Autonomous Entities Research Articles

An Organic Computing Approach to Self-Organizing Robot Ensembles

Similar to the Autonomous Computing initiative, that has mainly been advancing techniques for self-optimisation focussing on computing systems and infrastructures, Organic Computing (OC) has been driving the development of system design concepts and algorithms for self-adaptive systems at large. Examples of application domains include, for instance, traffic management and control, cloud services, communication protocols, and robotic systems. Such an OC system typically consists of a potentially large set of autonomous and self-managed entities, where each entity acts with a local decision horizon. By means of cooperation of the individual entities, the behaviour of the entire ensemble system is derived. In this article, we present our work on how autonomous, adaptive robot ensembles can benefit from OC technology. Our elaborations are aligned with the different layers of an observer/controller framework which provides the foundation for the individuals' adaptivity at system design-level. Relying on an extended Learning Classifier System (XCS) in combination with adequate simulation techniques, this basic system design empowers robot individuals to improve their individual and collaborative performances, e.g. by means of adapting to changing goals and conditions. Not only for the sake of generalisability, but also because of its enormous transformative potential, we stage our research in the domain of robot ensembles that are typically comprised of several quad-rotors and that organise themselves to fulfil spatial tasks such as maintenance of building facades or the collaborative search for mobile targets. Our elaborations detail the architectural concept, provide examples of individual self-optimisation as well as of the optimisation of collaborative efforts, and we show how the user can control the ensembles at multiple levels of abstraction. We conclude with a summary of our approach and an outlook on possible future steps.

Székelymagyar nemzeti- és kulturálisidentitás-stratégiák a trianoni határokon túl (Székely-Hungarian National and Cultural Identity Strategies beyond the Trianon Borders)

In twenty-first century Europe the issue of majority/minority conflicts, national identity, and different forms of intercultural communication have become more and more foregrounded. Hungarian identity is a complex problematic in itself because Hungary suffered a serious historical trauma as a result of the 1921 Trianon treaties, in which Székely-Hungarians present an interesting case. This ethnic group had always had an identity of its own in Transylvania. However, the post-Trianon situation differs in that while formerly the Székelys defined themselves and claimed self-determination within (Hungarian) culture, they now found themselves in a multicultural world, in which no permissive multiculturality was allowed in the sense we conceive multiculturalism today. They were trapped in an antagonistic intercultural situation, where the borders were redrawn around them so that without leaving their homeland they nevertheless became beyond-the-borders citizens, which has led them to the need to apply various identitymanagement strategies. Post-Trianon Székely literature documents this very struggle of intercultural communication and identity-management strategies. Paradoxically, Transylvanian literature owes its existence as an autonomous entity to Trianon. It is by examining literary texts by Áron Tamási, Rózsa Ignácz, and György Bözödi that I am going to set up a typology of identity-management as reflected in the literature under discussion, a typology which this literature would not yield through traditional critical methods, and one which could be helpful in dealing not only with Székely literature in particular, but with contemporary European intercultural communicative crises in general.

귀농인의 영농 어려움에 영향을 미치는 변인 연구

For the purpose, this study examines to identify factors influencing urban to rrual migration for farming. This study analyzed 217 urban to rural migrant farmers. The result of this study were as follows: the influence of the main variables on the agricultural challenges of the urban to rural migrant farmers were observed as the relationship of the level of financial preparations, the motivations of urban to rural migration, the agricultural income, the annual of urban to rural migration, the size of agricultural, gender, and age. This study result show that urban to rural migrant farmers' agricultural challenges is influenced by almost economical factors. Therefore, for the successful agricultural activities of the urban to rural migrant farmers show significant impact to need on the composite effort of all such as the individual, the family, the rural society, local autonomous entity, the government.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Philanthropy: The Missing Link

The notion of “corporate social responsibility” has been developed by academic literature for decades. National governments, international organizations and researchers gave a number of definitions of “socially responsible” corporations. In the meantime, the process of economic globalization brought forth corporations as autonomous legal entities and the debate became even more complex due to the concept of “corporate citizenship”. Despite a multifaceted theoretical background, there was a common idea: corporations have (or should have) a role in the development of society. Scholars thus began to question the idea that managers should only consider shareholders’ interest when managing the company. The Berle-Dodd controversy rose once again and the paradigm of shareholder value was put under scrutiny. A number of alternative models were developed (the enlightened shareholder value or long-term production theory, the team production theory), and they all tackled a common problem: how much should managers take into consideration other stakeholders’ interests? Among these stakeholders there are those entitled to social rights, ecological rights and human rights: as such, the debate on CSR strongly intertwined itself with that on stakeholders’ interests. In its first part, the paper will examine how the aforementioned debate impacted on national and international legislation, as well as corporate codes of ethics (non-binding list of rules that corporations declare to adhere to), in order to assert the current normative framework of CSR standards. In the context of the actual immigration crisis, fulfilling refugees’ rights is a most urgent social issue, involving all of us on a global level. Since government are struggling with both practical and political issues, many have advocated for an intervention by private companies, although it is unclear how this should happen. Since, in principle, humanitarian assistance by corporations is considered a philanthropic activity, in the second part his paper will try to assert if philanthropic activities are considered part of a “socially responsible” conduct by: 1) the academic debate on CSR; 2) national and international legislations; 3) multinational corporations (examining both their activities and codes of ethics). A brief case study on how multinational corporations responded to the refugee crisis will also be conducted, in order to better understand what place philanthropic activities have in the CSR debate.The paper concludes that, while certain definitions of CSR encompass philanthropic activities (from both an academic and a legislative point of view), corporations have implemented a concept of CSR that only consider the interests of parties related to the company (directly or indirectly). In light of the rising necessity for global humanitarian assistance, the paper ultimately suggests that it’s time for the debate to receive a broader definition of socially responsible conducts, in order to develop a new concept of corporate social responsibility that is grounded on what corporations are actually capable of doing.

BIOSOARM: a bio-inspired self-organising architecture for manufacturing cyber-physical shopfloors

Biological collective systems have been an important source of inspiration for the design of production systems, due to their intrinsic characteristics. In this sense, several high level engineering design principles have been distilled and proposed on a wide number of reference system architectures for production systems. However, the application of bio-inspired concepts is often lost due to design and implementation choices or are simply used as heuristic approaches that solve specific hard optimization problems. This paper proposes a bio-inspired reference architecture for production systems, focused on highly dynamic environments, denominated BIO-inspired Self-Organising Architecture for Manufacturing (BIOSOARM). BIOSOARM aims to strictly adhere to bio-inspired principles. For this purpose, both shopfloor components and product parts are individualized and extended into the virtual environment as fully decoupled autonomous entities, where they interact and cooperate towards the emergence of a self-organising behaviour that leads to the emergence of the necessary production flows. BIOSOARM therefore introduces a fundamentally novel approach to production that decouples the system’s operation from eventual changes, uncertainty or even critical failures, while simultaneously ensures the performance levels and simplifies the deployment and reconfiguration procedures. BIOSOARM was tested into both flow-line and “job shop”-like scenarios to prove its applicability, robustness and performance, both under normal and highly dynamic conditions.

Validation of an agent based model using a participatory simulation gaming approach: The case of city logistics

Agent-based modeling is used for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous entities aiming to assessing their effects on the system as a whole. At an abstract level, an agent-based model (ABM) is a representation of the many simple agents and interactions among them. The decision making of the agents is based on the rules given to them. In an ABM, the model output is the result of internal decision-making and may differ with alteration in the decision path. On the contrary, with the set of rules embedded in agents, their behavior is modeled to take a ‘certain action’ in a ‘certain situation’. It suggests that the internal decision making behavior of agents is truly responsible for the model output and thus it cannot be ignored while validating ABMs. This research article focuses on the validating agents’ behavior by evaluating decision-making processes of agents. For this purpose, we propose a validation framework based on a participatory simulation game. Using this framework we engage a human player (i.e. a domain stakeholder) to allow us to collect information about choices and validate the behavior of an individual agent. A proof-of-concept game is developed for a city logistics ABM to test the framework.

The study about operation condition of dental hospital and clinics used public data : focus on population of local autonomous entity

This study assayed regional distribution of dental hospital & dental clinics, the number of population & households per one dental hospital & clinic, operation condition & duration. This study used public data that display from 1946 years(the first dental clinic open in republic of korea) to 2016 years. We collected present condition of 21,686 dental hospital and clinics available in public data portal site on 28. Feb.2016. Data were classified by scale, location, permission year, operation duration of dental hospital & clinics and were analyzed using SPSS 20.0 program. Surveyed on Feb. 2016. Best top 10 regions of permission dental clinics are (1) Gangnam-gu, Seoul(1,337), (2) Seongnamsi, Gyeonggi-do(555), (3) Songpa-gu, Seoul(491), (4) Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul(472), (5) Suwon-si, Gyeonggi-do(443), (6) Seocho-gu, Seoul(428), (7) Nowon-gu, Seoul(417), (8) Goyang-si, Gyeonggi-do(413), (9) Jung-gu, Seoul(380), (10) Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do(353). Whereas best top 10 regions of operating dental clinics are (1) Gangnam-gu, Seoul(581), (2) Seongnamsi, Gyeonggi-do(415), (3) Suwon-si, Gyeonggi-do(382), (4) Seocho-gu, Seoul(320), (5) Changwon-si, Gyeongsangnam-do(303), (6) Songpa-gu, Seoul(295) (7) Goyang-si, Gyeonggi-do(290), (8) Bucheon-si and Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do(262), (9) Jeonju-si, Jeollabuk-do(224). Average population per one dental hospital & clinic by regional local government are 3,120 people. Best five region of population per one dental hospital & clinic are (1) Sejong-si(5,272), (2) Gangwon-do(4,653), (3) Chungcheongbuk-do(4,513), (4) Gyeongsangbuk-do(4,490), (5) Chungcheongnam-do(4,402). Average households per one dental hospital & clinic by regional local government are 1,316 households. Best three region of households per one dental hospital & clinic are (1) Sejong-si(2,126), (2) Gangwon-do(2,057), (3) Gyeongsangbuk-do(1,946). From 1946 to 1986, permission and operating dental hospital and clinics was steadily increasing. On 1986-1990, 1991-1995, permission, operation and closure of dental hospital and clinics increase rapidly. From the 2011-2015 to 2016(present), permission, operation and closure of dental hospital and clinics is decreasing. Average operating duration of closured dental hospital and clinics are 14.054 years. We need to map of dental hospital and clinics for open and operation of one, base on analyzed results. In an era of 30,000 dentist, we should to be concerned about operation of dental clinics in the light of past operating condition.

Erratum to: A supplier offer modification approach based on fuzzy systems for automated negotiation in e-commerce

In E-commerce, numbers of transactions are increasing day by day in B2B and B2C trade. Online negotiation is possible because of automated negotiation. Autonomous entities such as agents could help in these situations. Providing an offer which has maximum utilities for both trading parties into possible shortest time is the main aim of this work. Proposed model applies issue trade-offs strategy in which multiple issues are traded-offs against one another to maximize participant satisfaction. To make trade-offs the model applies a fuzzy system approach. The automated negotiation model in this article has a process without offer generating and exchanging between buyer and supplier agents to explore time-consuming negotiation process in earlier researches. Mediator component searches an optimal offer that satisfies buyer and supplier requirements. The system will utilize fuzzy inference systems to automate negotiation process and considers two effective factors in the negotiation process: requirements and preferences. Requirements are qualitative or quantitative values which the participants assign to issues for negotiation. Preferences of the participants are priorities assigned to the issues. These values express an importance measure of the issues from a participant perspective. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to get preferences of the issues. Proposed model applies different Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) schemes for qualitative and quantitative negotiation issues to enhance the satisfaction level of buyers and suppliers. Experimental results show that how the model fulfills the main aim of our work.

Review

Review

From loose body to osteochondritis dissecans: a historical account of disease definition.

Osteochondritis dissecans (OCD) is a rare yet fascinating disease affecting young, active patients. It remains a 'mysterious disease' whose etiopathology, still unclear, is the subject of ongoing studies aiming improving the knowledge of this condition and, therefore, treatment options, too. Even though the first descriptions of intra-articular loose bodies date back to very ancient times, it is only relatively recently that, thanks to the contribution of some very eminent physicians, it became recognized as a specific orthopaedic condition. The aim of the present manuscript is to trace the main steps in the journey that led to the acknowledgement of OCD as an autonomous clinical entity, and to recall the prominent figures involved.

Public Sector e-Recruitment Practices in Greece: The Case of the Supreme Council for Civil Personnel Selection (Asep) Website.

Although it is generally accepted that technology itself has no inherent value, there is no doubt that it is the key enabler of e-Government services. In regards to personnel recruitment, technology has undoubtedly revolutionized traditional methods. E-recruitment, generally defined as the process of utilizing new Information and Communication Technologies for candidate attraction, selection and communication management, has been extensively used in the private sector over the last two decades. The success of e-recruiting, especially in terms of reductions in hiring time and costs, also made the practice attractable as part of most e-government initiatives worldwide. Greece is no exception to this trend. Following the institution of the Supreme Council for Civil Personnel Selection (ASEP) as an independent authority in 1994, the Greek State was provided with an autonomous entity tasked with the staffing of the Public Sector, “in conditions of full transparency, publicity, objectivity and meritocracy”. However, it is this very statement that points at the particularities pertaining to public sector recruitment practices which are rarely present in the private sector. Greece is characterized by a decades-old clientelistic approach to public sector employment and e-recruiting for the state is a mission that raises the stakes clearly higher than that of a measured cost reduction. The current paper briefly reviews the benefits of e-recruitment practices in the private sector, examines the significant differences that apply to the recruitment practices of the Greek state and finally assesses the official ASEP website in a technical and functional manner as a tool for promoting trust between citizens and the State by applying the guidelines provided by the Greek Public Portal Certification Framework.

Controlling Negative Emergent Behavior by Graph Analysis at Runtime

Self-organized systems typically consist of distributed autonomous entities. An increasing part of such systems is characterized by openness and heterogeneity of participants. For instance, open desktop computing grids provide a framework for unrestrictedly joining in. However, openness and heterogeneity present severe challenges to the overall system’s stability and efficiency since uncooperative and even malicious participants are free to join. A promising solution for this problem is to introduce technical trust as a basis; however, in turn, the utilization of trust opens space for negative emergent behavior. This article introduces a system-wide observation and control loop that influences the self-organized behavior to provide a performant and robust platform for benevolent participants. Thereby, the observation part is responsible for gathering information and deriving a system description. We introduce a graph-based approach to identify groups of suspicious or malicious agents and demonstrate that this clustering process is highly successful for the considered stereotype agent behaviors. In addition, the controller part guides the system behavior by issuing norms that make use of incentives and sanctions. We further present a concept for closing the control loop and show experimental results that highlight the potential benefit of establishing such a control loop.

Towards a Reliable Election Algorithm for Vanets Networks

The alert data dissemination is one of principal’s several works in VANETs network research. This latter is composed of autonomous entities characterized by high speed and predictable regular mobility intelligent vehicles. Indeed, several studies are proposed for improvement security in this networks .Which is considered one of the most important objective of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) , that are using different technologies and ways to meet this goal, based mainly on to the information disseminated between network’s vehicles related studies. In this context, The goal in this paper is modelling and simulate an election algorithm for VANET networks, to improve the warning data dissemination in order to achieve a passenger security service on the routes .Where we choose the modelling and simulation approach to justified our technique.

The Bangsamoro Basic Law: Awareness and support among the Basilan Ethnic and Non-Ethnic Youths

The Philippine government (GPH) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) signed the Framework Agreement on the Bangsamoro, which culminates the Aquino Administration’s effort to end the deadlock in the peace process in Mindanao. It would pave the way for the creation of the new Muslim autonomous political entity (NPE) called “Bangsamoro” under law to be approved by the Philippine Congress, which was the proposed ‘Bangsamoro Basic Law’ or BBL (Bangkok Post, 2014). This study is a descriptive - correlation – regression analysis of the awareness and support of the Ethnic and Non-Ethnic Youths in Basilan, Philippines on the Bangsamoro Basic Law. The findings and conclusions were: (1) The Basilan ethnic youths (Yakan and Tausug) were moderately aware of the provisions of the BBL, while the Basilan non-ethnic youths (Chavacano and Visayan) are barely aware of the provisions of the BBL; (2) The ethnic youths moderately support the passage of the BBL while the non-ethnic youths least support its passage; (3) There is a significant relationship between the youths’ level of awareness and extent of support for the BBL; and (4) The levels of support for the BBL of the Basilan youths are dependent on their ethnic and non-ethnic affiliation.

Psicologia analítica e a interpretação dos personagens dos sonhos lúcidos

Resumo Os sonhos lúcidos são descritos como a consciência de estar sonhando durante o sonho e a capacidade de alterá-lo narrativamente. Uma breve introdução sobre tema será desdobrada, seguida pela análise de uma das características marcantes desse fenômeno: os personagens que habitam esse estado onírico, possuidores de um grau de autonomia e facilidade de comunicação surpreendente se comparados aos sonhos comuns. Na intenção de averiguar substrato psíquico dessas entidades autônomas será conduzida uma investigação sob a ótica da psicologia analítica, privilegiando o conceito Junguiano de “sombra” e a teoria dos complexos. Por fim, será destacada a importância dessa análise para o processo de individuação.

English

8 ORIGINAL PROF-3279 ABSTRACT… Introduction: National Health Information Exchange (NHIX) Systems are rapidly evolving. Due to the cyber infrastructure and improvements in communication technology, it is possible to share healthcare related data within a geographic region electronically among healthcare related autonomous entities such as physicians, hospitals, test laboratories, insurers, emerging Health Information Organizations (HIO), and even government departments. Study Design: Whether data are collected with the RCT, Quasi-experimentation or Triangulation etc., we present to explore a NHIX system for EHR that has also been implemented as a test case. We particularly propose to demonstrate a concept application, Medical Drop Box (MDB) with the key technological components of a future NHIX System for medical industry. Setting: Data from different medical settings have been used for testing the new system but the technological development has been done at IIU, Islamabad. Period: The proposed system is not time bond in terms of data collection. Basically the proposed system can handle data collected in any chunk of time in the history and can provide information as and when needed in future. Material & Methods: With MDB, a person is able to collect his/her health data and share it with the whole medical industry according to his/her own preferences and setting. Besides the technology for handing numerous forms of health care data, the main challenge of NHIX system is to allow individuals and associated medical entities to manage and share their medical information based on personal control and preferences given to each by medical laws, information rights and privacy rules. The main focus in this research paper is to make a standard medical application for the medical data that is in exchangeable format according to the standards defined in HL7. Results: The new system is able to make standardized Clinical document for medical data in exchangeable format according to HL7 standard. The MDB is the first step to setup NHIX system. With the help of MDB Statistical Analyzer now the health industry of the country can perform a variety of analysis for the future improvements in different health settings. Conclusions: The availability of medical data of patients on MDB cloud has improved Clinical Impact, created new Business & Services opportunities and reduced the overall Treatment Cost.

Distributed architecture for agents‐based energy negotiation in solar powered micro‐grids

SummaryThe quota of renewable energy production from decentralized sources is increasing even more, affecting the management of current power grids. The lack of alignment between energy produced by photovoltaic panels and the consumption by user's appliances are the main issues that need to be addressed. The usage of energy storages is not yet feasible because of dimensioning problems and costs. The CoSSMic project is developing an innovative autonomic distributed platform that adopts a collaborative approach and distributed knowledge to schedule the usage of consuming devices according to user's preferences and constraints, monitoring data and predicted photovoltaic production. The main objective is the maximization of self‐consumption in a neighborhood. Multi‐agent systems are a good candidate for modeling and managing such kind of systems. In fact, smart grids are geographically distributed systems composed of autonomous and reactive entities among which some are pro‐active and have social abilities. In this paper, we focus on the design and prototype implementation of the multi‐agent systems, that is one of the pillars of the CoSSMic platform, aiming at implementing a distributed scheduler. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Industry 4.0 revolution and the future of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)

Industry 4.0 dictates the end of traditional centralized applications for production control. Its vision of ecosystems of smart factories with intelligent and autonomous shop-floor entities is inherently decentralized. Responding to customer demands for tailored products, these plants fueled by technology enablers such as 3D printing, Internet of Things, Cloud computing, Mobile Devices and Big Data, among others create a totally new environment. The manufacturing systems of the future, including manufacturing execution systems (MES) will have to be built to support this paradigm shift.

Change, Challenge and Opportunity: Departments of Medicine and Their Leaders

Academic Health Centers are evolving to larger and more complex Academic Health Systems (AHS), reflecting financial stresses requiring them to become nimble, efficient, and patient (consumer) and faculty (employee) focused. The evolving AHS organization includes many positive attributes: unity of purpose, structural integration, collaboration and teamwork, alignment of goals with resource allocation, and increased financial success. The organization, leadership, and business acumen of the AHS influence directly opportunities for Departments of Medicine. Just as leadership capabilities of the AHS affect its future success, the same is true for departmental leadership. The Department of Medicine is no longer a quasi- autonomous entity, and the chairperson is no longer an independent decision-maker. Departments of Medicine will be most successful if they maintain internal unity and cohesion by not fragmenting along specialty lines. Departments with larger endowments or those with public financial support have more flexibility when investing in the academic missions. The chairpersons of the future should serve as change agents while simultaneously adopting a “servant leadership” model. Chairpersons with executive and team building skills, and business acumen and experience, are more likely to succeed in managing productive and lean departments. Quality of patient care and service delivery enhance the department’s effectiveness and credibility and assure access to additional financial resources to subsidize the academic missions. Moreover, the drive for excellence, high performance and growth will fuel financial solvency.

REFLECTION OF POSTMODERNISM IN KURT VONNEGUT’S SELECTED FICTIONS

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is known as one of the best American postmodern writers in XX century. This paper attempts to look at three steps of postmodernism in three of his most popular novels, such as Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and Slaughterhouse-five. It will categorize the evolutionary process of postmodernism in these novels. The steps include accumulation, synthesis, and autonomy. Through Player Piano, accumulation copes with the separation between nature and culture in postmodernism. It investigates the presence of the objects made of nature and culture. Through Cat’s Cradle, synthesis will show the center of the evolution. And finally through Vonnegut’s magnum opus Slaughterhouse-five, autonomy will touch on his achievement as an autonomous entity.