Flexible Automation as a topic of research has been around for at least a half century. In the late 70’s, flexible manufacturing cell/systems (MFC/MFS) started playing pivotal roles in modern industry, in particular automobile industry. However, the journey of going from a theory or vision to an art or reality did not end there and then. In the last two decades, flexible automation has taken on...

There is an increasing interest in the concept of intelligent environments where a closed or delimited public space (shopping mall, station, museum, hospital etc) is endowed with some automatic ability to interpret human behavior. Intelligent environments interact with their users, aiding, serving and pre-emptying them. In a not too distant future, this paradigm in Europe called ambient intelli...

Intelligent environments are an interesting development and research application problem for multi-agent systems. The functional and spatial distribution of tasks naturally lends itself to a multi-agent model and the existence of shared resources creates interactions over which the agents must coordinate. In the UMASS Intelligent Home project we have designed and implemented a set of distribute...

on September 14–17, 2005, organized by INSTICC in cooperation with the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya. This conference was built on the success achieved in its first edition, in 2004, and aims at representing a major forum to debate technical advances presented by researchers and developers, both from academia and industry, working in the conference areas. Informatics applications are per...

The trust placed in automated diagnostic aids by the human operator is one of the most critical psychological factors that influences operator reliance on decision support systems. Studies examining the nature of human interaction with automation have revealed that users have a propensity to apply norms of human-human interpersonal interaction to their interaction with ‘intelligent machines’. N...

Recent technological advancements have increased the likelihood that smart home technologies will become part of our everyday environments. However, many of these technologies are brittle and do not adapt to the user’s wishes or changes in residents’ habits and lifestyle. Here we introduce CASAS, an adaptive smart home that utilizes machine learning techniques to discover patterns in user behav...

Due to a growing older population, researchers and industry are paying more attention to the needs of this group of people. Ambient Intelligence (AmI) aims to help people in their daily lives, achieving a more natural interaction of users with an electronic home environment. Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) arise as a natural interface between humans and AmI. Our contribution is to present...

This paper proposes a framework for distributed management of network faults by software agents. Intelligent network agents with advanced reasoning capabilities address many of the issues for the distribution of processing and control in network management. The agents detect, correlate and selectively seek to derive a clear explanation of alarms generated in their domain. The causal relationshi...

Currently industrial automation systems are built using a hierarchical top-down approach, yielding tightly coupled and low flexibility systems. Holonic and intelligent agent-based industrial control systems have the potential to be much more highly robust and flexible systems with very loose coupling between subsystems. Despite this potential these systems are slow to be adopted by industry. Th...

An electric power system includes a generating, a transmission, a distribution, and consumers subsystems. An electrical power network in Tanzania keeps growing larger by the day and become more complex so that, most utilities have long wished for real-time monitoring and remote control of electrical power system elements such as substations, intelligent devices, power lines, capacitor banks, fe...