In complex industrial and chemical process control rooms, effective decision-making is crucial for safety and efficiency. The experiments in this paper evaluate the impact and applications of an AI-based decision support system integrated into an improved human-machine interface, using dynamic influence diagrams, a hidden Markov model, and deep reinforcement learning. The enhanced support system aims to reduce operator workload, improve situational awareness, and provide different intervention strategies to the operator adapted to the current state of both the system and human performance. Such a system can be particularly useful in cases of information overload when many alarms and inputs are presented all within the same time window, or for junior operators during training. A comprehensive cross-data analysis was conducted, involving 47 participants and a diverse range of data sources such as smartwatch metrics, eye-tracking data, process logs, and responses from questionnaires. The results indicate interesting insights regarding the effectiveness of the approach in aiding decision-making, decreasing perceived workload, and increasing situational awareness for the scenarios considered. Additionally, the results provide insights to compare differences between styles of information gathering when using the system by individual participants. These findings are particularly relevant when predicting the overall performance of the individual participant and their capacity to successfully handle a plant upset and the alarms connected to it using process and human-machine interaction logs in real-time which resulted in a 95.8% prediction accuracy using hidden Markov model. These predictions enable the development of more effective intervention strategies.

This study presents a novel methodology incorporating safety constraints into a robotic simulation during the training of deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The framework integrates specific parts of the safety requirements, such as velocity constraints, as specified by ISO 10218, directly within the DRL model that becomes a part of the robot’s learning algorithm. The study then evaluated the efficiency of these safety constraints by subjecting the DRL model to various scenarios, including grasping tasks with and without obstacle avoidance. The validation process involved comprehensive simulation-based testing of the DRL model’s responses to potential hazards and its compliance. Also, the performance of the system is carried out by the functional safety standards IEC 61508 to determine the safety integrity level. The study indicated a significant improvement in the safety performance of the robotic system. The proposed DRL model anticipates and mitigates hazards while maintaining operational efficiency. This study was validated in a testbed with a collaborative robotic arm with safety sensors and assessed with metrics such as the average number of safety violations, obstacle avoidance, and the number of successful grasps. The proposed approach outperforms the conventional method by a 16.5% average success rate on the tested scenarios in the simulations and 2.5% in the testbed without safety violations.

This paper introduces a learning-based framework for dynamic placement of threads of parallel applications to the cores of Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures. Adaptation takes place in two levels, where at the first level each thread independently decides on which group of cores (NUMA node) it will execute, and on the second level it decides to which particular core from the group it will be pinned. Naturally, these two adaptation levels run on different time-scales: a low-frequency switching for the NUMA-node adaptation, and a high-frequency switching for the CPU-node level adaptation. In addition, the learning dynamics have been designed to handle measurement noise and rapid variations in the performance of the threads. The advantage of the proposed learning scheme is the ability to easily incorporate any multi-objective criterion and easily adapt to performance variations during runtime. Our objective is to demonstrate that this framework is appropriate for supervising parallel processes and intervening with respect to better resource allocation. Under the multi-objective criterion of maximizing total completed instructions per second (i.e., both computational and memory-access instructions), we compare the performance of the proposed scheme with the Linux operating system scheduler. We have observed that performance improvement could be significant especially under limited availability of resources and under irregular memory-access patterns.

The management of resources among competing QoS-aware applications is often solved by a resource manager (RM) that assigns both the resources and the application service levels. However, this approach requires all applications to inform the RM of the available service levels. Then, the RM has to maximize the "overall quality" by comparing service levels of different applications which are not necessarily comparable. In this paper we describe a Linux implementation of a game-theoretic framework that decouples the two distinct problems of resource assignment and quality setting, solving them in the domain where they naturally belong to. By this approach the RM has linear time complexity in the number of the applications. Our RM is built over the SCHED_DEADLINE Linux scheduling class.

We consider the problem of network formation in a distributed fashion. Network formation is modeled as a strategic-form game, where agents represent nodes that form and sever unidirectional links with other nodes and derive utilities from these links. Furthermore, agents can form links only with a limited set of neighbors. Agents trade off the benefit from links, which is determined by a distance-dependent reward function, and the cost of maintaining links. When each agent acts independently, trying to maximize its own utility function, we can characterize “stable” networks through the notion of Nash equilibrium. In fact, the introduced reward and cost functions lead to Nash equilibria (networks), which exhibit several desirable properties such as connectivity, bounded-hop diameter, and efficiency (i.e., minimum number of links). Since Nash networks may not necessarily be efficient, we also explore the possibility of “shaping” the set of Nash networks through the introduction of state-based utility functions. Such utility functions may represent dynamic phenomena such as establishment costs (either positive or negative). Finally, we show how Nash networks can be the outcome of a distributed learning process. In particular, we extend previous learning processes to so-called “state-based” weakly acyclic games, and we show that the proposed network formation games belong to this class of games.

Friction is responsible for several servomechanism problems, and their elimination is always a challenge for control engineers. In this paper, feedback model-based compensation of friction is used for servomechanism set point and tracking tasks. Basic friction models are tested and their influence on system response is examined using describing function analysis. Analytical predictions are compared to simulations and experimental results. Various control laws using friction compensation are compared experimentally. Results showed that for both types of tasks, the best response is obtained by a model-based control law with friction compensation using the general kinetic friction model.