This paper addresses the problem of enabling a group of autonomous vehicles to effectively patrol an environment significantly larger than their communication and sensing radii. The environment is divided into smaller areas and special coordinator vehicles are designated to control the transfer of the other vehicles from one area to another. Our past work showed that by organizing the areas and...

In this paper, we present an approach to safety scheduling in distributed computing based on strategies of resource co-allocation for complex sets of tasks (jobs). The necessity of guaranteed job execution until the time limits requires taking into account the distributed environment dynamics, namely, changes in the number of jobs for servicing, volumes of computations, possible failures of pro...

Networks of cooperating peers are a new exciting paradigm for evaluating queries in a distributed environment. In this scenario, a query originated at a peer propagates through the network, and the overall result is obtained by aggregating those returned by the peers involved in the evaluation. In this paper we consider the relevant case of preference queries, in which the user is interested in...

We present here a distributed problem-solving testbed, which we use for experimental analysis of the relationships among distributed problem structure, inter-agent communication and coordination strategies, and problem-solving performance. Distributed problems in our system are represented as distributed CSPs. The testbed consists of two parameterized components: (1) a problem generator, for th...

In this paper we report on query processing experiments that were performed in one distributed data base environment. In this environment we compared the strategy produced by a collection of algorithms on the basis of number of bytes moved. Among other conclusions we found that limited search algorithms do not perform very well compared to algorithms which exhaust all possible processing plans.

In this paper, we cast the problem of managing traac ow in terms of a distributed collection of independent agents that adapt to their environment. We describe an evolutionary algorithm that learns strategies for lane selection, using local information, on a simulated highway that contains hundreds of agents. Experimental studies suggest that the learned controllers lead to better traac ow than...

We consider the problem of searching a set of data repositories, each managed by an independent agent which is able to handle queries from users, as well as queries from peer agents. Given a query, an agent’s task is to find a closest match to the query over all the distributed databases. The agents search the distributed databases cooperatively by routing queries with each other. However, it i...

We study the problems of reaching a specific control state, or converging to a set of target states, in networks with a parameterized number of identical processes communicating via broadcast. To reflect the distributed aspect of such networks, we restrict our attention to executions in which all the processes must follow the same local strategy that, given their past performed actions and rece...

Many components of the IS are constructed as modular units which do not need to communicate with each other such that the number of components increases but the size remains constant. However, a sub-modular IS architecture in which lymph node number and size both increase sublinearly with body size is shown to efficiently balance the requirements of communication and migration, consistent with ...