Monica Dragoicea

Integrating HLA and Service-Oriented Architecture in a Simulation Framework

The High-Level Architecture (HLA) is the de-facto standard in simulation interoperability. This paper presents a possible way for HLA to integrate with a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in the context of a smart building project. The paper discusses the design of an HLA federate for the inclusion of a service oriented smart building controller in the simulation loop.

Emergent intelligence in agents: A scalable architecture for smart cities

The Smart City concept is the context in which a scalable agent architecture with emergent properties is introduced in this paper. These agents form on-demand control loops within the urban system, taking into account both the protection and the comfort of its inhabitants, at varying degrees of intelligence and abstraction of tasks and/or purpose. The resulting flexibility and scalability of the system allows expansion and contraction of the systemic environments, integration with emergency response units, protection of human lives, as well as day to day regular operations. The case study included in this paper illustrates the real-time creation of a control loop for an underground railway intersection system. The objective of forming the traffic light and rail switch control loops is first formulated, followed by the message exchange between devices in order to perform the reorganization of the system, in an agent based simulation scenario.

A Service Science Knowledge Environment in the Cloud

This paper presents the prototype of a knowledge sharing environment dedicated to Service Science development and dissemination. This proposed concept model of the Service Science Knowledge Environment (SS–KE) can be developed on three directions, i.e. research, education and business alliances. The paper emphasize the way in which value co-creation can profit from semantic-driven social software, taking into consideration the case of educational services delivered in the cloud. It approaches conception and development of an open, collaborative, interactive environment to gather around universities, industry, governmental agencies and European institutions in order to foster service innovation by means of a) information, b) proves and c) technological transfer of the research results aiming to develop sustainable service systems solutions. In this respect, a specification proposal for a collaborative service process based on co-creation of value between educational service providers and consumers is presented. As current ICT state-of-the-art allows to create new services and business services connected to the traditional manufacturing and business domains, the paper presents a perspective on manufacturing servitization processes. In the Internet of Services (IoS) perspective, the proposed approach delivers a vision on using cloud to help research and education to become global by improving front-end applications for educational services, such that technology would encourage individual learning, make learning global at the same time and enable global collaboration both in education and research.

Real time agent based simulation for smart city emergency protocols

This work proposes a holistic perspective on a coordination strategy for an Intelligent Operation Centre (IOC) at city level that accounts for the implementation of critical intervention protocols. The proposed solution depicts an agent based simulation scenario, demonstrating the real-time integration of large amounts of data into a decision making process. Based on this type of analysis, leaders have the possibility to analyze data for better decisions, anticipate problems to resolve them proactively and coordinate resources to operate effectively. The proposed agent-based coordination solution is validated through an Agent-Based oriented simulation (ABS) of specific behavioural scenarios. These scenarios account for emergency response in case of city wide critical situations in a larger perspective of a scalable multi-agent system whose main task is human life protection.

Service interactions modeling for improved management of public transport systems

This paper shows how service science principles may be used for engineering and realizing improved public transport services. It approaches a value co-creation perspective for the management of public transport service operations based on an activity-based model of a generic service system that allows capturing requirements for software intensive service systems. The main focus is on specific implementation issues of the activity-based model of the generic service system, with a strong accent on its most representative component, the service set-up and configuring unit. This model is applied in a case study for planning of a public transport service and describes how a specific service reconfiguring request is formulated. This examination is further used as a document of requirements that drives the construction of an agent-based model expressing value-creation interactions among service system’s stakeholders in public transport services. The usefulness of the developed agent-based model for the analysis of service systems operational capabilities is suggested through simulation. A business scenario related to the management of public transport services is described, and the defined agent-based model is executed with the Presage2 multi-agent programming platform in order to capture specific issues of piece-of-work planning. The proposed approach, evaluated on the simple working scenario, fosters the role of service interaction modeling in supporting a public transport service system to dynamically adapt its operational capabilities in delivering good public transport services, as more or less quantifiable changes can affect service delivery over time.

Mobile Robots Adaptive Control Using Neural Networks

The paper proposes a feed-forward control strategy for mobile robot control that accounts for a non-linear model of the vehicle with interaction between inputs and outputs. It is possible to include specific model uncertainties in the dynamic model of the mobile robot in order to see how the control problem should be addressed taking into consideration the complete dynamic mobile robot model. By means of a neural network feed-forward controller a real non-linear mathematical model of the vehicle can be taken into consideration. The classical velocity control strategy can be extended using artificial neural networks in order to compensate for the modelling uncertainties. It is possible to develop an intelligent strategy for mobile robot control.

Adaptive Predictive Control Based on Neural Networks

Abstract Predictive techniques based on neural networks are investigated in an adaptive structure for on-line control of a process exhibiting nonlinearities and typical disturbances. The method proposed consists of a novel identification technique based on extended memory adaptation (BMA) and an efficient implementation of the predictive control based on a nonlinear programming method. A forced circulation evaporator was chosen as a realistic nonlinear case study for the techniques discussed in the paper.

From Data to Service Intelligence: Exploring Public Safety as a Service

This paper describes an exploration process aligned with the core domain of Service Science inside a critical sector of Society, aiming at developing City in a sustainable, responsible, inclusive way. The paper focuses on defining the Public Safety as a Service concept in an inclusive and responsible value co-creation urban design vision for liveable cities. It explains how service intelligence can act on immaterial artefacts to transform data into information to generate value co-creation processes whose outcomes are applied to the evolution of knowledge in public safety services. Public safety is approached within a service ecosystem perspective, following the global targets of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction as an application perspective. Managerial implication are approached from two perspectives: establishment of governance principles with the help of Elinor Ostrom’s works, and a Viable Systems Approach on the response to disasters operating rules.

Diversity and Intelligence in Multi-robot Teams

This research proposes new tools for investigation of behavioral diversity in multi-robot systems and a significant body of results using these tools in simulated and real mobile robot experiments. The experiments specifically describe a framework of defining behavior-based strategies for multi-robot tasks as robot foraging, robot soccer and robot formation. The research focuses specifically on motor schema-based multi-robot systems, which are an important example of behavior-based control.

Adaptive Neural Control for Mobile Robots Autonomous Navigation

This paper presents a combined strategy for tracking a non-holonomic mobile robot which works under certain operating conditions for system parameters and disturbances. The strategy includes kinematic steering and velocity dynamics learning of mobile robot system simultaneously. In the learning controller (neural network based controller) the velocity dynamics learning control takes part in tracking of the reference velocity trajectory by learning the inverse function of robot dynamics while the reference velocity control input plays a role in stabilizing the kinematic steering system to the desired reference model of kinematic system even without using the assumption of perfect velocity tracking.