Multi Agent Safety

Safety has been ranked as the number one concern for the acceptance and adoption of automated vehicles since safety has driven some of the most complex requirements in the development of self-driving vehicles. Recent fatal accidents involving self-driving vehicles have uncovered issues in the way some automated vehicle companies approach the design, testing, verification, and validation of their products. Traditionally, automotive safety follows functional safety concepts as detailed in the standard ISO 26262. However, automated driving safety goes beyond this standard and includes other safety concepts such as safety of the intended functionality (SOTIF) and multi-agent safety. Multi-Agent Safety addresses the concept of safety for self-driving vehicles through the inclusion of 10 recent and highly relevent SAE technical papers. Topics that these papers feature include vehicle interaction with other vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, and other road objects. As the second title in a series on automated vehicle safety, each will contain introductory content by the Editor with 10 SAE technical papers specifically chosen to illuminate the specific safety topic of that book.

Safety has been ranked as the number one concern for the acceptance and adoption of automated vehicles since safety has driven some of the most complex requirements in the development of self-driving vehicles. Recent fatal accidents involving self-driving vehicles have uncovered issues in the way some automated vehicle companies approach the design, testing, verification, and validation of their products. Traditionally, automotive safety follows functional safety concepts as detailed in the standard ISO 26262. However, automated driving safety goes beyond this standard and includes other safety concepts such as safety of the intended functionality (SOTIF) and multi-agent safety. Multi-Agent Safety addresses the concept of safety for self-driving vehicles through the inclusion of 10 recent and highly relevent SAE technical papers. Topics that these papers feature include vehicle interaction with other vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, and other road objects. As the second title in a series on automated vehicle safety, each will contain introductory content by the Editor with 10 SAE technical papers specifically chosen to illuminate the specific safety topic of that book.

As intelligent autonomous agents and multiagent system applications become more pervasive, it becomes increasingly important to understand the risks associated with using these systems. Incorrect or inappropriate agent behavior can have harmful - fects, including financial cost, loss of data, and injury to humans or systems. For - ample, NASA has proposed missions where multiagent systems, working in space or on other planets, will need to do their own reasoning about safety issues that concern not only themselves but also that of their mission. Likewise, industry is interested in agent systems that can search for new supply opportunities and engage in (semi-) automated negotiations over new supply contracts. These systems should be able to securely negotiate such arrangements and decide which credentials can be requested and which credentials may be disclosed. Such systems may encounter environments that are only partially understood and where they must learn for themselves which aspects of their environment are safe and which are dangerous. Thus, security and safety are two central issues when developing and deploying such systems. We refer to a multiagent system’s security as the ability of the system to deal with threats that are intentionally caused by other intelligent agents and/or s- tems, and the system’s safety as its ability to deal with any other threats to its goals.

This volume gathers the peer reviewed papers presented at the 4th edition of the International Workshop “Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-agent Manufacturing – SOHOMA’14” organized and hosted on November 5-6, 2014 by the University of Lorraine, France in collaboration with the CIMR Research Centre of the University Politehnica of Bucharest and the TEMPO Laboratory of the University of Valenciennes and Hainaut-Cambrésis. The book is structured in six parts, each one covering a specific research line which represents a trend in future manufacturing: (1) Holonic and Agent-based Industrial Automation Systems; (2) Service-oriented Management and Control of Manufacturing Systems; (3) Distributed Modelling for Safety and Security in Industrial Systems; (4) Complexity, Big Data and Virtualization in Computing-oriented Manufacturing; (5) Adaptive, Bio-inspired and Self-organizing Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing and (6) Physical Internet Simulation, Modelling and Control. There is a clear orientation of the SOHOMA’14 workshop towards complexity, which is a common view of all six parts. There is need for a framework allowing the development of manufacturing cyber physical systems including capabilities for complex event processing and data analytics which are expected to move the manufacturing domain closer towards cloud manufacturing within contextual enterprises. Recent advances in sensor, communication and intelligent computing technologies made possible the Internet connectivity of the physical world: the Physical Internet, where not only documents and images are created, shared, or modified in the cyberspace, but also the physical resources and products interact over Internet and make decisions based on shared communication.

During the last decade Argumentation has been gaining importance within Artificial Intelligence especially in multi agent systems. Argumentation is a powerful mechanism for modelling the internal reasoning of an agent. It also provides tools for analysing, designing and implementing sophisticated forms of interaction among rational agents, thus making important contributions to the theory and practice of multiagent dialogues. Application domains include: nonmonotonic reasoning, legal disputes, business negotiation, labor disputes, team formation, scientific inquiry, deliberative democracy, ontology reconciliation, risk analysis, scheduling, and logistics. This volume presents the latest developments in this area at the interface of argumentation theory and multi agent systems. The 10 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers from the AAMAS 2008 conference were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on argument-based reasoning, argumentation and dialogue, as well as strategic and pragmatic issues.

Safety has been ranked as the number one concern for the acceptance and adoption of automated vehicles since safety has driven some of the most complex requirements in the development of self-driving vehicles. Recent fatal accidents involving self-driving vehicles have uncovered issues in the way some automated vehicle companies approach the design, testing, verification, and validation of their products. Traditionally, automotive safety follows functional safety concepts as detailed in the standard ISO 26262. However, automated driving safety goes beyond this standard and includes other safety concepts such as safety of the intended functionality (SOTIF) and multi-agent safety. Characterizing the Safety of Automated Vehicles addresses the concept of safety for self-driving vehicles through the inclusion of 10 recent and highly relevent SAE technical papers. Topics that these papers feature include functional safety, SOTIF, and multi-agent safety. As the first title in a series on automated vehicle safety, each will contain introductory content by the Editor with 10 SAE technical papers specifically chosen to illuminate the specific safety topic of that book.

In this follow-up to his earlier SAE book By the Numbers: Principles of Automotive Parts Management, Naples focuses on managing the three most important assets of an automobile parts business: financial, customer, and personnel. The book also includes information critical for creating and managing a total quality organization. Beyond the Numbers offers reference material applicable to the parts supply industry and beyond, and provides a framework that parts managers and parts store owners can use to improve overall organizational performance. Naples provides specific and practical guidelines for quality management which will lead to loyal employees, loyal customers, and a better bottom line.

The increasing complexity of manufacturing systems as well as the overall demands for flexible and fault-tolerant control of production processes stimulates (among many others) two key emerging technologies that are already making an important breakthrough in the field of intelligent manufacturing, control, and diagnostics. These two paradigms are: • the holonic approach based on the event-driven control strategy, usually aimed at modular control systems that are directly physically linked with the manufacturing hardware equipment, and • the multi-agent approach developed in the area of distributed information processing. The research communities working in both these fields are approaching the problem of intelligent manufacturing from different viewpoints and, until recently, to a certain extent, in an independent way. We can however observe quite a clear convergence of these fields in the last few years: the communities have started to cooperate, joining efforts to solve the painful problems involved in achieving effective industrial practice. We can see convergence in the terminology, standards and methods being applied.