Agent in a Box: A Framework for Autonomous Mobile Robots with Beliefs, Desires, and Intentions

This paper provides the Agent in a Box for developing autonomous mobile robots using Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents. This framework provides the means of connecting the agent reasoning system to the environment, using the Robot Operating System (ROS), in a way that is flexible to a variety of application domains which use different sensors and actuators. It also provides the needed customisation to the agent’s reasoner for ensuring that the agent’s behaviours are properly prioritised. Behaviours which are common to all mobile robots, such as for navigation and resource management, are provided. This allows developers for specific application domains to focus on domain-specific code. Agents implemented using this approach are rational, mission capable, safety conscious, fuel autonomous, and understandable. This method was used for demonstrating the capability of BDI agents to control robots for a variety of application domains. These included simple grid environments, a simulated autonomous car, and a prototype mail delivery robot. From these case studies, the approach was demonstrated as capable of controlling the robots in the application domains. It also reduced the development burden needed for applying the approach to a specific robot.

An Automatic Aggregator of Power Flexibility in Smart Buildings Using Software Based Orchestration

This paper presents a software-based modular and hierarchical building energy management system (BEMS) to control the power consumption in sensor-equipped buildings. In addition, the need of this type of solution is also highlighted by presenting the worldwide trends of thermal energy end use in buildings and peak power problems. Buildings are critical component of smart grid environments and bottom-up BEMS solutions are need of the hour to optimize the consumption and to provide consumption side flexibility. This system is able to aggregate the controls of the all-controllable resources in building to realize its flexible power capacity. This system provides a solution for consumer to aggregate the controls of ‘behind-the-meter’ small loads in short response and provide ‘deep’ demand-side flexibility. This system is capable of discovery, status check, control and management of networked loads. The main novelty of this solution is that it can handle the heterogeneity of the installed hardware system along with time bound changes in the load device network and its scalability; resulting in low maintenance requirements after deployment. The control execution latency (including data logging) of this BEMS system for an external control signal is less than one second per connected load. In addition, the system is capable of overriding the external control signal in order to maintain consumer coziness within the comfort temperature thresholds. This system provides a way forward in future for the estimation of the energy stored in the buildings in the form of heat/temperature and use buildings as temporary batteries when electricity supply is constrained or abundant.

Performance Analysis of Quantum Key Distribution Technology for Power Business

Considering the complexity of power grid environments and the diversity of power communication transmission losses, this study proposes a quantum key distribution (QKD) network structure suitable for power business scenarios. Through simulating the power communication transmission environment, performance indicators of quantum channels and data interaction channels in power QKD systems are tested and evaluated from six aspects, such as distance loss, galloping loss, splice loss, data traffic, encryption algorithm and system stability. In the actual environment, this study combines the production business to build a QKD network suitable for power scenarios, and conducts performance analyses. The experimental results show that power QKD technologies can meet the operation index requirements of power businesses, as well as provide a reference for large-scale applications of the technology.

Optimizing Resource Discovery Technique in the P2P Grid Systems

Distributed discovery service is a main concept in the scalable and dynamic grid environments. In this paper, based on the super-peer technique, we propose a new topology for the grid discovery service. The model is designed in such a way that each super-peer within the cluster has the routing indices (RIs) based on cobweb and uses the hop-count routing index (HRI) to select the best neighbor. Besides, each super-peer includes a cache table, which stores the query and the query results. Furthermore, from the point of view of the response time and the number of submitted messages, we compare the new model with an existing method. An illustrative simulation is also presented to show the efficiency and validation of the new technique.