Adaptation and Evolution in Dynamic Persistent Environments

The research focuses on methods and software tools for decision support for the organization of distributed production of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) based on digital twin and multi-agent systems technologies. The purpose of the work is to provide a critical review of existing approaches to the organization of distributed production of UAVs, as complex technical objects, and to substantiate an approach to building a multi-agent decision support system for the synthesis of a rational production structure based on digital twins of participants in production cooperation. The tasks include: classifying unmanned aerial vehicles according to the main features that determine their production specifics; analysing modern scientific publications in the field of distributed production informatization, multi-agent systems, digital twins and intelligent decision support; identifying the limitations of existing solutions; and proposing an approach to the organization of distributed production of UAVs using digital twins in the form of intelligent agents. The applied methods are based on system and classification analysis, generalization of modern scientific approaches to the organization of production, decision-making theory, the concept of multi-agent systems, digital twin technologies, production logistics and artificial intelligence. The following results were obtained: UAVs were classified by mass, purpose and level of autonomy, which made it possible to determine the specifics of their production and life cycle management. An analysis of scientific publications was performed, which showed the active development of areas related to the use of multi-agent systems, digital twins and artificial intelligence to address complex tasks in UAV life cycle management. It was established, in particular, that the works of recent years consider the issues of cooperative UAV production, the use of deep learning algorithms for decision-making in dynamic environments and the integration of digital twins into relevant production systems. At the same time, a number of limitations on the implementation of existing solutions were identified: insufficient formalization of business processes between production participants, weak integration of digital twins into production logistics, and the lack of self-organization mechanisms. An approach to solving the problem of effective organization of distributed UAV production is proposed. The architecture of a multi-agent decision support system for distributed UAV production is developed, which includes modules for coordination, self-organization, and the evaluation of the effectiveness of production configuration options, considering the initial risk tolerance indicator. Conclusions. The scientific novelty of the results obtained is as follows: an approach to solving the problem of effective organization of distributed UAV production is proposed, which, unlike existing ones, is based on the representation of production participants as digital twins in the form of intelligent agents, this enables the generation of multiple options and the subsequent selection of the most rational configuration for organizing distributed UAV production in terms of business process efficiency and the reduction of production risks. The research results create a basis for further integration of multi-agent technologies into real-world manufacturing platforms and the expansion of their application to other types of complex machinery.

This paper proposes a classification framework to help with the understanding and integration of contributions in the field of adaptive multi-agent systems. This framework is used to highlight gaps in the field and derive directions for further research. The need for this framework has arisen from the proliferation of fragmented streams of research, aiming to enable adaptation of agent systems to rapidly changing circumstances and requirements. Multi-agent systems are purported to provide flexible support for users and organisations in dynamic and complex open environments because of their capabilities of autonomous problem-solving. However, exploring the boundaries of flexibility quickly uncovers limitations when agents have to adapt to situations which have not been considered during design time. This issue has been addressed by different research groups using approaches such as flexible systems, evolutionary computation, control systems, and complex adaptive systems. Nevertheless, exchange of ideas between different groups is rare, and systematic analysis of achievements is overdue. The classification framework proposed here is used for such analysis and covers both the analysis and the results in terms of directions for future work.Keywordsadaptive multi-agent systemsclassification frameworkecosystem

Welcome to the Eighth Annual Workshop on Evolutionary Computation and Multi-Agent Systems and Simulation (ECoMASS 2014)! Evolutionary computation (EC) and multi-agent systems and simulation (MASS) both involve populations of agents. EC is a learning technique by which populations of individual agents adapt according to the selection pressures exerted by an environment; MASS seeks to understand how to coordinate the actions of a population of (possibly selfish) autonomous agents that share an environment so that some outcome is achieved. Both EC and MASS have top-down and bottom up features. For example, some aspects of multi-agent system engineering (e.g., mechanism design) are concerned with how top-down structure can constrain or influence individual decisions. Similarly, most work in EC is concerned with how to engineer selective pressures to drive the evolution of individual behavior towards some desired goal. Multi-agent simulation (also called agent-based modeling) addresses the bottom-up issue of how collective behavior emerges from individual action. Likewise, the study of evolutionary dynamics within EC (for example in coevolution) often considers how population-level phenomena emerge from individual-level interactions. Thus, at a high level, we may view EC and MASS as examining and utilizing analogous processes. It is therefore natural to consider how knowledge gained within EC may be relevant to MASS, and vice versa; indeed, applications and techniques from one field have often made use of technologies and algorithms from the other field. Studying EC and MASS in combination is warranted and has the potential to contribute to both fields. The ECoMASS Workshop at GECCO has a successful history as a forum for exploring precisely this intersection, and we are looking forward to another year of stimulating discussion, bringing together experts as well as novices in both areas, to engage in dialogue about their work. This year's participants bring a variety of topics for discussion, including migratory flows, the beating of the heart, embedded systems, pelotons and cyclists, and flocking behavior. This year, we will also be adding a research slam. We will be inviting presenters who are presenting in the general conference to give us a quick presentation about their work. We hope that this will further encourage additional lively discussion about a wide range of topics. We also encourage presenters to demonstrate their software live during a breakout session, enabling additional opportunities for one-on-one dialogue and discussion of actual running systems. Through these additions to the workshop, we hope to continue to innovate, and develop the conversations around the interesting intersection of evolutionary computation and multi-agent systems and simulations!

A key difficulty in the design of multi-agent robotic systems is the size and complexity of the space of possible designs. In order to make principled design decisions, an understanding of the many possible system configurations is essential. To this end, we present a taxonomy that classifies multi-agent systems according to communication, computational and other capabilities. We survey existing efforts involving multi-agent systems according to their positions in the taxonomy. We also present additional results concerning multi-agent systems, with the dual purposes of illustrating the usefulness of the taxonomy in simplifying discourse about robot collective properties, and also demonstrating that a collective can be demonstrably more powerful than a single unit of the collective.

In Multi-Agent System (MAS), developers concentrate on creating design models and evolving them, from higher level models to lower level models, in several steps. Considerable part of MAS implementations is automatically produced from the design models. If a design model contains faults, they are passed to the generated implementations. Practical model validation techniques are required to discover and delete faults in abstract design models. In this paper, we introduce a formal approach for MAS design testing. It specifies a testing process that complements Multi-agent Systems Engineering (MaSE) methodology and strengthens the mutual relationship between UML and MAS. Besides, it defines a structured and comprehensive testing process for engineering software agents at the design level by providing a systematic way of converting the MAS design models to UML design diagram. Then a Petri Net (PN) diagram is generated from the UML models to simulate the behavior of the MAS system. Finally, because Petri Nets (PNs) are formal models, their analysis techniques can be applied to automatic MAS behavioral testing.

A client-server network is one of the most important topics in a computer network. In this work, a real-time computer control system is designed based on the Client-Server Model for a Multi-Agent Mobile Robot System (CSM-MAMRS) and is applied to a building that consists of (N) floors and uses one mobile robot on each floor that has specific actions in different types of environments. The new proposed CSM-MAMRS consists of four layers. The first stage manages the network communication for each agent. The second stage solves the major problems of path planning by using a proposed hybrid algorithm that combines the Rapidly Exploring Random Tree Star (RRT*) and the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms in order to provide the shortest and smoothest path with collision avoidance between the starting and the target points in a static and dynamic robot environments are used.. In the third stage, a velocity planner controller is based on an inverse kinematic mobile robot model. In the fourth stage, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP is used to send velocity values to real mobile robots via the Wireless Network Control Administration. The simulation results and experimental works successfully achieved to significant improvement in real-time when using three missions of three mobile robots on different static map floors in the building. The maximum tracking pose errors for three robots in the static enviormnets are 0.39 cm, 0.02 cm, 0.32 cm respectively, but the maximum tracking pose error in the dynamic environments are 2.94 cm and 2.8 cm only for two mobile robots along the maximum distance of 250 cm. Index Terms— Real-time computer control, Mobile robot, Multi-agent system, Path planning algorithms.

The demand for creating increasingly dynamic, autonomous and proactive software systems is challenging for the traditional Multi-agent Systems (MASs) approaches. Such requirement has given rise to adaptive software agents approaches. At the same time, norm is an essential and challenging feature that still tends to be addressed in adaptive MAS. In fact, norms to regulate agent behavior is still a vague concept that has not been properly investigated in terms of modeling and implementation. Even though many researchers have proposed modeling languages to deal with different abstractions, these languages fail to support the modeling of abstractions, such as adaptation and norms. Even more severe is the fact that little has been done to support the systematic design of Adaptive Normative Multi-Agent Systems (ANMASs). To facilitate the design and development of ANMASs, this paper presents a new metamodel, as well as language support, as means to provide tools to enable software developers. The proposed metamodel fosters a better understanding of the way agents are able to change their behaviors to deal with norms and captures interactions between agent’s norms and adaptation. To this end, our research is organized into five steps: (i) a literature review to identify the limitations of existing approaches related to ANMAS modeling; (ii) propose a new metamodel to support adaptative and normative concepts; (iii) propose a new language for modeling ANMASs; (iv) perform a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the proposed language using a real case scenario, and (v) an empirical evaluation. The proposed metamodel and its associated modeling language advances the state of the art in modeling MASs and the approach is assessed in terms of correctness, time and difficulty. Our initial results revealed that our approach can be feasibly applied in a real world application, and is less difficult to apply and requires less time in comparison with a traditional approach. As software applications become more dynamic and adaptive, we believe it is essential to support developers to model MASs with abstractions such as adaptive agents, norms and their relationships. Such information can be foundational to steer future research on modeling adaptive agents capable of understanding and dealing with norms and adaptation.

Knowledge based design integrates a broad range of highly specialized knowledge from expert sources to synthesize or refine a design. Knowledge-based design systems automate at least some of these knowledge sources. However, the constant evolution of standards, technologies, and a dynamic marketplace demands a high degree of adaptability in both design expertise and in the process of applying that expertise. The need for diverse, highly sophisticated, and rapidly changing skills and knowledge makes the multiagent paradigm particularly appropriate for knowledge-based design. As researchers apply multiagent technologies to design domains, challenges include supporting interoperability among heterogeneous agents on diverse platforms, coordinating the design process, and managing conflict. This article surveys the state of the art in multiagent systems, through examples of projects and techniques, and then presents several questions that elicit the requirements and goals of a proposed multiagent design application.

In recent years, considerable interest and enthusiasm have been generated by the prospect of widespread use of intelligent agent-based systems [18]. In particular, a number of researchers have been investigating the design and implementation of systems consisting of multiple agents [26]. The design of successful multiagent systems is, however, a problem of significant magnitude and difficulty. Often multiple, conflicting criteria have to be simultaneously optimized to come up with a cost-effective multiagent system design. Agent system design may involve designing the infrastructure or environment for agent interaction as well as behavioral strategies for individual or multiple agents. Agent behaviors handcrafted offline can be inadequate if possible interactions are overlooked. Genetic algorithms provide us with another tool for designing both individual agent behaviors as well as social rules for multiagent systems. In this chapter we identify different modes for evolving agent groups and present instances of two different approaches: a coevolutionary optimization approach, and an adaptive system approach.KeywordsShared MemoryMultiagent SystemAgent SocietySocial DilemmaQuadrupedal RobotThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The paper proposes a multi-agent decision-making system designed to manage exceptional situations in robotic production processes by recognizing human emotions in speech. The importance of human-robot collaboration was highlighted, with a focus on automatically detecting human operators’ emotions as potential warning signals for technical or safety issues. This approach contributes to improving the safety and efficiency of the production process by enabling agents to quickly adjust system settings according to the emotions expressed by operators in speech, for example, in cases of stress or frustration. The paper details the structural and functional scheme of the system. It presents the mathematical model and shows how deep learning algorithms implemented through hybrid neural networks (CNN and RNN) enable the system to accurately recognize and classify emotional patterns in an audio signal. The technology uses Python libraries such as TensorFlow and Keras to analyze acoustic characteristics such as tone, intensity, rhythm, and timbre of the voice. These parameters are used to identify emotions and initiate proactive or automatic corrective actions in robotic processes. Thus, the multi-agent system provides an excellent level of human-robot interaction, optimizing both productivity and safety in complex and dynamic industrial environments.

: Controls research under this program concentrated on the development of a network thermodynamic stabilization framework for hybrid control design of large-scale and multiagent aerospace systems. In particular, we concentrate on hybrid control, hierarchical control, impulsive dynamical systems, nonnegative dynamical systems, compartmental systems, large-scale systems, nonlinear switching control, cooperative control, and adaptive control. Application areas include large flexible interconnected space structures, spacecraft stabilization, cooperative control of unmanned air vehicles, network systems, swarms of air and space vehicle formations, and pharmacological systems.

This paper focuses the development of an adaptive observer-based distributed fault estimation observer (DFEO) for multi-agent nonlinear time-delay systems under a directed communication topology. The process involves constructing a fault estimation observer for each agent based on their relative output estimation errors. An adaptive DFEO design is proposed for multi-agent systems with a directed communication topology. Furthermore, investigating the effect of faulty agents on the criteria of fault detection on healthy agents. The proposed design is represented with Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) to establish a systematic design procedure. The study also includes simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design techniques.

The development of theoretical-based methods for the assessment of multi-agent systems properties is of critical importance. This work is a preliminary investigation on methodologies for modeling, analysis and design of multi-agent systems. Multi-agent systems are regarded as discrete-event dynamic systems and Petri nets are used as a modeling tool to assess the structural properties of the multi-agent system. Our methodology consists of defining a simple multi-agent system based on the abstract architecture for intelligent agents. The abstract architecture is modeled as a discrete-event system using Petri nets and structural analysis of the net provides an assessment of the communication and coordination properties of the multi-agent system. Deadlock avoidance in the multi-agent system is considered as an initial key property, and it is evaluated using liveness and boundedness properties of the Petri net model.

Supply chain efficiency is a major challenge in today’s business environment, where efficient resource allocation and coordination of activities are essential for competitive advantage. Traditional efficiency strategies often struggle for resources for the complex and dynamic network. In response, bio-inspired metaheuristic algorithms have emerged as powerful tools to solve these optimization problems. Referring to the random search nature of metaheuristic algorithms and emphasizing that no metaheuristic algorithm is the best optimizer for all optimization applications, the No Free Lunch (NFL) theorem encourages researchers to design newer algorithms to be able to provide more effective solutions to optimization problems. Motivated by the NFL theorem, the innovation and novelty of this paper is in designing a new meta-heuristic algorithm called Bobcat Optimization Algorithm (BOA) that imitates the natural behavior of bobcats in the wild. The basic inspiration of BOA is derived from the hunting strategy of bobcats during the attack towards the prey and the chase process between them. The theory of BOA is stated and then mathematically modeled in two phases (i) exploration based on the simulation of the bobcat’s position change while moving towards the prey and (ii) exploitation based on simulating the bobcat’s position change during the chase process to catch the prey. The performance of BOA is evaluated in optimization to handle the CEC 2017 test suite for problem dimensions equal to 10, 30, 50, and 100, as well as to address CEC 2020. The optimization results show that BOA has a high ability in exploration, exploitation, and balance them during the search process in order to achieve a suitable solution for optimization problems. The results obtained from BOA are compared with the performance of twelve well-known metaheuristic algorithms. The findings show that BOA has been successful in handling the CEC 2017 test suite in 89.65, 79.31, 93.10, and 89.65% of the functions for the problem dimension equal to 10, 30, 50, and 100, respectively. Also, the findings show that in order to handle the CEC 2020 test suite, BOA has been successful in 100% of the functions of this test suite. The statistical analysis confirms that BOA has a significant statistical superiority in the competition with the compared algorithms. Also, in order to analyze the efficiency of BOA in dealing with real world applications, twenty-two constrained optimization problems from CEC 2011 test suite and four engineering design problems have been selected. The findings show that BOA has been successful in 90.90% of CEC2011 test suite optimization problems and in 100% of engineering design problems. In addition, the efficiency of BOA to handle SCM applications has been challenged to solve ten case studies in the field of sustainable lot size optimization. The findings show that BOA has successfully provided superior performance in 100% of the case studies compared to competitor algorithms.

Nature-inspired methods, such as evolutionary computing and lifetime learning, have shown great promise in advancing autonomous robot design. However, the integration of evolution and learning for the joint optimization of robot morphologies and controllers remains underexplored, particularly in dynamic environments. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the effectiveness of Lamarckian inheritance (a mechanism that allows learned traits to be encoded into the genotype and passed to offspring) in improving robot evolution in nonstationary environments. We compare a Lamarckian system with a traditional Darwinian system, where learned traits are not inherited. Using simulated modular robots in six distinct environmental setups, we analyze the fitness progression, learning ability, and parent-offspring similarity within both systems. Our results demonstrate that the Lamarckian system consistently outperforms the Darwinian system, achieving up to 33% higher fitness in the most challenging conditions. The Lamarckian system also recovers more quickly from environmental changes, showing immediate fitness gains when shifting to complex terrains, whereas the Darwinian system adapts more slowly. Real-world tests validate the robustness of the Lamarckian approach, as the top-performing robots evolved in the most challenging environment exhibit the smallest reality gap. These findings highlight the potential of Lamarckian inheritance as a powerful tool for engineering adaptive robotic systems capable of maintaining high performance in dynamic environments.