Abstract
This Chapter describes the development and operation of an experimental structural health monitoring system whose functionality is based on self-organization in a complex multi-agent system. Self-organization within a system of many interacting components is generally understood to mean the formation of global patterns, or the production of coordinated global behaviours, solely from the interactions among the lowerlevel components of the system. The important characteristics are that the resulting patterns or behaviours occur at a larger scale than the individual system components, and that the interactions between the components are not influenced by a central controller or by reference to the emergent pattern or behaviour: they are purely local interactions. Self-organization in biological systems has been defined and discussed by Camazine et al. (Self-organization in biological systems. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2001), and Prokopenko et al. (Complexity 15:11–28, 2008) have discussed self-organization from an information-theoretic perspective. The system that will be described in this Chapter consists of a large number (∼200) of semi-autonomous local sensing agents, each of which can sense, process data, and communicate with its neighbours. In this context self-organization means that the agents will produce a system-level response to external events or damage that is produced entirely by the local communications between the agents, and is not influenced by a central controller or by any system-level design. The main benefits of this approach lie in scalability (the system performance is not limited by the computational and communication capability of a central controller) and in robustness (there is no single point of vulnerability, such as would be represented by a central controller).
D.C. Price is deceased.
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Notes
- 1.
The tracking field referred to here is identical to the gradient field defined by Prokopenko et al. (2005a). The robot’s path is determined by the gradient of this field.
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Acknowledgements
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the continued support for this work of Drs. Ed Generazio and Bill Prosser of NASA Langley Research Center, and of Dr. Lance Richards of NASA Dryden Flight Research Center. We also gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Adam Batten, Graeme Edwards, Tony Farmer, Peter Isaacs and Chris Lewis (all from CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering), as well as Mikhail Prokopenko and Peter Wang (CSIRO ICT Centre) to this work.
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Hoschke, N., Price, D.C., Scott, D.A. (2013). Self-Organizing Sensing of Structures: Monitoring a Space Vehicle Thermal Protection System. In: Prokopenko, M. (eds) Advances in Applied Self-Organizing Systems. Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5113-5_4
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