The challenge of building process-control software

Process control is explained, and it is shown why trying to build process-control software using the same approaches developed and used for data-processing and information-system software will lead to failure. Rather than offering solutions to the problems inherent in developing process-control software, the author identifies the aspects of the problem on which to focus attention and the tasks that are ripe for solution. In particular, modeling and analysis, human-computer interaction, and risk evaluation are discussed     

TUM autonomous motorsport: An autonomous racing software for the Indy Autonomous Challenge

For decades, motorsport has been an incubator for innovations in the automotive sector and brought forth systems, like, disk brakes or rearview mirrors. Autonomous racing series such as Roborace, F1Tenth, or the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) are envisioned as playing a similar role within the autonomous vehicle sector, serving as a proving ground for new technology at the limits of the autonomous systems capabilities. This paper outlines the software stack and approach of the TUM Autonomous Motorsport team for their participation in the IAC, which holds two competitions: A single-vehicle competition on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and a passing competition at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Nine university teams used an identical vehicle platform: A modified Indy Lights chassis equipped with sensors, a computing platform, and actuators. All the teams developed different algorithms for object detection, localization, planning, prediction, and control of the race cars. The team from Technical University of Munich (TUM) placed first in Indianapolis and secured second place in Las Vegas. During the final of the passing competition, the TUM team reached speeds and accelerations close to the limit of the vehicle, peaking at around $270\text{km h}{}^{-1}$ and $28ms{}^{-2}$. This paper will present details of the vehicle hardware platform, the developed algorithms, and the workflow to test and enhance the software applied during the 2-year project. We derive deep insights into the autonomous vehicle's behavior at high speed and high acceleration by providing a detailed competition analysis. On the basis of this, we deduce a list of lessons learned and provide insights on promising areas of future work based on the real-world evaluation of the displayed concepts.     

A distributed architecture for supervision of autonomous multi-robot missions

Realizing long-term autonomous missions involving teams of heterogeneous robots is a challenge. It requires mechanisms to make robots react to disturbances or failures that will arise during the mission, while trying to successfully achieve the mission in cooperation. This paper presents HiDDeN, a distributed deliberative architecture that manages the execution of a hierarchical plan. This plan has initially been computed offline, ensuring some military operational constraints of the mission. Each robot’s supervisor then executes its own part of the plan, and reacts to failures using a hierarchical repair approach. This hierarchical repair has been designed with the sake of ensuring operational constraints, while reducing the need of communication between robots, as communication may be intermittent or even nonexistent when the robots operate in completely separate environments. HiDDeN’s robustness and scalability is evaluated with simulations. Experiments with an autonomous helicopter and an autonomous underwater vehicle have been realized and are presented as the defining point of our contribution.     

Evaluation of software testing metrics for NASA's Mission Control Center

Software metrics are used to evaluate the software developmentprocess and the quality of the resultingproduct. We used five metrics during the testing phase of the Shuttle Mission Control Center (MCC) Upgrade (MCCU) at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Johnson Space Center. All but one metric provided useful information. Based on our experience we recommend using metrics during the test phase of software development and propose additional candidate metrics for further study.     

Verified software: a grand challenge

Given the right computer-based tools, the use of formal methods could become widespread and transform software engineering. The computer science community recently committed itself to making verified software a reality within the next 15 to 20 years when representatives met in Zurich in 2005 to discuss an international grand challenge on verification.     

Evolutionary testing of autonomous software agents

A system built in terms of autonomous software agents may require even greater correctness assurance than one that is merely reacting to the immediate control of its users. Agents make substantial decisions for themselves, so thorough testing is an important consideration. However, autonomy also makes testing harder; by their nature, autonomous agents may react in different ways to the same inputs over time, because, for instance they have changeable goals and knowledge. For this reason, we argue that testing of autonomous agents requires a procedure that caters for a wide range of test case contexts, and that can search for the most demanding of these test cases, even when they are not apparent to the agents’ developers. In this paper, we address this problem, introducing and evaluating an approach to testing autonomous agents that uses evolutionary optimisation to generate demanding test cases. We propose a methodology to derive objective (fitness) functions that drive evolutionary algorithms, and evaluate the overall approach with two simulated autonomous agents. The obtained results show that our approach is effective in finding good test cases automatically.     

Canada: meeting the software quality challenge; current activities

Canada has a substantial software industry made up of a few very sizeable players and a large percentage of small companies. This strategically important industry is adjusting to the quality demands of the global marketplace and the need for quality in the software engineering process environment. This paper will note some of the challenges facing Canadian software firms, and outline the key national and local initiatives undertaken in the past two years to deal with these challenges. A few specific programs and organizations are chosen to illustrate the diversity of the efforts and to present the new spirit of cooperation taking place from coast to coast.     

Anonymity and software agents: An interdisciplinary challenge

Software agents that play a role in E-commerce and E-government applications involving the Internet often contain information about the identity of their human user such as credit cards and bank accounts. This paper discusses whether this is necessary: whether human users and software agents are allowed to be anonymous under the relevant legal regimes and whether an adequate interaction and balance between law and anonymity can be realised from both the perspective of Computer Systems and the perspective of Law.This paper is an extended and fully revised version of Brazier, Kubbe, Oskamp and Wijngaards (2002) and Brazier, Oskamp, Prins, Schellekens and Wijngaards (2003).     

自动驾驶软件测试技术研究综述

自动驾驶系统（autonomous driving system,ADS）是一种集成高精度传感器、人工智能和地图导航系统等模块的信息—物理融合系统。该类系统中的自动驾驶软件完成了从高级辅助驾驶到无人驾驶任务中关键的感知、定位、预测、规划和控制任务。随着深度学习和强化学习等人工智能技术的发展和车载硬件设备的不断升级,高级别的自动驾驶软件已经逐渐应用于多种安全攸关的场景中,保障其运行稳定性与可靠性的测试技术逐渐成为学术界和产业界的研究重点。本文在广泛调研国内外文献基础上,对自动驾驶软件测试技术进行了深入分析与梳理。结合自动驾驶软件的架构特点及系统特征,讨论了面向自动驾驶系统的仿真测试和实景测试,以及面向组件的测试技术。其中,在仿真方法方面,分析了软件仿真、半实体仿真和在环仿真等技术;在仿真对象方面,讨论了静态环境仿真、动态场景仿真、传感器仿真和车辆动力学仿真等。同时,本文介绍了当前实景测试的进展与情况,重点分析了实景测试案例中的得失优劣。在面向自动驾驶软件组件的测试技术方面,重点讨论了当前数据驱动技术在感知组件、决策规划组件,以及控制组件测试方面的进展。最后,本文总结分析了自动驾驶软件测试当前面临的挑战,并对未来自动驾驶软件测试技术的研究方向和研究重点进行了展望。     

Distributed algorithms for partitioning a swarm of autonomous mobile robots

A number of recent studies address systems of mobile autonomous robots from a distributed computing point of view. Although such systems employ robots that are relatively weak and simple (i.e., dimensionless, oblivious and anonymous), they are nevertheless expected to have strong fault tolerance capabilities as a group. This paper studies the partitioning problem, where n$n$ robots must divide themselves into k$k$ size-balanced groups, and examines the impact of common orientation on the solvability of this problem. First, deterministic crash-fault-tolerant algorithms are given for the problem in the asynchronous full-compass and semi-synchronous half-compass models, and a randomized algorithm is given for the semi-synchronous no-compass model. Next, the role of common orientation shared by the robots is examined. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the partitioning problem to be solvable are given in the different timing models. Finally, the problem is proved to be unsolvable in the no-compass synchronous model.     

An autonomous manufacturing system based on swarm of cognitive agents

Disruptions of the manufacturing systems caused by the disturbances such as the tool wear, machine breakdown, malfunction of robot or transporter, and so on reduce the productivity as well as increase the cost of product. The conventional manufacturing systems are unable to face with the disturbances by their rigid structure. These systems should be stopped when the disturbances occur. The paper presents an Autonomous Manufacturing System based on Swarm of Cognitive Agents (AMS-SCA) in order to adapt to the disturbances. In the AMS-SCA, the manufacturing system is considered as a swarm of cognitive agents where work-pieces, machines, robots, and transporters are controlled by the corresponding cognitive agents. The system reacts to disturbances autonomously based on the reaction of each agent or the cooperation among them. To develop the AMS-SCA, the disturbances happened in the machining shop were analyzed to find out the corresponding management methods. A test-bed was implemented to prove the functionality of the proposed AMS-SCA.     

Portable software: a new challenge for process control

This paper deals with the relative merit of transportable programming techniques and system modularization. The benefits are discussed broadly in the areas of benefits to managing the sequencing of systems installation, programming effort and touches briefly on the impact of new control equipment from the human aspect.The primary message of the paper is that we should take advantage of the tremendous similarity of system function from process to process and by using extensive applications data structures, capitalize on the similarities to accelerate the project life cycle. This improves the return on investment time, reduces the criticality of number of highly experienced personnel, and offers some suggestions for areas which lend themselves to portable concepts in terms of system function.     

Science and substance: a challenge to software engineers

For 25 years, software researchers have proposed improving software development and maintenance with new practices whose effectiveness is rarely, if ever, backed up by hard evidence. We suggest several ways to address the problem, and we challenge the community to invest in being more scientific     

On building with reusable software: Democratization of information systems automation through software reuse

Software reuse is an important emerging technology. It allows consumption of reusable information, which, in turn, can contribute to democratization of information systems automation. I introduce software reuse concepts and discuss current reuse approaches, issues of economics of reuse, and currently used metaphors as they apply to the reuse consumer. The discussion should give those who have not yet began to exploit consumption of information reuse a starting point for their considerations.Some sections of this paper were presented, in brief, during the Third International Conference for Systems Integration held in Sao Paulo City, Brazil, July 30 to August 6th, 1994.     

缩微智能车软件系统设计与实现

论述一种基于简单视听觉缩微智能车的软件系统架构,可实现在缩微道路环境下自主驾驶行为决策。缩微智能车系统采用分布式层次设计方法,遵循器件独立、算法独立、可扩展、易调试、数据可储存等原则,可以有效模拟车辆在真实交通环境中的基本驾驶行为。实验证明该软件系统具有很好的实效性和稳定性。     

Automated assembly of Internet-scale software systems involving autonomous agents

On the Internet, there is a great amount of distributed software entities deployed independently and behaving autonomously. This paper describes an automated approach to constructing Internet-scale software systems based on autonomous software agents. In the approach, the systems are modeled by interconnected divisions and cooperative roles. The approach adopts a dynamic trial-and-evaluation strategy to select high quality autonomous agents to undertake the responsibilities of roles, and implements a special mobile agent, called delegate, carrying the interaction information specified for responsibilities of roles to facilitate the interoperations among autonomous agents. The experiments show that the approach is highly scalable and improves the overall qualities of systems remarkably.     

免疫微粒群算法优化的水下机器人运动控制器

借鉴免疫算法基于浓度和适应度的抗体更新策略,提出一种改进微粒群局部搜索能力的免疫微粒群算法,并对其进行收敛性分析。该算法在满足收敛性的条件下,根据微粒浓度和适应度动态调整加速因子,保证了群的多样性和持续搜索能力。在与遗传算法、免疫遗传算法、基本微粒群等算法的仿真比较试验中,该算法不仅搜索到了最好的近优解,而且收敛速度最快。在无人潜水器仿真平台上的控制试验表明,基于免疫微粒群算法的控制器性能良好,具有较强的抗海流干扰能力。仿真结果证明了该算法的可行性。     

Autonomic communication services: a new challenge for software agents

The continuous growth in ubiquitous and mobile network connectivity, together with the increasing number of networked devices populating our everyday environments, call for a deep rethinking of traditional communication and service architectures. The emerging area of autonomic communication addresses such challenging issues by trying to identify novel flexible network architectures, and by conceiving novel conceptual and practical tools for the design, development, and execution of “autonomic” (i.e., self-organizing, self-adaptive and context-aware) communication services. In this paper, after having introduced the general concepts behind autonomic communication and autonomic communication services, we analyze the key issue of defining suitable “component” models for autonomic communication services, and discuss the strict relation between such models and agent models. On this basis, we survey and compare different approaches, and eventually try to synthesize the key desirable characteristics that one should expect from a general-purpose component model for autonomic communication services. The key message we will try to deliver is that current research in software agents and multi-agent systems have the potential for playing a major role in inspiring and driving the identification of such a model, and more in general for influencing and advancing the whole area of autonomic communication.