skip to main content
research-article

On Ordering Multi-Robot Task Executions within a Cyber Physical System

Published:14 November 2017Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

With robots entering the world of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), ordering the execution of allocated tasks during runtime becomes crucial. This is so because, in the real world, there can be several physical tasks that use shared resources that need to be executed concurrently. In this article, we propose a mechanism to solve this issue of ordering task executions within a CPS that inherently handles mutual exclusion. The mechanism caters to a decentralized and distributed CPS comprising nodes such as computers, robots, and sensor nodes and uses mobile software agents that knit through them to aid the execution of the various tasks while also ensuring mutual exclusion of shared resources. The computations, communications, and control are achieved through these mobile agents. Physical execution of the tasks is performed by the robots in an asynchronous and pipelined manner without the use of a clock. The mechanism also features addition and deletion of tasks and insertion and removal of robots facilitating On-The-Fly Programming. As an application, a Warehouse Management System as a CPS has been implemented. The article concludes with the results and discussions on using the mechanism in both emulated and real-world environments.

References

  1. Anchal, P. Saini, and C. R. Krishna. 2014. An efficient permission-cum-cluster based distributed mutual exclusion algorithm for mobile adhoc networks. In Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Grid Computing (PDGC’14). 141--146.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. H. Attiya, A. Kogan, and J. L. Welch. 2010. Efficient and robust local mutual exclusion in mobile ad hoc networks. IEEE Trans. Mobile Comput. 9, 3 (March 2010), 361--375. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. R. Baheti and H. Gill. 2011. Cyber-physical systems. The Impact of Control Technology 12 (2011), 161--166.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. S. Basagni, M. Conti, S. Giordano, and I. Stojmenovic. 2004. Mobile Ad Hoc Networking. John Wiley 8 Sons.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. F. Bellifemine, A. Poggi, and G. Rimassa. 2001. JADE: A FIPA2000 compliant agent development environment. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. 216--217. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  6. S. C. Botelho and R. Alami. 1999. M+: A scheme for multi-robot cooperation through negotiated task allocation and achievement. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Vol. 2. 1234--1239. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  7. A. Boukerche, R. B. Machado, K. R. L. Jucá, J. B. M. Sobral, and M. S. M. A. Notare. 2007. An agent based and biological inspired real-time intrusion detection and security model for computer network operations. Comput. Commun. 30, 13 (2007), 2649--2660. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. S. Bulgannawar and N. F. Vaidya. 1995. A distributed K-mutual exclusion algorithm. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems. 153--160. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  9. K. M. Chandy and J. Misra. 1984. The drinking philosophers problem. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 6, 4 (Oct. 1984), 632--646. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. M. Chen, S. Gonzalez, and V. C. M. Leung. 2007. Applications and design issues for mobile agents in wireless sensor networks. Wireless Commun. IEEE 14 (Dec. 2007), 20--26. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  11. R. Chertov, S. Fahmy, and N. B. Shroff. 2006. Emulation versus simulation: A case study of TCP-targeted denial of service attacks. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks and Communities (TRIDENTCOM). Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  12. H. N. Chu, A. Glad, O. Simonin, F. Sempe, A. Drogoul, and F. Charpillet. 2007. Swarm approaches for the patrolling problem, information propagation vs. pheromone evaporation. In Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI’07), Vol. 1. 442--449.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  13. E. G. Coffman, M. Elphick, and A. Shoshani. 1971. System deadlocks. ACM Comput. Surv. 3, 2 (June 1971), 67--78. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. M. M. Cruz-Cunha. 2011. Handbook of Research on Mobility and Computing: Evolving Technologies and Ubiquitous Impacts. Vol. 1. IGI Global. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  15. S. S. Dhenakaran and A. Parvathavarthini. 2013. An overview of routing protocols in mobile ad-hoc network. Int. J. Adv. Res. Comput. Sci. Softw. Eng. 3, 2 (2013), 251--259.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. M. B. Dias and A. Stentz. 2000. A free market architecture for distributed control of a multirobot system. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS’06). 115--122.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. L. D. Fife and L. Gruenwald. 2003. Research issues for data communication in mobile ad-hoc network database systems. ACM SIGMOD Rec. 32, 2 (June 2003), 42--47. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  18. S. Franklin and A. Graesser. 1997. Is it an agent, or just a program? A taxonomy of autonomous agents. Intell. Agents III 1193 (1997), 21--36. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  19. J. Gaber and M. Bakhouya. 2008. Mobile agent-based approach for resource discovery in peer-to-peer networks. In Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing. 63--73. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  20. B. P. Gerkey and M. J. Mataric. 2001. Principled communication for dynamic multi-robot task allocation. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics 271 (2001), 353--362.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  21. B. P. Gerkey and M. J. Mataric. 2003. Multi-robot task allocation: Analyzing the complexity and optimality of key architectures. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA’03), Vol. 3. 3862--3868.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  22. W. W. Godfrey, S. S. Jha, and S. B. Nair. 2013. On a mobile agent framework for an internet of things. In Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Communication Systems and Network Technologies. 345--350. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  23. W. W. Godfrey and S. B. Nair. 2008. An immune system based multi-robot mobile agent network. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 5132 (2008), 424--433.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  24. W. W. Godfrey and S. B. Nair. 2010. A pheromone based mobile agent migration strategy for servicing networked robots. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems. Springer, 533--541.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  25. V. Hadzilacos. 2001. A note on group mutual exclusion. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC’01). 100--106. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  26. S. S. Jha, W. W. Godfrey, and S. B. Nair. 2014. Stigmergy-based synchronization of a sequence of tasks in a network of asynchronous nodes. Cybernet. Syst. 45, 5 (June 2014), 373--406. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  27. S. S. Jha and S. B. Nair. 2012. A logic programming interface for multiple robots. In Proceedings of the 3rd National Conference on Emerging Trends and Applications in Computer Science (NCETACS’12). IEEE, 152--156. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  28. A. B. Kahn. 1962. Topological sorting of large networks. Commun. ACM 5, 11 (1962), 558--562. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  29. Y. Kambayashi, M. Takimoto, and Y. Kodama. 2005. Controlling biped walking robots using genetic algorithms in mobile agent environment. In Proceedings of the IEEE 3rd International Conference on Computational Cybernetics (ICCC’05). IEEE, 29--34. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  30. Y. Khaluf and F. Rammig. 2013. Task allocation strategy for time-constrained tasks in robots swarms. In Proceedings of the European Conference on Artificial Life. 737--744.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  31. D. B. Lange. 1998. Mobile Objects and Mobile Agents: The Future of Distributed Computing? In Proceedings of the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP’98). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1445. 1–12.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  32. P. Maes, R. H. Guttman, and A. G. Moukas. 1999. Agents that buy and sell. ACM Communication 42, 3 (March 1999), 81--91. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  33. J. Matani and S. B. Nair. 2011. Typhon: A mobile agents framework for real world emulation in prolog. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Multi-Disciplinary Trends in Artificial Intelligence (MIWAI’11). 261--273. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  34. N. Minar, M. Gray, O. Roup, R. Krikorian, and P. Maes. 2000. Hive: Distributed agents for networking things. IEEE Concurr. 8 (2000), 24--33. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  35. N. Minar, K. H. Kramer, and P. Maes. 1999. Cooperating Mobile Agents for Dynamic Network Routing. 287--304.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  36. S. Mostinckx, T. V. Cutsem, S. Timbermont, E. G. Boix, É. Tanter, and W. D. Meuter. 2009. Mobile-C: A mobile agent platform for mobile C/C++ agents. Softw. Prac. Exp. 39 (2009), 661--699.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  37. L. Null and J. Lobur. 2014. The Essentials of Computer Organization and Architecture. Jones 8 Bartlett.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  38. A. Outtagarts. 2009. Mobile agent-based applications: A survey. Int. J. Comput. Sci. Netw. Secur. 9, 11 (2009), 331--339.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  39. L. E. Parker. 1998. ALLIANCE: An architecture for fault tolerant multirobot cooperation. IEEE Trans. Robot. Automat. 14, 2 (1998), 220--240. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  40. J. L. Posadas, J. L. Poza, J. E. Simó, G. Benet, and F. Blanes. 2008. Agent-based distributed architecture for mobile robot control. Eng. Appl. Arti. Intell. 21, 6 (Sept. 2008), 805--823. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  41. F. L. W. Ratnieks and C. Anderson. 1999. Task partitioning in insect societies. Insect. Soc. 46, 2 (1999), 95--108. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  42. M. Raynal. 1986. Algorithms for Mutual Exclusion. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1986).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  43. M. Schumacher. 2001. Multi-agent systems. Objective Coordination in Multi-Agent System Engineering: Design and Implementation (2001), 9--32.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  44. F. Sempe and A. Drogoul. 2003. Adaptive patrol for a group of robots. In Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS’03), Vol. 3. 2865--2869. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  45. T. Semwal, M. Bode, V. Singh, S. S. Jha, and S. B. Nair. 2015. Tartarus: A multi-agent platform for integrating cyber-physical systems and robots. In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Advances in Robotics (AIR’15). Article 20, 6 pages. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  46. T. Semwal, Nikhil S, S. S. Jha, and S. B. Nair. 2016. TARTARUS: A multi-agent platform for bridging the gap between cyber and physical systems. In Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Autonomous Agents 8 Multiagent Systems. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 1493--1495.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  47. J. Shi, J. Wan, H. Yan, and H. Suo. 2011. A survey of cyber-physical systems. In Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Wireless Communications and Signal Processing (WCSP’11). 1--6. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  48. P. Tarau. 1999. Jinni: Intelligent mobile agent programming at the intersection of java and prolog. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agents (PAAM’99), Vol. 99. 109--123.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  49. W. Wu, J. Zhang, A. Luo, and J. Cao. 2015. Distributed mutual exclusion algorithms for intersection traffic control. IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst. 26, 1 (Jan. 2015), 65--74. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  50. O. R. Zaiane. 2002. Building a recommender agent for e-learning systems. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computers in Education. 55--59. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref

Index Terms

  1. On Ordering Multi-Robot Task Executions within a Cyber Physical System

              Recommendations

              Comments

              Login options

              Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

              Sign in

              Full Access

              • Published in

                cover image ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems
                ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems  Volume 12, Issue 4
                December 2017
                224 pages
                ISSN:1556-4665
                EISSN:1556-4703
                DOI:10.1145/3155314
                Issue’s Table of Contents

                Copyright © 2017 ACM

                Publisher

                Association for Computing Machinery

                New York, NY, United States

                Publication History

                • Published: 14 November 2017
                • Accepted: 1 July 2017
                • Revised: 1 April 2017
                • Received: 1 August 2016
                Published in taas Volume 12, Issue 4

                Permissions

                Request permissions about this article.

                Request Permissions

                Check for updates

                Qualifiers

                • research-article
                • Research
                • Refereed

              PDF Format

              View or Download as a PDF file.

              PDF

              eReader

              View online with eReader.

              eReader
              About Cookies On This Site

              We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

              Learn more

              Got it!