Emerging pervasive computing services will typically involve a large number of devices and service components cooperating together in an open and dynamic environment. This calls for suitable models and infrastructures promoting spontaneous, situated, and self-adaptive interactions between components. SAPERE (Self-Aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems) is a general coordination framework aimed at facilitating the decentralized and situated execution of self-organizing and self-adaptive pervasive computing services. SAPERE adopts a nature-inspired approach, in which pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services and devices, all of which interact in accord to a limited set of coordination laws, or eco-laws. In this article, we present the overall rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference architecture. We introduce the eco-laws--based coordination model and show how it can be used to express and easily enforce general-purpose self-organizing coordination patterns. The middleware infrastructure supporting the SAPERE model is presented and evaluated, and the overall advantages of SAPERE are discussed in the context of exemplary use cases.
{"title":"Engineering Pervasive Service Ecosystems: The SAPERE Approach","authors":"G. Castelli, M. Mamei, A. Rosi, F. Zambonelli","doi":"10.1145/2700321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2700321","url":null,"abstract":"Emerging pervasive computing services will typically involve a large number of devices and service components cooperating together in an open and dynamic environment. This calls for suitable models and infrastructures promoting spontaneous, situated, and self-adaptive interactions between components. SAPERE (Self-Aware Pervasive Service Ecosystems) is a general coordination framework aimed at facilitating the decentralized and situated execution of self-organizing and self-adaptive pervasive computing services. SAPERE adopts a nature-inspired approach, in which pervasive services are modeled and deployed as autonomous individuals in an ecosystem of other services and devices, all of which interact in accord to a limited set of coordination laws, or eco-laws. In this article, we present the overall rationale underlying SAPERE and its reference architecture. We introduce the eco-laws--based coordination model and show how it can be used to express and easily enforce general-purpose self-organizing coordination patterns. The middleware infrastructure supporting the SAPERE model is presented and evaluated, and the overall advantages of SAPERE are discussed in the context of exemplary use cases.","PeriodicalId":50919,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2015-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85388145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In multiplex networks, agents are connected by multiple types of links; a multiplex network can be split into more than one network layer that is composed of the same type of links and involved agents. Each network link type has a bias for communicating different types of resources; thus, the task’s access to the required resources in multiplex networks is strongly related to the network link types. However, traditional task allocation and load balancing methods only considered the situations of agents themselves and did not address the effects of network link types in multiplex networks. To solve this problem, this article considers both link types and agents, and substantially extends the existing work by highlighting the effect of network layers on task allocation and load balancing. Two multiplex network-adapted models of task allocation with load balancing are presented: network layer-oriented allocation and agent-oriented allocation. This article also addresses the unreliability in multiplex networks, which includes the unreliable links and agents, and implements a reliable task allocation based on a negotiation reputation and reward mechanism. Our findings show that both of our presented models can effectively and robustly satisfy the task allocation objectives in unreliable multiplex networks; the experiments prove that they can significantly reduce the time costs and improve the success rate of tasks for multiplex networks over the traditional simplex network-adapted task allocation model. Lastly, we find that our presented network layer-oriented allocation performs much better in terms of reliability and allocation time compared to our presented agent-oriented allocation, which further explains the importance of network layers in multiplex networks.
{"title":"Reliable Task Allocation with Load Balancing in Multiplex Networks","authors":"Yichuan Jiang, Yifeng Zhou, Yunpeng Li","doi":"10.1145/2700327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2700327","url":null,"abstract":"In multiplex networks, agents are connected by multiple types of links; a multiplex network can be split into more than one network layer that is composed of the same type of links and involved agents. Each network link type has a bias for communicating different types of resources; thus, the task’s access to the required resources in multiplex networks is strongly related to the network link types. However, traditional task allocation and load balancing methods only considered the situations of agents themselves and did not address the effects of network link types in multiplex networks. To solve this problem, this article considers both link types and agents, and substantially extends the existing work by highlighting the effect of network layers on task allocation and load balancing. Two multiplex network-adapted models of task allocation with load balancing are presented: network layer-oriented allocation and agent-oriented allocation. This article also addresses the unreliability in multiplex networks, which includes the unreliable links and agents, and implements a reliable task allocation based on a negotiation reputation and reward mechanism. Our findings show that both of our presented models can effectively and robustly satisfy the task allocation objectives in unreliable multiplex networks; the experiments prove that they can significantly reduce the time costs and improve the success rate of tasks for multiplex networks over the traditional simplex network-adapted task allocation model. Lastly, we find that our presented network layer-oriented allocation performs much better in terms of reliability and allocation time compared to our presented agent-oriented allocation, which further explains the importance of network layers in multiplex networks.","PeriodicalId":50919,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2015-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81463500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Peter Vrancx, Pasquale Gurzi, Abdel Rodríguez, K. Steenhaut, A. Nowé
In today’s Internet, the commercial aspects of routing are gaining importance. Current technology allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to renegotiate contracts online to maximize profits. Changing link prices will influence interdomain routing policies that are now driven by monetary aspects as well as global resource and performance optimization. In this article, we consider an interdomain routing game in which the ISP’s action is to set the price for its transit links. Assuming a cheapest path routing scheme, the optimal action is the price setting that yields the highest utility (i.e., profit) and depends both on the network load and the actions of other ISPs. We adapt a continuous and a discrete action learning automaton (LA) to operate in this framework as a tool that can be used by ISP operators to learn optimal price setting. In our model, agents representing different ISPs learn only on the basis of local information and do not need any central coordination or sensitive information exchange. Simulation results show that a single ISP employing LAs is able to learn the optimal price in a stationary environment. By introducing a selective exploration rule, LAs are also able to operate in nonstationary environments. When two ISPs employ LAs, we show that they converge to stable and fair equilibrium strategies.
{"title":"A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Interdomain Routing with Link Prices","authors":"Peter Vrancx, Pasquale Gurzi, Abdel Rodríguez, K. Steenhaut, A. Nowé","doi":"10.1145/2719648","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2719648","url":null,"abstract":"In today’s Internet, the commercial aspects of routing are gaining importance. Current technology allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to renegotiate contracts online to maximize profits. Changing link prices will influence interdomain routing policies that are now driven by monetary aspects as well as global resource and performance optimization. In this article, we consider an interdomain routing game in which the ISP’s action is to set the price for its transit links. Assuming a cheapest path routing scheme, the optimal action is the price setting that yields the highest utility (i.e., profit) and depends both on the network load and the actions of other ISPs. We adapt a continuous and a discrete action learning automaton (LA) to operate in this framework as a tool that can be used by ISP operators to learn optimal price setting. In our model, agents representing different ISPs learn only on the basis of local information and do not need any central coordination or sensitive information exchange. Simulation results show that a single ISP employing LAs is able to learn the optimal price in a stationary environment. By introducing a selective exploration rule, LAs are also able to operate in nonstationary environments. When two ISPs employ LAs, we show that they converge to stable and fair equilibrium strategies.","PeriodicalId":50919,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2015-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87242898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Performance improvement and energy efficiency are two important goals in provisioning Internet services in datacenter servers. In this article, we propose and develop a self-tuning request batching mechanism to simultaneously achieve the two correlated goals. The batching mechanism increases the cache hit rate at the front-tier Web server, which provides the opportunity to improve an application’s performance and the energy efficiency of the server system. The core of the batching mechanism is a novel and practical two-layer control system that adaptively adjusts the batching interval and frequency states of CPUs according to the service level agreement and the workload characteristics. The batching control adopts a self-tuning fuzzy model predictive control approach for application performance improvement. The power control dynamically adjusts the frequency of Central Processing Units (CPUs) with Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) in response to workload fluctuations for energy efficiency. A coordinator between the two control loops achieves the desired performance and energy efficiency. We further extend the self-tuning batching with DVFS approach from a single-server system to a multiserver system. It relies on a MIMO expert fuzzy control to adjust the CPU frequencies of multiple servers and coordinate the frequency states of CPUs at different tiers. We implement the mechanism in a test bed. Experimental results demonstrate that the new approach significantly improves the application performance in terms of the system throughput and average response time. At the same time, the results also illustrate the mechanism can reduce the energy consumption of a single-server system by 13% and a multiserver system by 11%, respectively.
{"title":"Self-Tuning Batching with DVFS for Performance Improvement and Energy Efficiency in Internet Servers","authors":"Dazhao Cheng, Yanfei Guo, Changjun Jiang, Xiaobo Zhou","doi":"10.1145/2720023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2720023","url":null,"abstract":"Performance improvement and energy efficiency are two important goals in provisioning Internet services in datacenter servers. In this article, we propose and develop a self-tuning request batching mechanism to simultaneously achieve the two correlated goals. The batching mechanism increases the cache hit rate at the front-tier Web server, which provides the opportunity to improve an application’s performance and the energy efficiency of the server system. The core of the batching mechanism is a novel and practical two-layer control system that adaptively adjusts the batching interval and frequency states of CPUs according to the service level agreement and the workload characteristics. The batching control adopts a self-tuning fuzzy model predictive control approach for application performance improvement. The power control dynamically adjusts the frequency of Central Processing Units (CPUs) with Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) in response to workload fluctuations for energy efficiency. A coordinator between the two control loops achieves the desired performance and energy efficiency. We further extend the self-tuning batching with DVFS approach from a single-server system to a multiserver system. It relies on a MIMO expert fuzzy control to adjust the CPU frequencies of multiple servers and coordinate the frequency states of CPUs at different tiers. We implement the mechanism in a test bed. Experimental results demonstrate that the new approach significantly improves the application performance in terms of the system throughput and average response time. At the same time, the results also illustrate the mechanism can reduce the energy consumption of a single-server system by 13% and a multiserver system by 11%, respectively.","PeriodicalId":50919,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2015-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84892693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The complexity of systems is considered an obstacle to the progress of the IT industry. Autonomic computing is presented as the alternative to cope with the growing complexity. It is a holistic approach, in which the systems are able to configure, heal, optimize, and protect by themselves. Web-based applications are an example of systems where the complexity is high. The number of components, their interoperability, and workload variations are factors that may lead to performance failures or unavailability scenarios. The occurrence of these scenarios affects the revenue and reputation of businesses that rely on these types of applications. In this article, we present a self-healing framework for Web-based applications (SHõWA). SHõWA is composed by several modules, which monitor the application, analyze the data to detect and pinpoint anomalies, and execute recovery actions autonomously. The monitoring is done by a small aspect-oriented programming agent. This agent does not require changes to the application source code and includes adaptive and selective algorithms to regulate the level of monitoring. The anomalies are detected and pinpointed by means of statistical correlation. The data analysis detects changes in the server response time and analyzes if those changes are correlated with the workload or are due to a performance anomaly. In the presence of performance anomalies, the data analysis pinpoints the anomaly. Upon the pinpointing of anomalies, SHõWA executes a recovery procedure. We also present a study about the detection and localization of anomalies, the accuracy of the data analysis, and the performance impact induced by SHõWA. Two benchmarking applications, exercised through dynamic workloads, and different types of anomaly were considered in the study. The results reveal that (1) the capacity of SHõWA to detect and pinpoint anomalies while the number of end users affected is low; (2) SHõWA was able to detect anomalies without raising any false alarm; and (3) SHõWA does not induce a significant performance overhead (throughput was affected in less than 1%, and the response time delay was no more than 2 milliseconds).
{"title":"SHõWA: A Self-Healing Framework for Web-Based Applications","authors":"J. Magalhães, L. Silva","doi":"10.1145/2700325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2700325","url":null,"abstract":"The complexity of systems is considered an obstacle to the progress of the IT industry. Autonomic computing is presented as the alternative to cope with the growing complexity. It is a holistic approach, in which the systems are able to configure, heal, optimize, and protect by themselves. Web-based applications are an example of systems where the complexity is high. The number of components, their interoperability, and workload variations are factors that may lead to performance failures or unavailability scenarios. The occurrence of these scenarios affects the revenue and reputation of businesses that rely on these types of applications.\u0000 In this article, we present a self-healing framework for Web-based applications (SHõWA). SHõWA is composed by several modules, which monitor the application, analyze the data to detect and pinpoint anomalies, and execute recovery actions autonomously. The monitoring is done by a small aspect-oriented programming agent. This agent does not require changes to the application source code and includes adaptive and selective algorithms to regulate the level of monitoring. The anomalies are detected and pinpointed by means of statistical correlation. The data analysis detects changes in the server response time and analyzes if those changes are correlated with the workload or are due to a performance anomaly. In the presence of performance anomalies, the data analysis pinpoints the anomaly. Upon the pinpointing of anomalies, SHõWA executes a recovery procedure. We also present a study about the detection and localization of anomalies, the accuracy of the data analysis, and the performance impact induced by SHõWA. Two benchmarking applications, exercised through dynamic workloads, and different types of anomaly were considered in the study. The results reveal that (1) the capacity of SHõWA to detect and pinpoint anomalies while the number of end users affected is low; (2) SHõWA was able to detect anomalies without raising any false alarm; and (3) SHõWA does not induce a significant performance overhead (throughput was affected in less than 1%, and the response time delay was no more than 2 milliseconds).","PeriodicalId":50919,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2015-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88086653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) offer a formal model for planning in cooperative multiagent systems where agents operate with noisy sensors and actuators, as well as local information. Prevalent solution techniques are centralized and model based—limitations that we address by distributed reinforcement learning (RL). We particularly favor alternate learning, where agents alternately learn best responses to each other, which appears to outperform concurrent RL. However, alternate learning requires an initial policy. We propose two principled approaches to generating informed initial policies: a naive approach that lays the foundation for a more sophisticated approach. We empirically demonstrate that the refined approach produces near-optimal solutions in many challenging benchmark settings, staking a claim to being an efficient (and realistic) approximate solver in its own right. Furthermore, alternate best response learning seeded with such policies quickly learns high-quality policies as well.
{"title":"Reinforcement Learning of Informed Initial Policies for Decentralized Planning","authors":"Landon Kraemer, Bikramjit Banerjee","doi":"10.1145/2668130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2668130","url":null,"abstract":"Decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) offer a formal model for planning in cooperative multiagent systems where agents operate with noisy sensors and actuators, as well as local information. Prevalent solution techniques are centralized and model based—limitations that we address by distributed reinforcement learning (RL). We particularly favor alternate learning, where agents alternately learn best responses to each other, which appears to outperform concurrent RL. However, alternate learning requires an initial policy. We propose two principled approaches to generating informed initial policies: a naive approach that lays the foundation for a more sophisticated approach. We empirically demonstrate that the refined approach produces near-optimal solutions in many challenging benchmark settings, staking a claim to being an efficient (and realistic) approximate solver in its own right. Furthermore, alternate best response learning seeded with such policies quickly learns high-quality policies as well.","PeriodicalId":50919,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2015-01-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90207190","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A data-centric joint adaptive sampling and sleep scheduling solution, SILENCE, for autonomic sensor-based systems that monitor and reconstruct physical or environmental phenomena is proposed. Adaptive sampling and sleep scheduling can help realize the much needed resource efficiency by minimizing the communication and processing overhead in densely deployed autonomic sensor-based systems. The proposed solution exploits the spatiotemporal correlation in sensed data and eliminates redundancy in transmitted data through selective representation without compromising on accuracy of reconstruction of the monitored phenomenon at a remote monitor node. Differently from existing adaptive sampling solutions, SILENCE employs temporal causality analysis to not only track the variation in the underlying phenomenon but also its cause and direction of propagation in the field. The causality analysis and the same correlations are then leveraged for adaptive sleep scheduling aimed at saving energy in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). SILENCE outperforms traditional adaptive sampling solutions as well as the recently proposed compressive sampling techniques. Real experiments were performed on a WSN testbed monitoring temperature and humidity distribution in a rack of servers, and the simulations were performed on TOSSIM, the TinyOS simulator.
{"title":"Distributed Data-Centric Adaptive Sampling for Cyber-Physical Systems","authors":"Eun Kyung Lee, H. Viswanathan, D. Pompili","doi":"10.1145/2644820","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2644820","url":null,"abstract":"A data-centric joint adaptive sampling and sleep scheduling solution, SILENCE, for autonomic sensor-based systems that monitor and reconstruct physical or environmental phenomena is proposed. Adaptive sampling and sleep scheduling can help realize the much needed resource efficiency by minimizing the communication and processing overhead in densely deployed autonomic sensor-based systems. The proposed solution exploits the spatiotemporal correlation in sensed data and eliminates redundancy in transmitted data through selective representation without compromising on accuracy of reconstruction of the monitored phenomenon at a remote monitor node. Differently from existing adaptive sampling solutions, SILENCE employs temporal causality analysis to not only track the variation in the underlying phenomenon but also its cause and direction of propagation in the field. The causality analysis and the same correlations are then leveraged for adaptive sleep scheduling aimed at saving energy in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). SILENCE outperforms traditional adaptive sampling solutions as well as the recently proposed compressive sampling techniques. Real experiments were performed on a WSN testbed monitoring temperature and humidity distribution in a rack of servers, and the simulations were performed on TOSSIM, the TinyOS simulator.","PeriodicalId":50919,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2015-01-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82799988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Manuele Brambilla, A. Brutschy, M. Dorigo, M. Birattari
In this article, we present property-driven design, a novel top-down design method for robot swarms based on prescriptive modeling and model checking. Traditionally, robot swarms have been developed using a code-and-fix approach: in a bottom-up iterative process, the developer tests and improves the individual behaviors of the robots until the desired collective behavior is obtained. The code-and-fix approach is unstructured, and the quality of the obtained swarm depends completely on the expertise and ingenuity of the developer who has little scientific or technical support in his activity. Property-driven design aims at providing such scientific and technical support, with many advantages compared to the traditional unstructured approach. Property-driven design is composed of four phases: first, the developer formally specifies the requirements of the robot swarm by stating its desired properties; second, the developer creates a prescriptive model of the swarm and uses model checking to verify that this prescriptive model satisfies the desired properties; third, using the prescriptive model as a blueprint, the developer implements a simulated version of the desired robot swarm and validates the prescriptive model developed in the previous step; fourth, the developer implements the desired robot swarm and validates the previous steps. We demonstrate property-driven design using two case studies: aggregation and foraging.
{"title":"Property-Driven Design for Robot Swarms: A Design Method Based on Prescriptive Modeling and Model Checking","authors":"Manuele Brambilla, A. Brutschy, M. Dorigo, M. Birattari","doi":"10.1145/2700318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2700318","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we present property-driven design, a novel top-down design method for robot swarms based on prescriptive modeling and model checking. Traditionally, robot swarms have been developed using a code-and-fix approach: in a bottom-up iterative process, the developer tests and improves the individual behaviors of the robots until the desired collective behavior is obtained. The code-and-fix approach is unstructured, and the quality of the obtained swarm depends completely on the expertise and ingenuity of the developer who has little scientific or technical support in his activity. Property-driven design aims at providing such scientific and technical support, with many advantages compared to the traditional unstructured approach. Property-driven design is composed of four phases: first, the developer formally specifies the requirements of the robot swarm by stating its desired properties; second, the developer creates a prescriptive model of the swarm and uses model checking to verify that this prescriptive model satisfies the desired properties; third, using the prescriptive model as a blueprint, the developer implements a simulated version of the desired robot swarm and validates the prescriptive model developed in the previous step; fourth, the developer implements the desired robot swarm and validates the previous steps. We demonstrate property-driven design using two case studies: aggregation and foraging.","PeriodicalId":50919,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2015-01-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88253096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Most previous works on coordination in cooperative multiagent systems study the problem of how two (or more) players can coordinate on Pareto-optimal Nash equilibrium(s) through fixed and repeated interactions in the context of cooperative games. However, in practical complex environments, the interactions between agents can be sparse, and each agent's interacting partners may change frequently and randomly. To this end, we investigate the multiagent coordination problems in cooperative environments under a social learning framework. We consider a large population of agents where each agent interacts with another agent randomly chosen from the population in each round. Each agent learns its policy through repeated interactions with the rest of the agents via social learning. It is not clear a priori if all agents can learn a consistent optimal coordination policy in such a situation. We distinguish two different types of learners depending on the amount of information each agent can perceive: individual action learner and joint action learner. The learning performance of both types of learners is evaluated under a number of challenging deterministic and stochastic cooperative games, and the influence of the information sharing degree on the learning performance also is investigated—a key difference from the learning framework involving repeated interactions among fixed agents.
{"title":"Multiagent Reinforcement Social Learning toward Coordination in Cooperative Multiagent Systems","authors":"Jianye Hao, Ho-fung Leung, Zhong Ming","doi":"10.1145/2644819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2644819","url":null,"abstract":"Most previous works on coordination in cooperative multiagent systems study the problem of how two (or more) players can coordinate on Pareto-optimal Nash equilibrium(s) through fixed and repeated interactions in the context of cooperative games. However, in practical complex environments, the interactions between agents can be sparse, and each agent's interacting partners may change frequently and randomly. To this end, we investigate the multiagent coordination problems in cooperative environments under a social learning framework. We consider a large population of agents where each agent interacts with another agent randomly chosen from the population in each round. Each agent learns its policy through repeated interactions with the rest of the agents via social learning. It is not clear a priori if all agents can learn a consistent optimal coordination policy in such a situation. We distinguish two different types of learners depending on the amount of information each agent can perceive: individual action learner and joint action learner. The learning performance of both types of learners is evaluated under a number of challenging deterministic and stochastic cooperative games, and the influence of the information sharing degree on the learning performance also is investigated—a key difference from the learning framework involving repeated interactions among fixed agents.","PeriodicalId":50919,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2015-01-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86153088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cloud data centers are becoming the preferred deployment environment for a wide range of business applications because they provide many benefits compared to private in-house infrastructure. However, the traditional approach of using a single cloud has several limitations in terms of availability, avoiding vendor lock-in, and providing legislation-compliant services with suitable Quality of Experience (QoE) to users worldwide. One way for cloud clients to mitigate these issues is to use multiple clouds (i.e., a Multi-Cloud). In this article, we introduce an approach for deploying three-tier applications across multiple clouds in order to satisfy their key nonfunctional requirements. We propose adaptive, dynamic, and reactive resource provisioning and load distribution algorithms that heuristically optimize overall cost and response delays without violating essential legislative and regulatory requirements. Our simulation with realistic workload, network, and cloud characteristics shows that our method improves the state of the art in terms of availability, regulatory compliance, and QoE with acceptable sacrifice in cost and latency.
{"title":"Multi-Cloud Provisioning and Load Distribution for Three-Tier Applications","authors":"N. Grozev, R. Buyya","doi":"10.1145/2662112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2662112","url":null,"abstract":"Cloud data centers are becoming the preferred deployment environment for a wide range of business applications because they provide many benefits compared to private in-house infrastructure. However, the traditional approach of using a single cloud has several limitations in terms of availability, avoiding vendor lock-in, and providing legislation-compliant services with suitable Quality of Experience (QoE) to users worldwide. One way for cloud clients to mitigate these issues is to use multiple clouds (i.e., a Multi-Cloud). In this article, we introduce an approach for deploying three-tier applications across multiple clouds in order to satisfy their key nonfunctional requirements. We propose adaptive, dynamic, and reactive resource provisioning and load distribution algorithms that heuristically optimize overall cost and response delays without violating essential legislative and regulatory requirements. Our simulation with realistic workload, network, and cloud characteristics shows that our method improves the state of the art in terms of availability, regulatory compliance, and QoE with acceptable sacrifice in cost and latency.","PeriodicalId":50919,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2014-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82342934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}