Abstract
Smart system applications (SSAs) built on top of cyber-physical and socio-technical systems are increasingly composed of components that can work both autonomously and by cooperating with each other. Cooperating robots, fleets of cars and fleets of drones, emergency coordination systems are examples of SSAs. One approach to enable cooperation of SSAs is to form dynamic cooperation groups—ensembles—between components at runtime. Ensembles can be formed based on predefined rules that determine which components should be part of an ensemble based on their current state and the state of the environment (e.g., “group together 3 robots that are closer to the obstacle, their battery is sufficient and they would not be better used in another ensemble”). This is a computationally hard problem since all components are potential members of all possible ensembles at runtime. In our experience working with ensembles in several case studies the past years, using constraint programming to decide which ensembles should be formed does not scale for more than a limited number of components and ensembles. Also, the strict formulation in terms of hard/soft constraints does not easily permit for runtime self-adaptation via learning. This poses a serious limitation to the use of ensembles in large-scale and partially uncertain SSAs. To tackle this problem, in this paper we propose to recast the ensemble formation problem as a classification problem and use machine learning to efficiently form ensembles at scale.
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Acknowledgment
This paper is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 810115). Also, the research leading to these results has received funding from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 783221 and was partially supported by Charles University institutional funding SVV 260451.
We are also grateful to Milan Straka from Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University for valuable input in the field of deep networks that improved the training speed and results significantly.
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Bureš, T., Gerostathopoulos, I., Hnětynka, P., Pacovský, J. (2020). Forming Ensembles at Runtime: A Machine Learning Approach. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation: Engineering Principles. ISoLA 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12477. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61470-6_26
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