Stochastic Search","authors":"Cody Kinneer, D. Garlan, Claire Le Goues","doi":"10.1145/3440119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3440119","url":null,"abstract":"Many software systems operate in environments of change and uncertainty. Techniques for self-adaptation allow these systems to automatically respond to environmental changes, yet they do not handle changes to the adaptive system itself, such as the addition or removal of adaptation tactics. Instead, changes in a self-adaptive system often require a human planner to redo an expensive planning process to allow the system to continue satisfying its quality requirements under different conditions; automated techniques must replan from scratch. We propose to address this problem by reusing prior planning knowledge to adapt to unexpected situations. We present a planner based on genetic programming that reuses existing plans and evaluate this planner on two case-study systems: a cloud-based web server and a team of autonomous aircraft. While reusing material in genetic algorithms has been recently applied successfully in the area of automated program repair, we find that naively reusing existing plans for self-* planning can actually result in a utility loss. Furthermore, we propose a series of techniques to lower the costs of reuse, allowing genetic techniques to leverage existing information to improve utility when replanning for unexpected changes, and we find that coarsely shaped search-spaces present profitable opportunities for reuse.","PeriodicalId":377078,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132337902","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":"REACT-ION: A Model-based Runtime Environment for Situation-aware Adaptations","authors":"Martin Pfannemüller, Martin Breitbach, Markus Weckesser, C. Becker, B. Schmerl, Andy Schürr, Christian Krupitzer","doi":"10.1145/3487919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3487919","url":null,"abstract":"Trends such as the Internet of Things lead to a growing number of networked devices and to a variety of communication systems. Adding self-adaptive capabilities to these communication systems is one approach to reducing administrative effort and coping with changing execution contexts. Existing frameworks can help reducing development effort but are neither tailored toward the use in communication systems nor easily usable without knowledge in self-adaptive systems development. Accordingly, in previous work, we proposed REACT, a reusable, model-based runtime environment to complement communication systems with adaptive behavior. REACT addresses heterogeneity and distribution aspects of such systems and reduces development effort. In this article, we propose REACT-ION—an extension of REACT for situation awareness. REACT-ION offers a context management module that is able to acquire, store, disseminate, and reason on context data. The context management module is the basis for (i) proactive adaptation with REACT-ION and (ii) self-improvement of the underlying feedback loop. REACT-ION can be used to optimize adaptation decisions at runtime based on the current situation. Therefore, it can cope with uncertainty and situations that were not foreseeable at design time. We show and evaluate in two case studies how REACT-ION’s situation awareness enables proactive adaptation and self-improvement.","PeriodicalId":377078,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)","volume":"186 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124714246","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":"Uncertainty in Self-adaptive Systems: A Research Community Perspective","authors":"Sara Mahdavi-Hezavehi, Danny Weyns, P. Avgeriou, R. Calinescu, R. Mirandola, Diego Perez-Palacin","doi":"10.1145/3487921","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3487921","url":null,"abstract":"One of the primary drivers for self-adaptation is ensuring that systems achieve their goals regardless of the uncertainties they face during operation. Nevertheless, the concept of uncertainty in self-adaptive systems is still insufficiently understood. Several taxonomies of uncertainty have been proposed, and a substantial body of work exists on methods to tame uncertainty. Yet, these taxonomies and methods do not fully convey the research community’s perception on what constitutes uncertainty in self-adaptive systems and on the key characteristics of the approaches needed to tackle uncertainty. To understand this perception and learn from it, we conducted a survey comprising two complementary stages in which we collected the views of 54 and 51 participants, respectively. In the first stage, we focused on current research and development, exploring how the concept of uncertainty is understood in the community and how uncertainty is currently handled in the engineering of self-adaptive systems. In the second stage, we focused on directions for future research to identify potential approaches to dealing with unanticipated changes and other open challenges in handling uncertainty in self-adaptive systems. The key findings of the first stage are: (a) an overview of uncertainty sources considered in self-adaptive systems, (b) an overview of existing methods used to tackle uncertainty in concrete applications, (c) insights into the impact of uncertainty on non-functional requirements, (d) insights into different opinions in the perception of uncertainty within the community and the need for standardised uncertainty-handling processes to facilitate uncertainty management in self-adaptive systems. The key findings of the second stage are: (a) the insight that over 70% of the participants believe that self-adaptive systems can be engineered to cope with unanticipated change, (b) a set of potential approaches for dealing with unanticipated change, (c) a set of open challenges in mitigating uncertainty in self-adaptive systems, in particular in those with safety-critical requirements. From these findings, we outline an initial reference process to manage uncertainty in self-adaptive systems. We anticipate that the insights on uncertainty obtained from the community and our proposed reference process will inspire valuable future research on self-adaptive systems.","PeriodicalId":377078,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)","volume":"19 2-6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116860095","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 Issue with Selected Papers of The International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS) 2020","authors":"Sven Tomforde, Timothy Wood, Jan-Philipp Steghöfer","doi":"10.1145/3492340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3492340","url":null,"abstract":"We are very happy to present extensions of five of the best papers included in the proceed-ings of the First IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS) 2020. While ACSOS 2020 may have been the first of its kind, it builds on the long-standing traditions of its predecessor conferences SASO (IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organising Systems) and ICAC (IEEE International Conference of Autonomic Computing).Eventhough the first edition of ACSOS fell into a pandemic year, the fully online conference was a great success thanks to the highly interactive format that combined a persistent chat in Slack with Zoom sessions and the hard and dedicated work of many volunteers from the community. We are very grateful for the strong engagement of the participants in these channels and for the many discussions and contributions. We could also lean on a very strong program with many excellent papers presented at the conference. The Program Co-Chairs Sven Tomforde and Timothy Wood not only presented a “Best Paper Award”, but also awarded the most impactful and interesting papers according to an audience poll. issue, reviewed conference ACSOS 2020 program committee. papers reviewers agreed about the quality and the substance of the extension for inclusion in the Special Issue.","PeriodicalId":377078,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134557655","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":"Behavioural Plasticity Can Help Evolving Agents in Dynamic Environments but at the Cost of Volatility","authors":"Chloe M. Barnes, A. Ekárt, K. Ellefsen, K. Glette, P. R. Lewis, J. Tørresen","doi":"10.1145/3487918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3487918","url":null,"abstract":"Neural networks have been widely used in agent learning architectures; however, learnings for one task might nullify learnings for another. Behavioural plasticity enables humans and animals alike to respond to environmental changes without degrading learned knowledge; this can be achieved by regulating behaviour with neuromodulation—a biological process found in the brain. We demonstrate that by modulating activity-propagating signals, neurally trained agents evolving to solve tasks in dynamic environments that are prone to change can expect a significantly higher fitness than non-modulatory agents and also achieve their goals more often. Further, we show that while behavioural plasticity can help agents to achieve goals in these variable environments, this ability to overcome environmental changes with greater success comes at the cost of highly volatile evolution.","PeriodicalId":377078,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132616956","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}