This paper proposes a socio-physical approach that considers jointly the interaction and integration of the social and physical views of a system to improve emergency response and preparedness. This is accomplished through a reduction of systemic risk, which refers to a risk that could be greater than the sum of the risks of the individual system constituents. Using network analysis, it is shown that the explicit socio-physical approach yields meaningful qualitative and quantitative differences when compared with approaches that focus on the social and physical views in isolation. The benefits of this proposed approach are illustrated on a case study using clustering analysis and a proof-of-concept simulation. This new approach leads to systemic risk reduction by enabling a more informed and coordinated response strategy following an incident and a better identification of possible consequences and preparation strategies prior to an incident.

This position paper presents the initial designs for a novel functional, context-aware, case-based recommendation system to enhance the current intelligence capability of military intelligence analysts. Its central objective is to support these analysts during the collection, processing, and analysis phases of the intelligence cycle through load minimization and improved human-machine synergy. This involves sense-making from both explicit and implicit contextual information with a nexus of technologies and processes, including software modelling and simulation, meta-level modelling and recommendation, and psycho-physiological modelling and monitoring. The proposed system, RECON, will contribute a new architecture based on five core components: i) brain-computer interfaces, ii) human-computer interaction, iii) data, iv) context, and v) case-based recommendation. Together with human analysts these form the basis of an adaptive system that will advance toward a powerful future intelligence analysis capability.

Effective relationships between people and technology are essential for organizational response (agility, adaptation, and innovation). Advances in computing power, and the rise of complex ubiquitous systems, raise a challenge for managing this relationship given limits of human physical and cognitive capacities. To re-align people with computing technology involves either improved human training, or streamlining technologies to fit human needs, abilities, and perceptions. This paper looks at this socio-technical gap and makes a case for intelligent agent mediation through passive human-input monitoring (human-context awareness) and basic models of human behavior. The target audience is interdisciplinary, involving the cognitive informatics, agent systems, bodynet, socio-technical systems, and human-computer-interface communities. The overall contribution is in the combination of socio-technical systems engineering and human factors concepts with the agent-based paradigm and cognitive sensing technologies towards new, “Human-tech” friendly agent applications for everyday socio-technical systems. As such an early architectural design for such agents is presented, as well as future research directions toward its development.

A novel capability for modelling and simulating intra- and inter-organizational collaboration in an emergency-response domain is presented. This capability combines the prescriptive, top-down view of organizations, which describes how they work “on paper,” and the descriptive, bottom-up view, which describes how they actually work, by focusing on three components in the light of agent-based modelling and simulation tools-structural, functional, and normative. Our approach enables decision-makers to anticipate the evolution of an emerging crisis and evaluate the effectiveness of different configurations on the response. The initial results of our simulation, based on an experiment which investigates the impact of three separate parameters, are also presented and reveal the joint effectiveness of the organizations involved.

Human-factor models are important for computer systems to i) make such systems more human aware (ie. better estimators of human behavior) and ii) make such systems demonstrate more realistic human behaviors (ie. display more human-like AI). These models expand the research horizons in domains such as multi-agent organizational simulation, as the impact of various human-factors can be investigated. This is particularly important in safety and security as organizational conflicts are largely impacted by human failures. Human-factor calculations, however, are difficult to quantify, validate, and encode because human behavior is both fuzzy and complex. This paper applies system dynamics, a modeling technique for understanding complex systems, to human-factors (stress in particular). It is a way that is computationally useful, and may be validated by experts in human studies. We first model stress as a causal loop diagram to discuss relationships between key components, and then produce a stocks and flows diagram to simulate behavior which, in future work, would be used for “mental models” in computer programs and agent simulations.

This introduction to the Special Issue on Digital Ecologies was inadvertently omitted from the July 2010 issue.

This work sets the vision for organizational transformation that will secure competitive advantage in the digital economy, as the border between society-market-organization becomes more permeated to facilitate new types of assemblages of dasiameshworkspsila within and across organizational boundaries. We argue that network technologies are feeding the emergence of architectures of participation, protocols of collaboration and the development of new concepts of how work can be accomplished; notably responsible autonomy and peer-production. The concept of eNetworked ecosystem is used as metaphor for the need to embed responsible autonomy within the organizational structure via a new type of personnel platform and space for non-hierarchical (impersonal) exchange and collaboration which mirrors dasiathe invisible handpsila of Adam Smith. Assuming that the transparency of the digital environment will provide for dramatic and ubiquitous accountability of action we consider the parallel with the transparency of ldquogood enoughrdquo information carried by the price mechanism that allows people to respond to price through the dasiainvisible handpsila of the market. We show how the melting of traditional constraints (e.g. geographical, transactions costs, coordination, job as identity, knowledge scarcity, etc.) makes room to a revolution in all social and political institutional frameworks via the integration of responsible autonomy within a more complex organizational architecture. This new mode of production capitalizes on the transparency inherent in the digital environment to set the conditions for responsible autonomy as foundation for a broader and more equal market for many more people to exchange anything, with anyone, anytime thus generating a ubiquitous expectation that the right individual (customer, employee) can connect to the right situation (product, job) at the right time. We conclude that the simple capacity to do more enabled by the transparency of the trusted situational awareness that allows decentralized action to be incorporated with agility of response through more relaxed organizational policies will continue to be a force of change fuelled by the dasiaorganizational survivalpsila drive to adapt and thrive in the complex and turbulent operational environment of the 21st Century economic reality.

Reliable, secure and robust power grid network is a necessity for crucial financial, industrial and business networks. Since national electrical grid, telecommunication, information networks and transportation networks are interdependent critical infrastructures, having an agent-based self-healing framework to reduce cascading failures through the networks and finding reasonable solution for potential faults - would be an essential asset. In response to this need we propose a self-healing framework that employs advanced failure diagnosis techniques along with autonomous Web services to provide temporary recovery solutions. Furthermore, it provides a cognitive planning cycle to find ultimate corrective solutions as well as evaluation service to verify the effectiveness and performance of the final solution.

This work introduces the concept of self-organizing security (SOS) network as a resilient architectural foundation on which the operational mechanism for deploying dynamic, short living emergency response organizations capable to react quickly to emerging crisis situations can be evolved. A simulation testbed for SOS networks is presented that balances micromanagement of subordinates with the excessive independence of commanders based on a trusted overall operational picture shared via a joint communications backbone. Built on the foundation of the recently introduced emergent engineering paradigm, the SOS testbed delivers a picture of the dynamics of emerging trends that enable decision makers to anticipate the evolution of emerging crises and evaluate the effectiveness of different inter-agency configurations coming together in addressing it. Hints towards a dasiachange of culturepsila shifting first responders operations from the traditional hierarchical towards a dasiapower to the edgepsila heterarchy point to policy changes that allow emerging leaders to take action in the dasiachaos of crisispsila. The strategies proposed increase the responsiveness and effectiveness of first responder meta-organizations thus reducing the vulnerabilities to asymmetric threats to increase the safety quotient and by this the social resilience in today's convoluted world dynamics.

Rooted in a deep understanding of their major properties, a control paradigm for complex systems is proposed based on latest advances in modeling the dynamics of complex networks.

This paper introduces a new class of information security solution. The core technology, to authorize and track the use of digital files, was originally developed in eCommerce applications, there known as Digital Rights Management (DRM). In applications to non-commercial confidential records, such as health and safety documents, we call the solution "Persistent Information Security". We distinguish it from DRM because the threat models of the fields of application differ significantly. An implementation, RightsEnforcer, is described to clarify some concepts of operation. A simple model for a cost-benefit study of deploying a security technology is suggested and illustrated.

A file level information security technology that applies everywhere, every time, is introduced. The security is always 'on', as much 'in the wild' as behind the firewall or in the VPN tunnel. The broad strokes of structure and operation are discussed in terms of a specific system, RightsEnforcer. The technology is currently being deployed in the Adaptive Risk Management Lab at the University of New Brunswick as part of a testbed supporting emergency response operations.

The purpose of this work is to develop an adaptive risk management framework capable of preventing, identifying and responding in critical time to threats. Our focus is on protecting critical infrastructure (e.g. public utilities) which depends vitally on network and information security. As a solution we propose a holonic cybersecurity system that unfolds into an emergency response management infrastructure capable of reacting in due time to unknown and new kinds of attacks/threats. The system can adapt to its changing environment through its self-organizing organic capability. Mimicking the way immunity works in biological organisms the system can dynamically adapt to embrace new risk situations and can dynamically create and learn new risk models as it encounters new risk situations.

As an exercise in agent-based software engineering, this work proposes a holonic model for the domain of supply chain management. The supply chain system is a distributed infrastructure that enforces protocol rules and through which agents registered on a domain find each other, access the knowledge base, communicate (exchange messages), and negotiate with other agents, which are independent entities with specific goals and resources. It is considered that individual resources that belong to each agent are not sufficient to satisfy their goals; therefore, the agents must procure the needed resources from other agents present in the system through negotiation. Our approach is based on the holonic enterprise model with the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) Contract Net protocols applied within different levels of the supply chain holarchy. To accommodate differentiation of interests and provide an allocation of resources throughout the supply chain holarchy, we use nested protocols as interaction mechanisms among agents. Agents are interacting through a price system embedded into specific protocols. The negotiation on prices is made possible by the implementation of an XML rule-based system that is also flexible in terms of configuration and can provide portable data across networks.

An approach to dynamic collaborative clustering in multi-agent systems is proposed. The approach determines the optimal configuration of an emergent virtual organization by clustering the best partners for each activity contributing towards the organizations' goal. The approach consists of two parts: 1) in a dynamic, ever expanding agent domain it performs an open evolutionary search for the best possible partners to be added to the organization; and 2) it uses fuzzy entropy minimization to continuously maintain the optimal configuration of the partnering agents in terms of their interactions to best fulfill the global goal of the organization.

In today's electronic economy the only chance for prosperity is to exploit optimally the emerging technologies based on which a new kind of infrastructure facilitates strategic partnerships among cyber-highway enabled participants. This paper merges latest results obtained by the Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) Consortium with latest developed standards for platform interoperability released by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) to propose a novel e-business model: the holonic enterprise. Including the e-marketplace and e-factory as submodels this new paradigm links the three levels of a global collaborative organization (inter-enterprise; intra-enterprise and machine level) to build a web-centric ecosystem partnering in which the workflow is harmoniously managed We identify several patterns of holonic collaboration and throughout the paper identify their particularities at each level. The holonic enterprise extends both the HMS and FIPA models. On one side it extends the holonic manufacturing paradigm with one top level, the inter-enterprise one. On the other side it extends the multi-agent system (MAS) paradigm to the hardware (physical machine) level.

Artificial intelligence, including fuzzy logic, is applied to the diagnosis of glaucoma. Current methods and difficulties are reviewed and a diagnostic and prediction system is proposed. Validation of the developed software will involve data collected from the clinical evaluation of glaucoma patients, glaucoma-suspect patients and normal subjects. The proposed system is expected to lead to a decrease in the difficulty and cost of glaucoma diagnosis as well as a decrease in the associated health risks.

Holonic manufacturing aims to design standardized, modular manufacturing systems made of interchangeable parts, to enable flexibility, online reconfigurability and self-organizing capabilities for the production systems. Recent advances in distributed artificial intelligence and networking technologies have proven that theoretical multi-agent systems (MAS) concepts are very suitable for the real life implementation of holonic concepts. Building on our recent results in the design and implementation of holonic reconfigurable architectures, the paper introduces a novel approach to the online self-organization of distributed systems. By using fuzzy set and uncertainty theoretical concepts, we construct a mathematical foundation for modeling MAS, where appropriate holonic structures are identified for each particular application. This approach opens new possibilities for the design of any distributed system that needs self-organization as an intrinsic property.

This paper discusses the swing-up control of a two link robot mechanism known as the Acrobot. First a PD controller is investigated and then a fuzzy controller is implemented by a combination of genetic algorithms, dynamic switching fuzzy systems, and meta-rule techniques. Limitations of the PD controller and the fuzzy controller are shown by investigating the effect of external random disturbances on the Acrobot using simulation. Design considerations are discussed. This study illustrates how intelligent control methods can reduce development effort and system complexity while achieving better performance.