Engineering Sustainable and Adaptive Systems in Dynamic and Unpredictable Environments

Cardoso, Rui P.; Rossetti, Rosaldo J. F.; Hart, Emma; Kurka, David Burth; Pitt, Jeremy

Abstract

Electronic institutions are socially-inspired multi-agent systems, typically operating under a set of policies, which are required to determine system operation and to deal with violations and other non-compliant behaviour. They are often faced with a dynamic population of agents, social network, and environment and their policy should suit this context. However, there is usually a large
space of possible system policies, but no tractable systematic method to find an appropriate policy given a joint state of the population, social network, and the environment. We have developed a model of an energy system which en-compasses several inter-connected community energy systems. We propose two methods, an offline and an online procedure, which enable this system model to approximately optimise its performance through adaptation and evolution of its operating policy. The policies evolved by our procedures clearly outperform a baseline policy we have designed by hand. Both procedures return policies which are appropriate for a system, given some performance criterion, without a human
designer's intervention. This could lay the foundations for the development of a new methodological paradigm for the engineering of collective adaptive systems.

Citation

Cardoso, R. P., Rossetti, R. J. F., Hart, E., Kurka, D. B., & Pitt, J. (2018, November). Engineering Sustainable and Adaptive Systems in Dynamic and Unpredictable Environments. Presented at 8th International Symposium, ISoLA 2018, Limassol, Cyprus

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 8th International Symposium, ISoLA 2018
• Start Date: Nov 5, 2018
• End Date: Nov 9, 2018
• Acceptance Date: Jun 25, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Oct 31, 2018
• Publication Date: Oct 31, 2018
• Deposit Date: Feb 15, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 15, 2019
• Print ISSN: 0302-9743
• Publisher: Springer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 221-240
• Series Title: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Series Number: 11246
• Series ISSN: 0302-9743
• Book Title: Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Distributed Systems
• ISBN: 9783030034238
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03424-5_15
• Keywords: Adaptive Systems, Dynamic, Unpredictable, Environments,
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1586071
• Contract Date: Feb 15, 2019