Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Multi-agent systems can play an important role in the realization of cyber-physical systems by providing intelligence, flexibility, robustness, self-adaptation, and self-organization to them. In spite of the promising perspective offered and concretized by the deployment of multi-agent systems in a few industrial systems and in several laboratory applications, its industrial adoption is far from the expected widely usage. Beside other issues, standardization is being identified as a critical aspect for this status and requires the need to be compliant with existing industrial practices but also a special effort to influence the specifications of existing standards and/or the introduction of new ones. The main objective of this paper is to analyze necessary standardization needs for applying and deploying agent-based technology in industrial environments, addressing industrial requirements imposed by different application fields.

Abstract
The increase of the use of Autonomous Vehicles in different types of environments leads to an improvement of the Localization and Navigation algorithms. The goal is to increase the levels of efficiency, security and robustness of the system, minimizing the tasks completion time. The application of cleaning robots in domestic environments have several advantages however some improvements should be performed in order to develop a robust system. Also in large spaces one robot doesn't achieve the desired performance in terms of robustness to faults and efficiency in the cleaning process. Considering a fleet of autonomous robots, this process could be improved. The purpose of our paper is the presentation of an architecture for management a fleet of cleaning robots, considering a complete coverage path planning for large and structured environments. Compartments are found in a grid-like decomposition and an area coverage strategy are evolved (optimized) by using Genetic Algorithms. The Task allocation module is based on Auctions strategy, thus obtaining cooperation under dynamic constraints in complex environments. The case study optimizes the number of robots involved in the cooperative cleaning of a full building in the campus, based on its real architectural plans.

Abstract
Joining efforts of academic and corporate teams, we developed an integration architecture - MULTIS - that enables corporate e-learning managers to use a Learning Management System (LMS) for management of educational activities in virtual worlds. This architecture was then implemented for the Formare LMS. In this paper we present this architecture and concretizations of its implementation for the Second Life Grid/OpenSimulator virtual world platforms. Current systems are focused on activities managed by individual trainers, rather than groups of trainers and large numbers of trainees: they focus on providing the LMS with information about educational activities taking place in a virtual world and/or being able to access within the virtual world some of the information stored in the LMS, and disregard the streamlining of activity setup and data collection in multi-trainer contexts, among other administrative issues. This architecture aims to overcome the limitations of existing systems for organizational management of corporate e-learning activities.

Abstract
Smart grids aim at ensuring a secure, reliable and efficient operation of power systems and for that purpose they need communications infrastructures capable of meeting different requirements. Current and emerging wireless multi-hop solutions based on standard technologies are strong candidates for communications networks associated and integrated with electric distribution grids but a suitable methodology to evaluate and deploy them is missing. This paper presents a holistic methodology supported by contextual information used to generate different scenarios of distribution grids and to evaluate and deploy wireless communications networks for smart grids. Simulation results show that the methodology is suitable for the evaluation of wireless multi-hop networks in the smart grid context and prove that the performance of such networks meets the expected requirements of different applications.