Milan Rollo

A -globe: Agent Development Platform with Inaccessibility and Mobility Support

At present several Java-based multi-agent platforms from different developers are available, but none of them fully supports agent mobility and communication inaccessibility simulation. They are thus unsuitable for experiments with large scale real-world simulation. In this chapter we describe architecture of A-globe, fast, scalable and lightweight agent development platform with environmental simulation and mobility support. Beside the functions common to most agent platforms it provides a position-based messaging service, so it can be used for experiments with extensive environment simulation and communication inaccessibility. Simple benchmarks that compare the A-globe performance against other available agent platforms are also included.

Communication security in multi-agent systems

Both, research and application development in the area of multi-agent systems currently undertakes rapid expansion. In order to use multi-agent technology in real applications, it is inevitable to ensure security, integrity and authenticity of inter-agent communication. Various securitysystems, developed for different applications have been used in multi-agent system (MAS). Alternatively, MAS are designed with respect to the specific communication security requirements. This paper describes the architecture and implementation of the security (X-Security) system, which implemets authentication and secure communication among agents. System uses certification authority (CA) and ensures full cooperation of secured agents and already existing (unsecured) agents. Principle of the system integration into already existing MAS is described here as well as possibility of its usage for mobile agents. Paper deals as well with security mechanisms activity during inaccessibility of CA and possibility of CAs recreation. Security system was designed according the FIPA standards.

A-Globe: Agent Platform with Inaccessibility and Mobility Support

At present several Java-based multi-agent platforms from different developers are available, but none of them fully supports agent mobility and communication inaccessibility. They are thus no suitable for experiments with real-world simulation. In this paper we describe architecture of newly developed agent platform A-GLOBE. It is fast and lightweight platform with agent mobility support. Beside the functions common to most of agent platforms it provides the Geographical Information System service to user, so it can be used for experiments with environment simulation and communication inaccessibility. A-GLOBE performance benchmarks compared against other agent platforms are also stated in this paper.

Wind Corrections in Flight Path Planning

Abstract When operating autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in real environments it is necessary to deal with the effects of wind that causes the aircraft to drift in a certain direction. In such conditions it is hard or even impossible for UAVs with a bounded turning rate to follow certain trajectories. We designed a method based on an Accelerated A* algorithm that allows the trajectory planner to take the wind effects into account and to generate states that are reachable by UAV. This method was tested on hardware UAV and the reachability of its generated trajectories was compared to the trajectories computed by the original Accelerated A*.

Mobility Model for Tactical Networks

In this paper a synthetic mobility model which represents behavior and movement pattern of heterogeneous units in disaster relief and battlefield scenarios is proposed. These operations usually take place in environment without preexisting communication infrastructure and units thus have to be connected by wireless communication network. Units cooperate to fulfill common tasks and communication network has to serve high amount of communication requests, especially data, voice and video stream transmissions. To verify features of topology control, routing and interaction protocols software simulations are usually used, because of their scalability, repeatability and speed. Behavior of all these protocols relies on the mobility model of the network nodes, which has to resemble real-life movement pattern. Proposed mobility model is goal-driven and provides support for various types of units, group mobility and realistic environment model with obstacles. Basic characteristics of the mobility model like node spatial distribution and average node degree were analyzed.

An abstract architecture for computational reflection in multi-agent systems

We propose a general framework for computational reflection in multi-agent systems and address some technical issues related to its implementation. Potentials of computational models of cognition and reflection in a multi-agent system are detailed, and using such models, an abstract architecture of a reflective agent is designed. We also propose important characteristics of reflective multi-agent systems build upon the presented architecture.

Reflective-Cognitive Architecture: From Abstract Concept to Self-Adapting Agent

This paper presents the general framework of the reflective-cognitive agent architecture. In our architecture we use modular approach to the reflection as we found it to be a promising way how to throw multi-agent systems together with the computing with limited resources, the programme code reusability and the automated code generation. The architecture is lightweight and it enables the agent to alter its own code in runtime using reflection according to the changes in the environment. At the end of the paper we present results of the architecture implementation showing the plausibility of the created prototype

Alarm Root Cause Detection System

Production process control becomes complicated as the complexity of the controlled process grows. To simplify the operator’s role many computer based control systems with integrated visualization clients have been developed. In many practical circumstances malfunction of one or more process components results in other related components entering the alarm states. Several alarms appear on the operator’s display in a short time making it difficult for the operator to diagnose the root cause quickly. Within this paper we describe a solution of this problem based on a multi-agent system that processes all incoming alarms, identifies the root cause alarms vs. alarms arising in consequence of the roots and presents the diagnostic results to the operator visually.

Simulation of underwater surveillance by a team of autonomous robots

Within this paper we describe a simulation environment for the underwater surveillance and propose architecture of control part of autonomous robot capable of efficient operation in such environment. Besides this the algorithms for decentralized coordination within a group of such robots and video stream transmission path planning are discussed. Development of these algorithms was necessary due to the nature of environment, where individual robots can become temporarily inaccessible.

Framework for incremental development of complex unmanned aircraft systems

In this paper we introduce a modular architecture for command & control (C2) of heterogeneous teams of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that allows for incremental development and verification of complex systems using a mixed-reality concept. This can simplify and speed up the process of deployment on new payloads or control and reasoning algorithms on hardware assets, as well as the process of increasing the number of UAVs in teams. The reason for this is that the proposed architecture allows for verifying only a subset of the hardware assets or deployed hardware devices at a time while the rest of them remain virtualized. The proposed architecture was implemented as C2 framework and used in flight tests for verification of collision avoidance algorithms on two fixed wing UAVs in real world experiments.