9965855
SESAME: towards better 3D conceptual design systems
Conceptual design dominates the early stages of most creative design processes. During these stages, the designer makes important decisions about the parameters of a model that are aimed at satisfying a set of design criteria. To do this, the designer produces many sketches of various possible solutions. Meanwhile, computer-aided design (CAD) systems are becoming the dominant visual medium used in design practice. However, these tools evolved as documentation production tools and do not support conceptual thinking. This paper presents a list of guidelines for computer support for conceptual design activities on 3D scenes and presents SESAME (Sketch, Extrude, Sculpt, and Manipulate Easily), a system based on these guidelines. Finally, we present a user study comparing SESAME with a conventional CAD package to demonstrate the effectiveness of SESAME.
16396247
Intelligent Manipulation Techniques for Conceptual 3D Design
One of the main operations in conceptual 3D design is the rearrangement of single and composite objects. This paper presents a new conceptual 3D design system that affords easy manipulation of composite objects. We discuss several alternative manipulation techniques to separate complex parts off an existing model. Then, we present a new way to move such parts in a 3D scene, as well as an algorithm to place parts at arbitrary locations. Finally, we present and discuss the results of a user study of these manipulation techniques.
8366022
A rationality-based modeling for coalition support
We present a game theoretic model for multi-agent resource distribution and allocation where agents in the environment must help each other to survive. Each agent maintains a set of two-tuples T=(A, P) called friendship values representing actual friendship and perceived friendship. The model directly addresses problems in reputation management schemes in multi-agent systems and peer-to-peer distributed systems. We present algorithms for maintaining the friendship values as well as a utility equation used in each agent's decision making. For an application problem, we adapted our formal model to the military coalition support problem in peace-keeping missions. Simulation results show that efficient resource allocation and sharing with minimum communication cost is achieved without centralized control.
3206497
Polymorphic self-* agents for stigmergic fault mitigation in large-scale real-time embedded systems
Organization and coordination of agents within large-scale, complex, distributed environments is one of the primary challenges in the field of multi-agent systems. A lot of interest has surfaced recently around self-* (self-organizing, self-managing, self-optimizing, self-protecting) agents. This paper presents polymorphic self-* agents that evolve a core set of roles and behavior based on environmental cues. The agents adapt these roles based on the changing demands of the environment, and are directly implementable in computer systems applications. The design combines strategies from game theory, stigmergy, and other biologically inspired models to address fault mitigation in large-scale, real-time, distributed systems. The agents are embedded within the individual digital signal processors of BTeV, a High Energy Physics experiment consisting of 2500 such processors. Results obtained using a SWARM simulation of the BTeV environment demonstrate the polymorphic character of the agents, and show how this design exceeds performance and reliability metrics obtained from comparable centralized, and even traditional decentralized approaches.
206612774
Design of Very Lightweight Agents for reactive embedded systems
Large-scale real-time high-performance data acquisition computing systems often require to be fault-tolerant and adaptive to changes. We consider a multi-agent system based approach to achieve these goals. This research is a part of ongoing research efforts to build a triggering and data acquisition system (known as BTeV) for particle-accelerator-based high energy physics experiments at Fermi National Laboratory. The envisioned hardware consists of pixel detectors and readout sensors embedded in the accelerator, which are connected to specialized FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays). The FPGAs are connected to approximately 2,500 digital signal processors (DSPs). After initial filtering and processing of data by the DSPs, a farm of approximately 2,500 Linux computers are responsible for post-processing a large amount of high speed data input. To support the adaptive fault-tolerance feature, we introduce the notion of very lightweight agents (VLAs), which are designed to be adaptive but small in footprint and extremely efficient. Each digital signal processor will run a very lightweight agent along with a physics application program that collects and processes input data from the corresponding FPGA. Since VLAs can be proactive or reactive, Brooks' subsumption architecture is a good basis for the design. In this paper we present several necessary changes in the original subsumption architecture to better serve the BTeV architecture.
14162832
Text-independent open-set speaker identification for military missions using genetic rule-based system
We present a genetic classifier system approach to the text-independent open-set speaker identification problem. Classifier systems are widely used in symbolic problem for dynamically changing open-ended learning. Signal processing problems require processing of real-valued parameters that classifier systems are not designed for. On the other hand, the approaches based on common cepstral encoding with clustering algorithms handle the closed-set speaker identification quite well. This research solves the open-set problem by hybridizing these two approaches.