Decisional Architecture Research Articles

An onboard software decisional architecture for Rapid Environmental Assessment missions

AbstractA software decisional architecture implemented and tested on the Daurade Autonomous Underwater Vehicle designed to achieve covert Rapid Environmental Assessment missions is presented. This decisional architecture is based on a software environment meant for controlling and monitoring highly autonomous systems using interpreted Petri nets and mission planning algorithms; when disruptive events occur, alternative encoded reactions are triggered and the current plan is modified. Lab and sea tests have validated data transmission, planning algorithms, online supervision of the AUV navigation actions and decisional capabilities while reacting to asynchronous events. Daurade is now used for operational REA missions.

Smart architecture for highly available, robust and autonomous satellite

AbstractEuropean leader for satellite systems and at the forefront of orbital infrastructures, Thales Alenia Space is a joint venture between Thales (67%) and Finmeccanica (33%) and forms with Telespazio a Space Alliance. Thales Alenia Space is a worldwide reference in telecoms, radar and optical Earth observation, defense and security, navigation and science. Thales Alenia Space has 11 industrial sites in 4 European countries (France, Italy, Spain and Belgium) with over 7,200 employees worldwide.Satellite evolution and wish to design more autonomous mission imply an enhancement of satellite architecture to enable the smart control of spacecraft. New system architecture needs to be defined to permit the decision-taking, and special attention has to be paid to FDIR (Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery) and the way action can be engaged. Nevertheless the constraints on architecture and related technique composing it, stay still invariant: robustness, high availability, industrially viable and cost efficient. This paper gives first some elements about a decisional architecture defined in joined work by Thales Alenia Space and CNES, then the current context of FDIR is briefly described and then a new FIDR strategy permitting smart decision is introduced, finally the way decision can be engaged on-board for the next generation of autonomous satellites is presented.

Nudging best practice: the HITECH act and behavioral medicine.

In February 2009, the US Congress passed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Consumer Health (HITECH) Act in order to stimulate the "meaningful use" of health information technology within medical practice. Economists have noted that other sectors in the economy have demonstrated substantive productivity improvements from investments in information technology but that the health sector lags behind. The "meaningful use" stipulation of the HITECH Act focuses systems redesign within the health sector on user's behavior, a provision that opens a window of contribution from specialists in behavioral medicine. There are several ways for behavioral medicine to become involved in the redesign. One is to help craft a health services environment that optimizes communication between providers and patients, between primary care and specialist care providers, and between patients and their caregivers. Another is to help practitioners and policy-makers create new "decisional architectures" for "nudging" behavior in positive ways through better incentives, understandable instructions, healthy defaults, instructive feedback, back-ups for error, and structured decision-making. New funding opportunities in research, implementation, and training may facilitate the involvement of behavioral medicine-an involvement that is crucial for ensuring the success of reform efforts in the long run.

Experimental Results in Multi-UAV Coordination for Disaster Management and Civil Security Applications

This paper describes a multi-UAV distributed decisional architecture developed in the framework of the AWARE Project together with a set of tests with real Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to validate this approach in disaster management and civil security applications. The paper presents the different components of the AWARE platform and the scenario in which the multi-UAV missions were carried out. The missions described in this paper include surveillance with multiple UAVs, sensor deployment and fire threat confirmation. In order to avoid redundancies, instead of describing the operation of the full architecture for every mission, only non-overlapping aspects are highlighted in each one. Key issues in multi-UAV systems such as distributed task allocation, conflict resolution and plan refining are solved in the execution of the missions.

Iterative Design of Advanced Mobile Robots

Integration of hardware, software and decisional components is fundamental in the design of advanced mobile robotic systems capable of performing challenging tasks in unstructured and unpredictable environments. We address such integration challenges following an iterative design strategy, centered on a decisional architecture based on the notion of motivated selection of behavior-producing modules. This architecture evolved over the years from the integration of obstacle avoidance, message reading and touch screen graphical interfaces, to localization and mapping, planning and scheduling, sound source localization, tracking and separation, speech recognition and generation on a custom-made interactive robot. Designed to be a scientific robot reporter, the robot provides understandable and configurable interaction, intention and information in a conference setting, reporting its experiences for on-line and off-line analysis. This paper presents the integration of these capabilities on this robot, revealing interesting new issues in terms of planning and scheduling, coordination of audio/visual/graphical capabilities, and monitoring the uses and impacts of the robot's decisional capabilities in unconstrained operating conditions. This paper also outlines new design requirements for our next design iteration, adding compliance to the locomotion and manipulation capabilities of the platform, and natural interaction through gestures using arms, facial expressions and the robot's pose.

Architecture décisionnelle pour satellite autonome. Intégration dans un logiciel de vol spatial

Space missions may benefit from a more advanced autonomy level in different ways: reduction of ground operations, reduction of the occurrence of service interruptions or improvement of the reactivity of the system. Depending on the mission requirements, new functions need to be supplied on-board the spacecraft, such as mission planning or failure diagnosis and automatic reconfiguration. Our work focused on the definition of a decisional architecture and its integration into a representative on-board software for an autonomous satellite. This software is based on a software bus and use the concept of software component, easily pluggable and reusable. Development process is based on interfaces modelling and automatic code generation facilitating their integration. This implementation has been evaluated on an operational software environment. Results are given in the last section.

AUTONOMOUS CONFIGURATION CONTROL FOR UAV FORMATION FLIGHT IN HOSTILE ENVIRONMENTS

A fleet of UAVs flying according a planned mission in hostile environments must optimize its configuration, so that the UAVs auto-protection systems ensure the fleet safety. Such an optimization can be done in the mission planning phase, and must also be reactively updated to tackle unpredicted threats. In this paper, we present an approach to the problem of selecting autonomously the fleet configuration. Algorithms that explicitly consider models of the threats and of the countermeasures systems are presented, and integrated within a global decisional architecture that ensures reactiveness and constraints satisfactions.

Celanese signs catalyst research agreement

European leader for satellite systems and at the forefront of orbital infrastructures, Thales Alenia Space is a joint venture between Thales (67%) and Finmeccanica (33%) and forms with Telespazio a Space Alliance. Thales Alenia Space is a worldwide reference in telecoms, radar and optical Earth observation, defense and security, navigation and science. Thales Alenia Space has 11 industrial sites in 4 European countries (France, Italy, Spain and Belgium) with over 7,200 employees worldwide.Satellite evolution and wish to design more autonomous mission imply an enhancement of satellite architecture to enable the smart control of spacecraft. New system architecture needs to be defined to permit the decision-taking, and special attention has to be paid to FDIR (Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery) and the way action can be engaged. Nevertheless the constraints on architecture and related technique composing it, stay still invariant: robustness, high availability, industrially viable and cost efficient. This paper gives first some elements about a decisional architecture defined in joined work by Thales Alenia Space and CNES, then the current context of FDIR is briefly described and then a new FIDR strategy permitting smart decision is introduced, finally the way decision can be engaged on-board for the next generation of autonomous satellites is presented.