Future manufacturing environments will be flexible and highly automated with control systems built as networks of computers. These computers will be expected to be adaptable, reconfigurable and fault-tolerant, operating autonomously and yet cooperating to perform the manufacturing task. This MICRO project has focused on the infrastructure required for building distributed manufacturing control ...

In this paper we consider the structural properties of the dynamics of robotic manipulation systems of a rather general class, including multiple cooperating, possibly whole-arm limbs, interacting with a manipulated object by means of contacts. A geometric approach t o the analysis of the linearized dynamics of such systems is presented, which provides much insight in some of their intrinsic ch...

The contribution investigates new methods and tools for design of next-generation telematic systems based on hybrid teams of cooperating robots and humans. The contribution presents selected issues of building the feature of presence in such telematic systems, deals with humanrobot integration and cooperation issues together with drawbacks and benefits of the technology in question. The present...

Demand for high data rates is increasing rapidly for future wireless systems. This trend is due to the increase in the number of mobile subscribers that need bandwidth hungry multimedia applications anywhere, anytime. Fourth generation cellular systems like IMT-advanced are being developed to meet these requirements. The unreliable nature of the wireless medium is one of the main hinderance in ...

The Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ADS), born in Japan 30 years ago, have technologically evolved in communication networks, information systems, and control systems. It has been applied in many actual systems, and it has progressed in standardization activities. IEICE and IEEE published joint Special Sections on “Autonomous Decentralized Systems” in May 2000, October 2001 and December 2005,...

A fundamental problem with the development of courseware is that no instruments exist which enable the likely performance of courseware to be estimated. For such a purpose, the construction of a model of computer-assisted instruction, such as a qualitative block diagram, is essential. The block diagram is then formalized using genera1 systems theory as a framework. The genera1 systems model is ...

Agents are abstractions for real-world autonomous and cooperating entities. Agent-oriented software development is the most promising approach for the development of complex systems. On the other hand, Petri nets are a good formalism for describing concurrency, synchronisation and causality. After presenting the notion of agents, we present some thoughts on using nets in agent-oriented developm...

Appointment scheduling is a problem faced daily by many individuals and organizations. Cooperating agent systems have been developed to partially automate this task. In order to extend the circle of participants as far as possible we advocate the use of natural language transmitted by email. We demonstrate COSMA, a fully implemented German language server for existing appointment scheduling age...

A federated database system (FDBS) is a collection of cooperating database systems that are autonomous and possibly heterogeneous. In this paper, we define a reference architecture for distributed database management systems from system and schema viewpoints and show how various FDBS architectures can be developed. We then define a methodology for developing one of the popular architectures of ...