Intelligent Software Agents and Multi-agent Systems for the Lifecycle of Smart Cyber-physical System-of-Systems. 01/10/2020 - 30/09/2024

Abstract

AnSyMo (Antwerp Systems and Software Modeling) is a Computer Science research group investigating foundations, techniques, methods and tools for the design, analysis and maintenance of software-intensive systems. MICSS (Modeling Intelligente Complex Software and Systems) is a lab in AnSyMo group dedicated to the modeling of intelligent systems such as smart cyber-physical system of systems using intelligent agents and model driven engineering techniques. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) consist of tightly integrated and coordinated computational and physical elements. They are the evolution of embedded systems to a higher level of complexity, focusing on the interaction with highly uncertain physical environments (such as human interaction or wear & tear of devices). In these systems, embedded computers and networks monitor (through sensors) and control (through actuators) the physical processes, usually with feedback loops where physical processes and computations affect each other. The computational part of these systems plays a key role and needs to be developed in a way that can handle uncertain situations with the limited resources (including computational resource, memory resource, communication resource, and so on), mostly in real-time. With IoT and Industry 4.0 maturing, these systems are getting interconnected and making a complex larger system called the Cyber-physical System of Systems (CPSoS) to serve in more sophisticated tasks. In these systems, CPSs are working as part of a large system that is spatially distributed, has no central control, has autonomous subsystems, is dynamically configured, has emergent behaviour, and is continually evolving, even at runtime. A key point in CPSoS is to obtain knowledge out of the information that is collected by distributed monitoring of the environment, using artificial intelligence techniques. This knowledge can improve the control and feedback mechanism. Further, these capabilities lead to the smart systems of the future with timely and more accurate decisions and actions, called Smart CPSoS (sCPSoS), which can help to address a number of social, industrial, and environmental issues. This project aims to address the challenges of sCPSoS using intelligent agents and model-driven engineering techniques.

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  • Research Project