The reactive system concepts are an attractive paradigm for system design, development and maintenance because it separates policies from mechanisms, which has a particular significance in fault-tolerant computing. The paper presents the design and implementation of reactive systems based on the Actor model. Three generic actor classes: DMMs, Sensors and Actuators are designed and implemented a...

Enforcing complex policies that span organizational domains is an open challenge. Current work on SOA policy enforcement splits security in logical components that can be distributed across domains, but does not offer any concrete solution to integrate this security functionality so that it works across security services for organization-wide policies. In this paper, we propose xESB, an enhance...

School closure policies are among the non-pharmaceutical measures taken into consideration to mitigate influenza epidemics and pandemics spread. However, a systematic review of the effectiveness of alternative closure policies has yet to emerge. Here we perform a model-based analysis of four types of school closure, ranging from the nationwide closure of all schools at the same time to reactive...

In many robotic exploration missions, robots have to learn specific policies that allow them to: (i) select high level goals (e.g., identify specific destinations), (ii) navigate (reach those destinations), (iii) and adapt to their environment (e.g., modify their behavior based on changing environmental conditions). Furthermore, those policies must be robust to signal noise or unexpected situat...

Background: The Covid-19 pandemic continues to adversely affect healthcare systems globally. Developed and underdeveloped countries continue to strive towards sustainable health policies that will help in containing the spread and at the same time managing positive cases. Global policy initiatives since the confirmation of the outbreak is guided by the recommendations from the World health orga...

The control architecture for well functioning open electricity market of smart grids is introduced. The novel concept is that it establishes near real-time market operators for smart grids. In the proposed market model, traders, producers, brokers and end-users are incorporated. It develops near realtime active and reactive power dispatch policies based on optimal operation of players. In reali...

The robustness of animal behavior is unmatched by current machines, which often falter when exposed to unforeseen conditions. While animals are notably reactive to changes in their environment, machines often follow finely-tuned yet inflexible plans. Thus instead of the traditional approach of training such machines over many different unpredictable scenarios in detailed simulations (which is t...

Recent advances in deep learning have enabled optimization of reactive policies (DRPs) for continuous MDP planning by encoding a parametric policy as neural network and exploiting automatic differentiation an end-to-end model-based gradient descent framework. This approach has proven effective optimizing DRPs nonlinear MDPs, but it requires large number sampled trajectories to learn effectively...

This paper presents a novel real-world application for energy savings in a Smart Building environment. The proposed system unifies heterogeneous wireless sensor networks under a Semantic Web Service middleware. Two complementary and mutually exclusive rule-based approaches for enforcing energy-saving policies are proposed: a reactive agent based on production rules and a deliberative agent base...