Month: May 2019

SISSY 2019 Papers accepted

~ Lukas Esterle ~ Leave a comment

Both papers submitted to the Workshop on Self-Improving System Integration (SISSY) have been accepted for publication.

The first paper, entitled “CHARIOT – Towards a Continuous High-level Adaptive Runtime Integration Testbed” was a collaborative effort of Chloe Barnes and Peter Lewis (both Aston University), Kirstie Bellman and Chris Landauer (both Topcy House Consulting), Joen Botev (University of Luxemburg), Ada Diaconescu (Telecom ParisTech), Christian Gruhl and Sven Tomforde (both University of Kassel), Phyllis Nelson (California State Polytechnical University), Anthony Stein (University of Augsburg), and Christopher Steward (Ohio State University).

The second paper, entitled “”When you believe in things that you don’t understand”: the effect of cross-generational habits on self-improving system integration” was written together with Chloe Barnes (Aston University) and John NA Brown (LinkedIn).

“CHARIOT – Towards a Continuous High-level Adaptive Runtime Integration Testbed” – ABSTRACT: Integrated networked systems sense a common environment, learn to navigate the environment and share their experiences. Sharing experiences simplifies learning, reducing costly trial and error in complex environments. However, integration produces dependencies that make constituent systems less robust to failures, unexpected outputs and performance anomalies. Even with APIs and reflective, self-aware techniques, system integration still requires expert programming and tuning. Self-integrating systems proposed in recent research automate integration, but can be challenging to validate at scale. We therefore propose CHARIOT, a common test environment to allow for different approaches and systems to be deployed, assessed and compared on a shared platform for the development of self-integrating systems. In this paper, we discuss the underlying requirements and challenges, potential metrics, and a system metamodel to accommodate these.

“”When you believe in things that you don’t understand”: the effect of cross-generational habits on self-improving system integration” – ABSTRACT: Humans experiencing unexpected feedback to certain actions which they are not able to explain, might develop superstitious behaviour. In this paper, we discuss that similar behaviour might also occur in engineered systems. We provide a thought-experiment regarding such behaviour in computational systems. This will be a first step towards an awareness of others and their affect on the system itself as described in networked self-awareness.

ALIFE 2019 paper accepted

~ Lukas Esterle ~ Leave a comment

The paper written in collaboration with David King and Gilbert Peterson (both AFIT Ohio) got accepted for this years Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE conference). The paper is entitled “Entropy-Based Team Self-Organization with Signal Suppression”

Abstract

Self-organized and distributed control methods are increasingly important as they allow multi-agent systems to scale more readily than centralized control techniques. Furthermore, these methods increase system robustness and flexibility. In the online multi-object k-coverage domain studied here, a collective of autonomous agents must dynamically form sub-teams to accomplish two concurrent tasks: target discovery and coverage. Once a target is discovered, the collective of agents must create a sub-team of k-agents to cover the target. The work presented here introduces a novel, entropy-based task selection technique that incorporates signal suppression behaviors found in bee colonies. We test the technique in the online multi-object k-coverage domain while exploring three team properties: heterogeneity, team size, and sensor ranges, and their impact on multi-task accomplishment. Results show that signal suppression helps avoid over-provisioning of team resources to individual targets, dynamically creating sub-teams that simultaneously accomplish target discovery and coverage tasks.