Cooperative Architecture Research Articles

Technological Cooperation Trends Under Conditions of the Modern World Economy

The authors emphasized key specific features of technological cooperation under conditions of the modern world economy and analyze modern trends of the world production ties development in high and medium technological economic sectors. They generalized main trends of technological cooperation development in the light of structural changes in the world economy, innovative production process and specific features of regional labor division. It was concluded that structural changes in the world economy, an innovative production process and specific features of regional labor division formed a new location of the world production, an architecture and motivation of technological cooperation in the hi-tech and economic sectors. It was emphasized that an analysis of technological cooperation development for Russia should be performed with account of the mentioned world tendencies and special features of the national economy.

Distributed secondary control of battery energy storage systems in a stand‐alone microgrid

The conventional hierarchical control in an islanded microgrid (MG) does not consider the long time-span dynamics of distributed storages (DSs). The main challenge in control of battery energy storage systems (BESSs) is different levels of stored energy in terms of state of charge (SoC). In power droop control, the energy of the BESSs with lower initial SoC is drained earlier, and their capacities become unachievable. Moreover, using droop control to balance the SoC of BESSs, deviates the steady state frequency and voltage from the nominal values. However, restoration of the MG frequency employing the conventional distributed secondary controllers disturbs SoC-balancing, since SoC of BESSs are ignored. In this paper, a new distributed storage secondary controller (DSSC) scheme is designed for restoration of the voltage and frequency of a stand-alone MG, and to provide power-sharing and SoC-balancing, using a distributed cooperative architecture. The cooperative DSs are controllable and exchange the information with neighbor DSs through a communication network. The unknown output power of the uncooperative renewable distributed generation (DG) is considered as external disturbance to the DSSC. The designed DSSC is robust against the variation of the communication configuration, and eliminates the necessity to communicate with uncontrollable DGs and loads.

Cooperative vehicular communication systems based on visible light communication

The use of visible light communication (VLC) in vehicular communication systems for vehicle safety applications is proposed. The system aims to ensure the communication between a LED-based VLC emitter and an on-vehicle VLC receiver. A traffic scenario is established. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) communications are analyzed. For the V2V communication study, the emitter was developed based on the vehicle headlights, whereas for the study of I2V communication system, the emitter was built based on streetlights. The VLC receiver is based on amorphous SiC technology and enhances the conditioning of the signal enabling to decode the transmitted information. Receivers are located at the rooftop of the vehicle, for I2V communications, and at the tails for V2V reception. Clusters of emitters, in a square topology, are used in the I2V transmission. The information and the ID code of each emitter in the network are sent simultaneously by modulating the individual chips of the trichromatic white LED. Free space is the transmission medium. An on–off code is used to transmit data. An algorithm to decode the information at the receivers is set. The proposed system was tested. The experimental results confirmed that the proposed cooperative VLC architecture is suitable for the intended applications.

Principles for Optimal Cooperativity in Allosteric Materials

Allosteric proteins transmit a mechanical signal induced by binding a ligand. However, understanding the nature of the information transmitted and the architectures optimizing such transmission remains a challenge. Here we show, using an in silico evolution scheme and theoretical arguments, that architectures optimized to be cooperative, which efficiently propagate energy, qualitatively differ from previously investigated materials optimized to propagate strain. Although we observe a large diversity of functioning cooperative architectures (including shear, hinge, and twist designs), they all obey the same principle of displaying a mechanism, i.e., an extended soft mode. We show that its optimal frequency decreases with the spatial extension L of the system as L−d/2, where d is the spatial dimension. For these optimal designs, cooperativity decays logarithmically with L for d = 2 and does not decay for d = 3. Overall, our approach leads to a natural explanation for several observations in allosteric proteins and indicates an experimental path to test if allosteric proteins lie close to optimality.

Making Bertha Cooperate–Team AnnieWAY’s Entry to the 2016 Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge

This paper presents the concepts and methods utilized by Team AnnieWAY for the 2016 Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge. The paper introduces the automated vehicle BerthaOne . The vehicle, even though being based on the Bertha platform, distinguishes itself from its siblings by its software modules and algorithms. We, therefore, describe its system architecture and algorithms for perception, cooperation and motion planning. In Particular, we present a motion planner that plans different maneuvers flexibly by augmenting the cost function with situation specific cost terms. We subsequently describe the requirements of the 2016 GCDC and evaluate our performance during the competition.

Envisaging the Post-Brexit Landscape: An Articulation of the Likely Changes to the EU–UK Competition Policy Relationship

In the light of the outcome of the 23rd June 2016 UK referendum to leave the European Union and the May government’s consequent approach to Brexit, this paper explores the likely changes that these will bring to a key EU–UK relationship, the competition policy relationship. It is suggested that changes are likely not only in public enforcement and private actions but also in the need for a new competition cooperation architecture between the EU and the UK. In order to appreciate how the competition relationship is likely to change after Brexit, an understanding of the current architecture in respect of the said areas is necessary and thus outlined early in the paper. Thereafter, it is argued that, post the implementation period, as the UK will no longer come under the direct jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice or indeed be a member of the Single European Market, a considerable loosening or separation of the strands that shape the current EU–UK competition relationship will occur. This unwinding of the currently intertwined EU and UK competition regimes will affect both public enforcement and private actions, thereby opening up the possibility of further regulatory divergence, unless consciously checked. Moreover, as the separation will see the Commission’s jurisdictional remit no longer include the UK, the domain will become the sole regulatory concern of UK institutions, particularly the Competition and Markets Authority. This will lead to dual regulatory capture, often of significant and complex antitrust and merger cases, given the overlapping nature of EU and UK markets. Clearly, this necessitates the UK regulator having the appropriate staffing to vet such cases, as it moves from essentially a regional player to one on a par with the Commission and regulators in the USA and China. In fact, the dual capture of such cases reinforces the importance of effective cooperation between the EU and UK regulators. However, given that the current competition cooperation relationship will end at the conclusion of the implementation period, the paper articulates a likely new EU–UK competition cooperation architecture, reflecting the fact that the UK would be outside the EU, but still enabling close, effective cooperation. Of course, and echoing the EU, it is also in the UK’s interest to agree similar competition cooperation bilaterals with key non-EU regulators. Yet, because this will take time, and because cooperation can indeed fail, the UK, like the EU, must ensure its competition instruments have the necessary extra-territorial reach.

India's Progress and Plan of Action in Addressing Climate Change and Its Role in Setting an Effective, Cooperative and Equitable Climate Policy Architecture

Much of climate actions and framing of state action plans to mitigate the adverse effect of climate change has been driven by international targets and obligations. The framing of national action plans was triggered by international negotiations, even though right up to the 1990s, climate action was not a domestic priority. India has maintained its stance of equity and historical emission burden at different climate negotiations. With extreme weather anomalies, climate sensitive sectors such as agriculture, water, energy and health are going to face several challenges. This paper positions the climate change policy of India with respect to its various national and state action plans and outlines its role in setting effective, cooperative and equitable climate policy architecture. Transition to a low-carbon economy is seen as a challenge for India, as it seeks to balance its developmental needs with concerns for climate change. The way forward poses both challenges and offers opportunities for a low-carbon led growth. In tackling the climate change scenarios, the paper outlines many opportunities that can also contribute to wider development goals. These include building climate resilient infrastructure, improving intersect oral organisation, resource planning and framing state policies and programmes that mainstream climate risks.

Towards a Cooperative Architecture Platform

This paper outlines the use of videogame simulations as a representation of the complex interactions of resources within an urban neighborhood. The research advances the use of videogames as a mechanism for the production of design patterns for the city, in the hands of its inhabitants. By establishing a real-time feedback loop between players and an ecological simulation of the city, a user can learn and make decisions that could be shared with a community. This paper will mainly discuss the research developed through the videogame Block’hood, a project developed by the Author at the University of Southern California School of Architecture and the Plethora-Project research that attempts to critically address the use of mass media technology for collective organization and value production.

ЧЕСЬКА І СЛОВАЦЬКА РЕСПУБЛІКИ В СИСТЕМІ ВІДНОСИН КРАЇН ВИШЕГРАДСЬКОЇ ЧЕТВІРКИ

In the article the author studies the historical aspects of the «Visegrad» forming and the main points of its activity, regional cooperation of the Central and Eastern European countries, in particular the modern issues and problems of interaction between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic in the framework of regional cooperation, cross-border cooperation, common foreign policy interests and mutually beneficial foreign economic policy, which was aimed at reviving an open market economy, accession to the EU and NATO. The article also shows that the system of interstate cooperation between the Czech Republic and Slovakia has proved its effectiveness and stability for many years, and the countries’ common interests in the post-integration period after acceding to the North Atlantic Alliance and the European Community have had significant historical traditions. These remarkable events in the life of the young states were preceded by radical reforms in the political, economic and legal spheres. At the same time, there were solved the complicated tasks of state building, consolidation of the political community and the whole society around the idea of the country`s return to Europe.The author maintains that despite the activity of the Visegrad countries towards integration, both in central- and in common European direction, each of these states follows its own course while pursuing its national interests. Sometimes even the rivalry can be felt between them, which was reflected in the first stages of their accession process into European and Euro-Atlantic structures.It should be noted that, in the context of implementing the primary – European – choice of Ukraine, studying the experience of priority foreign relations of the Czech Republic and Slovakia is topical and extremely significant from the scientific-theoretical and practical point of view.At the present stage of development, the Czech-Slovak regional collaboration within the framework of the Visegrad Four in the context of intergovernmental cooperation has turned into a significant integral part of the new architecture of cooperation in the region of Central Europe and the European continent as a whole. On the international scene, the Czech Republic and Slovakia implement their common foreign and security policy of the EU. It agreeably integrates into the common internal market, trade and customs union of the EU. That is, the co-ordinated Czech-Slovak intergovernmental cooperation in realizing their integration interests and tasks comes to the forefront.

Automated Scheduling Technique Based on Multiple Timer Interrupts for Time-Triggered Co-operative Architecture

Automated Scheduling Technique Based on Multiple Timer Interrupts for Time-Triggered Co-operative Architecture

A distributed secondary scheme with terminal sliding mode controller for energy storages in an islanded microgrid

Different levels of the stored energy is the main challenge in control of the distributed energy storages (DESs) in an islanded microgrid. The conventional power-droop and the secondary distributed controllers of distributed generators (DGs) does not consider the long time-span dynamics of state of charge (SoC) of the DESs. Subsequently, the DESs with lower initial SoCs are discharged before other DESs. Besides, the SoC-droop primary control results in further deviation of the frequency of the microgrid. In this paper, the secondary control scheme is employed to share the power mismatch, match the SoCs of the DESs, and regulate the frequency and voltage of the microgrid. The proposed scheme has distributed cooperative architecture, and employs distributed terminal sliding mode controller (DTSMC) for the state regulators, and proportional controller for distributed power-sharing and SoC-matching. The proposed scheme organizes the controllable DGs, the DESs with limited SoCs, and the uncooperative DGs with unknown generation, through communicating between the neighbor cooperative DGs and DESs. Performance of the designed DTSMC is verified for the changes of communication topology, time-delays, data drop-outs, load variations, and external disturbances. DTSMC provides finite-time convergence, fast transients, and improved robustness.

Post-Brexit Trade Policy Autonomy as Pyrrhic Victory: Being a Middle Power in a Contested Trade Regime

The Leave camp and prominent Brexiteers typically present regaining political control over international trade policy after Brexit as one advantage of leaving the European Union. A newly autonomous UK government, so the argument goes, will be free to negotiate wide-reaching and ambitious trade agreements with the world and will not be restricted by the compromise-culture inherent in supranational, Brussels-based deliberations. In the absence of clear formulations of Britain’s post-Brexit trade political agenda, much of the debate remains hypothetical at this point. Yet, from a global governance perspective, it is clear that the institutional and legal architecture for international trade cooperation is currently fragmented. Given WTO negotiating deadlocks, the institutional strain resulting from parallel country-by-country negotiations, regulatory clash in the existing network of preferential trade agreements, and the UK’s new position as a middle power in the trade regime, this essay argues that Britain may find it more difficult to push its own trade agenda internationally than is currently conceded in the debate. With the global trade regime currently shifting back towards more power-based forms of international interactions, regaining trade policy autonomy post-Brexit may turn out to be a pyrrhic victory for the new trade middle power Britain.

A cooperative architecture for swarm robotic based on dynamic fuzzy cognitive maps

This work presents a cooperative architecture for navigation of a swarm of robots based on Dynamic Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (DFCM). This architecture is used to develop homogeneous autonomous robots without any type of global controllers. The developed autonomous navigation system has skills for learning, self-adaptation, behavior management and cooperative data share. We adopt a multi-agent approach, inspired by Brooks subsumption architecture, which allows hierarchical management of actions and parallel processing. Reinforcement learning is used to self-tune the navigation system parameters allowing the DFCM model to be self-adaptive. Two strategies are analyzed for data and experience exchange between agents (robots). The first one is based on a navigation memory sharing and the other is a bio inspired by ant's behavior strategy. Results are presented with both strategies and comparisons of their performance are carried out in a virtual environment.

MicroThings: A Generic IoT Architecture for Flexible Data Aggregation and Scalable Service Cooperation

The Internet of Things has been widely deployed in various areas of daily life through heterogeneous communications protocols. Each unstandardized protocol focuses on a specific IoT communication pattern. Inspired by the Internet architecture over which divergent devices can easily be accessed and a considerable number of applications can be run, we propose a generic architecture for IoT. This architecture supports two DIY areas: network DIY for data aggregation and application DIY for service cooperation. To connect these two DIYs, a centralized controller has been designed to provide standardized interfaces for data acquisition, organization, and storage, and to support elastic and supportive computing. With these properties, divergent devices can coexist in a uniform microworld, and rich services can be developed and provided on demand to interoperate with physical devices. This article discusses the background, design principles, and advantages of the proposed architecture, as well as open problems and our initial solution, which substantiates a novel IoT architecture and new research ground.

Hybrid relay selection‐based scheme for UWB BANs combining MB‐OFDM and decode‐and‐forward cooperative architectures

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) is now a well-accepted technology that provides not only efficient and remote health-care services but also targets the integration of future multimedia applications, in which high data rate is compulsory. UWB communication is one of the key solutions that afford such rates, and its extended version, multiband OFDM (MB-OFDM) has recently shown its efficiency with WBANs. However, increasing the data rates may come at the expense of the data reliability which is a critical issue in biomedical applications. Cooperative diversity has proven its ability in offering such robustness to channel errors while avoiding to use multiple antennas. Indeed, a single antenna terminal is sufficient to achieve diversity benefits by sharing its physical resources with cooperating single antenna relays. Aiming at providing a viable compromise between the data rate and accuracy in low-profile UWB body networks, to incorporate a decode-and-forward-based cooperative architecture in MB-OFDM system by resorting to opportunistic relaying approach is proposed, which retains only the best on-body relay to forward the information to the destination, thereby significantly reducing the complexity.

Cooperative mapping of unknown environments by multiple heterogeneous mobile robots with limited sensing

While recent advancements in using sophisticated onboard sensors on robotic platforms have made it possible to consign various tasks like exploration, mapping, and flocking to teams of mobile robots, some issues like handling extensive amount of data, high dependency on sensors’ performance, and high expenses emerge. In this paper, the problem of mapping unknown environments by a team of heterogeneous mobile robots with limited and inexpensive sensing abilities is addressed. The concepts of Information Space and sensor models have been employed to plan the motions of robots with limited sensory data in order to accomplish the common goal of mapping the entire workspace as complete as possible. Also, a cooperation architecture is proposed to fuse and interrelate the dissimilar data obtained by individual heterogeneous robots and allocate various exploratory tasks to each of them in order to complete the map. The algorithm works with various limited sensing models, such as depth-limited boundary distance sensor, quadridirectional depth sensor, depth-limited gap sensor, and depth-limited radially-bounded depth senor. Based on each sensor model, the best moving strategy is introduced to maximize the workspace coverage for each robot. The proposed algorithm, which yields a geometric map of the environment, is implemented in diverse simulated problems both with and without sensing noises, and the results and comparisons with a recent related work show that it is able to reliably construct maps of simply-connected and multiply-connected environments with convex and concave obstacles. In the presence of noises, the produced maps had about 12.4% false positive and 3.3% false negative errors on average. Also, some sensitivity analyses are done on the effects of workspace size and number of robots on the mapping time.

Force Bistability in Adhesion Switch

The lateral junctions of epithelial cells must display mechanical stability to form barriers, but also significant plasticity to allow for reorganization during development and repair. In this issue, Biswas et al. (1) extend the use of fluid supported-lipid bilayers (SLBs) to reconstitute function of the key adhesion molecule that initiates lateral junctions of epithelial cells, E-cadherin, and to further study the requirements for mechanical forces in activating the cytoplasmic complex that links E-cadherin to the cytoskeleton (1).

Design and Field Experimentation of a Cooperative ITS Architecture Based on Distributed RSUs.

This paper describes a new cooperative Intelligent Transportation System architecture that aims to enable collaborative sensing services. The main goal of this architecture is to improve transportation efficiency and performance. The system, which has been proven within the participation in the ICSI (Intelligent Cooperative Sensing for Improved traffic efficiency) European project, encompasses the entire process of capture and management of available road data. For this purpose, it applies a combination of cooperative services and methods for data sensing, acquisition, processing and communication amongst road users, vehicles, infrastructures and related stakeholders. Additionally, the advantages of using the proposed system are exposed. The most important of these advantages is the use of a distributed architecture, moving the system intelligence from the control centre to the peripheral devices. The global architecture of the system is presented, as well as the software design and the interaction between its main components. Finally, functional and operational results observed through the experimentation are described. This experimentation has been carried out in two real scenarios, in Lisbon (Portugal) and Pisa (Italy).

Intra-Brics Trade intensities: An Analytical study

-Nearly 17 percent of the world‟s total commodity trade is accounted by BRICS countries. BRICS countries,categorised as leading emerging economies and political powers at the regional and international level, are causing changes in the architecture of international development cooperation. Keeping in view the increasing international importance of BRICS countries both economically and politically and increasing efforts by leaders of BRICS countries to enhance mutual trade and strengthen BRICS as a group financially and politically, one of the major objectives of present study is to find out how intense the trade is among BRICS countries so as to determine whether the value of trade among BRICS countries is greater or smaller than expected value on the basis of their importance in world trade. The share of BRICS countries in total world commodity trade has persistently increased from 7.33%i n 2 0 0 1 to17.25% in 2015. During 2001-2015, intraBRICS trade as percent of Total BRICS trade is almost doubled, increasing from 6.03 to 12.12. However it is worth mentioning that China is the dominant contributor in both cases. Out of total BRICS share in world trade (17.25), 12.08 percent is accounted by China only. India‟s share is just 2% while Brazil, Russia and South Africa have only 1.11, 1.56 and 0.51 % share in world trade. Further, the findings of the present study also reveals that the Intra-BRICS trade of major BRICS countries (China, India and Russia) became less intense as intra-BRICS trade intensities decreased in 2015 compared to that in 2001. Intra-BRICS trade intensity of BRICS as a group decreased from 0.82 in 2001 to 0.70 in 2015. For India and Russia it is 0.84 and 0.85 respectively and for China, it is just 0.59 in 2015, implying that China‟s trade with other BRICS countries is far less than expected, given its importance in world trade. However for Brazil and South Africa, trade flows between these two countries and other BRICS countries is more than expected given their importance in world trade, as the figures for intra-BRICS trade intensity are greater than one.

Architecture for multi-level cooperation and dynamic authority management in an Automated Driving System - A case study on lane change cooperation

This article introduces a functional architecture of an automated driving system defined by taking into account the theoretical knowledge on the driving task modeling and the principles of humanmachine cooperation. The necessary functionalities to ensure the interaction and cooperation between the system and the driver who share the driving task on the operational, tactical and strategic levels were gathered. A multi-level cooperative interaction concept to continuously share control between the driver and the system is introduced. The architecture modules have been implemented and tested in an experiment on a driving simulator with an expert driver. Results show an improved interaction with the driver thanks to the continuous and dynamic interference management.