Brueckner S, Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thesis at Humboldt University, Berlin Department of Computer Science, 2000.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....embarrassingly active when an application is scaled up for real world use, and those engineering agents for non electronic domains (such as factory automation) must consider the environment explicitly. Consider, for example, the active role of the environment in pheromone models of coordination [4, 30]. In natural insect societies and engineered systems inspired by them, the environment actively provides three information processing functions. 1. It fuses information from different agents passing over the same location at different times. 2. It distributes information from one location to ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

....active wtiv an application is scaled up for real w63EP use, and those engineering agents for non electronic domains (such as factory automation) must consider the environment explicitly. Consider, for example, the active role of the environment i n pheromone models of coordination [4, 30]. In natural insect societies and engineered systems inspired by them, the environment actively provides three information processing functions. 1. It fuses information from different agents passing over the same ocation at different times. 2. It distributes information from one ocation to ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thes s at Humboldt Un vers ty Berl n, Department of Computer Sc ence, 2000.

....deposit, within a time window determined by the evaporation rate of the original deposit. Thus the environment links agents whose trajectories in space time come close enough together. If agents can move, the topology of the system is a function of time. Synthetic pheromone infrastructures [2, 10] suggest one way to implement such a topology. The environment is modeled as a network of places, among which agents move. A place provides a number of services to agents that occupy it: agents can deposit pheromones on a place, and sense pheromone strengths at the place and its immediate ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Ph.D. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000 (forthcoming).

....an entry to an exit and if it does, it prefers to move items of the same type to the same exit as it did in the past. This very simple agent behavior leads to the emergence of very robust and flexible material sorting dynamics if multiple segments (and their agents) are joined into a larger system [3, 4]. While an implementation of the agent system is very simple and straightforward, a formal analysis of the emerging dynamics and expected sorting performance is far from trivial. In the case of the emergent material sorting as well as for many other agent systems it is possible to construct a ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Dr.rer.nat. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

....equal to the communication latency of the system. Our experiments show that using this delayed FIP is sufficient to remove the system from the thrashing region. We treat the current NAP value as a concentration of a digital pheromone as we used them in several previous applications ( 11] 3] [1]) Consequentially, we deposit additional pheromone into NAP in proportion to the strength of the current evidence, which is the locally observed delayed FIP. At the same time we continually evaporate the pheromone, reducing its concentration through multiplication with a fixed No Action ....

....is the locally observed delayed FIP. At the same time we continually evaporate the pheromone, reducing its concentration through multiplication with a fixed No Action Probability Evaporation (NAPE) factor between zero and one. Based on our formal analysis of the dynamics of digital pheromones [1], we know that a repeated evaporation and deposit of the strongest evidence (FIP=1) drives the NAP parameter to approximate a fixed point of 1 (1 NAPE) Treating this fixed point as the upper limit, the agent skips a color decision cycle with a probability of NAP (1 NAPE) Figure 6 repeats the ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Dr.rer.nat. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

....paths. In JFACC, we tile the physical space with hexagons, each representing a place agent with six neighbors but in principal both regular and irregular tiling schemes can be employed. The underlying mathematics of the pheromone field, including critical stability theorems, is described in [3]. Battlefield intelligence from sensors and reconnaissance activities causes the instantiation of Red surrogate agents representing known targets and threats. These agents deposit pheromones on the places representing their location in the battlespace. The field they generate is dynamic since ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

....use local sensors to acquire data and guide its transmission, they may fuse, interpolate, and interpret data from heterogeneous sources, and they may take or influence command and control decisions. In previous projects, we developed swarm intelligent agent systems for command and control [11] [4] and for data acquisition and transmission [6] In this paper we present a swarming agent architecture for distributed pattern detection and classification. Driven by the need for more efficiency and agility in business and public transactions, more and more data becomes digitally available in ....

....in strength. Members of the colony who sense pheromones of a particular flavor may change their behavior (e.g. follow pheromone trail to food source) Pheromone concentrations in the environment disperse in space and evaporate over time, because pheromones are highly volatile substances. [4] specifies and analyzes an application independent component for distributed agent runtime environments that emulates the dynamics of pheromone aggregation, dispersion, and evaporation for fine grained software agents. The pheromone infrastructure represents concentrations of pheromones as scalar ....

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S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Ph.D. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

....generate a gradient that agents perceive, permitting ordered behavior at the agent level. At the same time, these processes increase disorder at the micro level, so that the system as a whole becomes less ordered over time, as the second law requires. Research in synthetic pheromones [3, 19, 24] draws directly on this model of coordination, but the model is of far broader applicability. In a multi commodity market, individual agents follow economic fields generated by myriad individual transactions, and self organization in the demand and supply of a particular commodity is ....

Brueckner, S. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

....place agents. There are different ways in which place agents can be assigned to space. In JFACC, we tile the physical space with hexagons, each representing a place agent with six neighbors. The underlying mathematics of the pheromone field, including critical stability theorems, is described in [2]. The key parameters governing its behavior are: r(t,p) pheromone deposit at time t to place p . E (0,1) evaporation rate . F [0,1) propagation rate . S (0, pheromone propagation threshold A walker agent is associated with one place agent at any given time. It can read the ....

....and can deposit pheromones into the place. A walker moves from one place to another by spinning a roulette wheel whose segments are weighted according to this set of strengths. Such techniques can play chess [4] and do combinatorial optimization [1] and we have applied them to manufacturing [2] and military C 2 [7] 1.3 Ghost Agents The path emergence illustrated in Figure 1 is the result of interactions among many walkers. Each walker performs a stochastic, real time Monte Carlo search of its environment, and contributes to the emergence of a long range path. In engineering ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

....FIELDS From an engineering perspective, pheromones are a particularly attractive way to construct a potential field that can guide agent based systems. Pheromones have been used in material transport routing (Parunak, 1987) combinatorial optimization (Bonabeau, 1999) and factory control (Brueckner, 2000). This paper discusses the use of pheromone fields in constructing paths for movement of robotic vehicles. 1.1 NATURAL SYSTEMS Many social insect species perform impressive feats of coordination without direct inter agent coordination or complex reasoning. Instead, they deposit and sense ....

....and the walkers which deposit and react to the field maintained by the environment. In JFACC, we tile the physical space with hexagons, each representing a place agent with six neighbors. The underlying mathematics of the pheromone field, including critical stability theorems, is described in (Brueckner, 2000). A walker agent is associated with one place agent at any given time. It can read the current strength of pheromones at that place and at each of its neighbors, and can deposit pheromones into the place. A walker moves from one place to another by spinning a roulette wheel whose segments are ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

....falls off rapidly with distance, deposits contribute to the field only in their immediate vicinity. Dynamic. Under continuous reinforcement, the pheromone field strength stabilizes rapidly, as a concave function of time (proportional to t d E 0 where E (0,1) is the evaporation rate) [2]. Thus new information is quickly integrated into the field, while obsolete information is automatically forgotten, through pheromone evaporation. An implementation of synthetic pheromones has two components: the environment (which maintains the pheromone field and performs aggregation, ....

....the variable over time, and propagates pheromones of the same flavor to neighboring place agents based on the current strength of the pheromone. The underlying mathematics of the field developed by such a network of places, including critical stability theorems, rest on two fundamental equations [2]. The parameters in both are: P = p i = set of places . N: P P = neighbor relation between places. Thus the places form an asymmetric multigraph. s(t,p) pheromone strength at time t and place p . r(t,p) external input at time t to place p . q(t,p) propagated input at time ....

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S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

....Pheromone Techniques and Interactive Visualization) applies fine grained agent techniques to the control of air resources charged with defending a friendly region from enemy attack. Intelligence on the location and strength of enemy ( Red ) resources leads to the deposit of synthetic pheromones [1, 5, 7] in a spatial model of the battlespace. The propagation and evaporation of these pheromones model the uncertainty in the available intelligence. Friendly ( Blue ) units then move in response to the flow field generated by these pheromones. Initial experiments with these mechanisms are being ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Ph.D. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

....scalable in size, adaptive to new environments, and intuitive in their structure. In natural agent systems, large numbers of individuals coordinate their activities in the fulfillment of tasks in stigmergetic interactions through the environment ( 3] The pheromone infrastructure, proposed in [2], enhances the execution infrastructure of our software agents, providing them with an active environment where they may share information. The pheromone infrastructure introduces a spatial structure to the system in which the agents may deposit synthetic pheromones at discrete locations (places) ....

....the pheromone is continuously reduced over time. The remaining concentration after one unit time is the product of the previous concentration and the evaporation factor of the pheromone. A more detailed discussion of the pheromone dynamics in the generic pheromone infrastructure is presented in [2] and a forthcoming ERIM technical report. 2.2 Walker Behavior All walkers move on the hexagonal grid in discrete steps. At a relocation moment t and located at an arbitrary place p, a walker selects its next location probabilistically from the set (C(p) of currently available options. C(p) ....

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S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant -- Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. PhD thesis, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany, 2000. (forthcoming).

.... applies basic principles of natural agent systems to the design of artificial multi agent systems ( 4] 1] In natural agent systems, large numbers of individuals coordinate their activities in the fulfillment of tasks in stigmergetic interactions ( 3] The pheromone infrastructure, proposed in [2], enhances the execution infrastructure of our software agents, providing them with a structured active environment where they may share information in synthetic pheromones. The internal operation of the infrastructure aggregates, propagates, and evaporates pheromone deposits by the agents. Our ....

....We conclude in Section 5. 2 Walking on Pheromones A pheromone system embodies two sets of dynamics: those of the pheromones themselves, and those of the walkers, which move in response to the pheromones. The dynamics of the generic pheromone infrastructure are formalized and analyzed in [2] and a forthcoming ERIM technical report. All walkers move on the hexagonal grid in discrete steps. At a relocation moment t and located at an arbitrary place p, a walker selects its next location probabilistically from the set (C(p) of currently available options. C(p) comprises the current ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant -- Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. PhD thesis, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany, 2000. (forthcoming).

.... increasing attention in the scientific community.Following the principles of the design of synthetic ecosystems (SE) 6] 7] pheromone based mechanisms have been applied, for instance, to packet routing in telecommunications networks ( 1] 4] to manufacturing logistics and control ( 9] [2]) and to problems in military operations. The advantages of the indirect approach are: the agents are decoupled in their activities, computation is off loaded to local servers without compromizing the performance or autonomy of the agents, forgetting over time is introduced automatically,anda ....

....Using pheromone based exchange, the complexity of the inter dependencies in the system increases. The following article presents an analytic model of a pheromone infrastructure (PI) A PI realizes application independent support for systems designed according to the principles proposed in [6] [2],o r[3] On the basis of the analytic model, the consequences of using pheromone based coordination mechanisms in an application may be considered. Formal predictions of the evolution of pheromone patterns in the PI when faced with specific input sequences by the agents are derived from the model. ....

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Brueckner, Sven A. "Return from the Ant -- Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control". Ph.D. thesis (forthcoming) at Humboldt University Berlin. 2000.

....enable distributed real time many to many information sharing without direct coupling of agents. Formal models can analyze the active environment that supports aggregation and compute important parameters (e.g. time until information is available, error in approximation) for each scenario [3]. This indirect approach has many benefits: it decouples agents, off loads computation to a server (the place) without compromising agent performance or autonomy, provides forgetting over time, and generates a flow field that can support agent coordination. However, potential users need ....

....different pheromones, the population of each species can be estimated. The strength approaches the asymptotic fixed point as a concave exponential, giving reasonable times for stabilization. For s(0) 0, the number of time steps needed to reach a fraction 0 q 1 of the fixed point can be shown [3] to be t min = ln( 1 q) 1 E) ln(E) or less than 30 steps for 99 convergence at E = 0.8. These techniques can be applied to real world problems in two ways. Sometimes actual physical entities can move immediately in response to pheromones. If physical entities cannot tolerate the intrinsic ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Ph.D. Thesis (forthcoming) at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

....Processes in the environment generate structures that the agents perceive, thus permitting ordered behavior at the agent level. At the same time, these processes increase disorder at the micro level, so that the system as a whole becomes less ordered over time. Research in synthetic pheromones [1, 10, 11] draws directly on this model of coordination, but the model is of far broader applicability. In a multi commodity market, individual agents follow economic fields generated by myriad individual transactions, and self organization in the demand and supply of a particular commodity is supported by ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

....Techniques and Interactive Visualization) applies fine grained agent techniques to the control of air resources charged with defending a friendly region from enemy attack. Intelligence on the location and strength of enemy ( Red ) resources leads to the deposit of synthetic pheromones (SP s) [3, 12, 14] in a spatial model of the battlespace. The propagation and evaporation of SP s model the uncertainty in the available intelligence, and generate a flow field that guides friendly ( Blue ) units. In our experiments with these mechanisms, Red moves ground troops under cover of air defense toward ....

.... individual agents (providing integration of information across multiple agents and through time) evaporates them over time (thus forgetting obsolete information and avoiding overloading) and diffuses them to nearby places (generating a gradient that agents can follow) A pheromone infrastructure [3] is a software environment that supports these operations. It consists of a network of places over which agents move, and between which pheromones propagate. At any moment in time, an agent is located at a specific. This place offers it a number of services, including the ability deposit ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

....across agents in a completely distributed manner, without direct coupling of agents. The active environment that supports aggregation can be analyzed using formal models, and important parameters (e.g. time until information is available, error in approximation) can be computed for each scenario. [3] This indirect approach has many benefits: it decouples agents, off loads computation to a server (the place) without compromising agent performance or autonomy, provides forgetting over time, and generates a flow field that can support agent coordination. However, potential users need ....

S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Ph.D. Thesis (forthcoming) at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

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Brueckner S, Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thesis at Humboldt University, Berlin Department of Computer Science, 2000.

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S. Brueckner, "Return from the ant - synthetic ecosystems for manufacturing control," Ph.D. dissertation, Humboldt University, 2000.

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Brueckner S, Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thesis at Humboldt University, Berlin Department of Computer Science, 2000.

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Brueckner, S.: Return from the Ant - Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. PhD thesis, Humboldt University Berlin (2000)

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S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant - Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. PhD thesis, Humboldt University Berlin, 2000.

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S. Brueckner. Return from the Ant: Synthetic Ecosystems for Manufacturing Control. Thesis at Humboldt University Berlin, Department of Computer Science, 2000.

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