Partly as a side effect of the "Decade of the Brain," general readers with an interest in science have been afflicted with a surfeit of books about the brain from writers of curiously varied backgrounds. This one, with its garish title and disjointed assortment of 18 chapters, is by the distinguished codiscoverer of the structure of DNA. Some work is required to tease out of the disorderly text the two main components of the book. One of them, the better, consists of an account of current knowledge and trends of thinking about neural structure and function, with special emphasis on the cortical visual system of the higher mammals. The other component, appearing irrepressibly in bits and pieces throughout the book, as well as in longer passages, consists of a mixture of Crick's zealous and uncritical Newton-or-bust ways of thinking about the relation of consciousness to brain and an insouciant polemic,

The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul

Emergence: From Chaos to Order by John H. Holland .

Agent Based Modelling and Simulation tools: A review of the state-of-art software

https://research.aalto.fi/files/11780013/1_s2.0_S0951832016303337_main.pdf

Towards the assessment of potential impact of unmanned vessels on maritime transportation safety

In this paper, we study the $H_{2} $ -control for discrete-time Markov Jump Linear Systems (MJLS) with partial information . We consider the case in which we do not have access to the Markov jump parameter but, instead, there is a detector that emits signals which provides information on this parameter. A salient feature of our formulation is that it encompasses, for instance, the cases with perfect information, no information and cluster observations of the Markov parameter, which were previously analyzed in the Markov jump control literature. The goal is to derive a feedback linear control using the information provided by the detector in order to stochastically stabilize the closed loop system. We present two Lyapunov like equations for the stochastic stability of the system. In addition, we show that a Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI) formulation can be obtained in order to design a stochastically stabilizing feedback control. In the sequel we deal with the $H_{2} $ control problem and we show that, again, an LMI optimization problem can be formulated in order to design a stochastically stabilizing feedback control with guaranteed $H_{2} $ -cost. We also present two special cases, one of them always satisfied for the limit case in which the detector provides perfect information on the Markov parameter, and the Bernoulli jump case, under which LMI conditions become necessary and sufficient for the stochastic stabilizability of the system and the LMI optimization problems provide the optimal $H_{2} $ cost. For the Bernoulli jump case we show that our formulation generalizes previous ones. The case with convex polytopic uncertainty on the parameters of the system and on the transition probability matrix is also considered. The paper is concluded with some numerical examples.

A Detector-Based Approach for the $H_{2} $ Control of Markov Jump Linear Systems With Partial Information

By now, safety is recognised as a key quality on which to select/design advanced air traffic management (ATM) concepts, even when capacity and efficiency are the drivers of the development. The safety target is often described as 'equal or better' in comparison with existing practice, allowing a large freedom in how safety is expressed, let alone measured. In effect, new advanced communication, navigation, surveillance and air traffic management (CNS/ATM) concept developments are typically accomplished without the use of feedback from appropriate safety assessments. ATM concept design teams (e.g., of Free Flight or four dimensional ATM) try to realise capacity-efficiency enhancements by exploiting new technology, changing human controller roles and introducing new procedures, while relying on the established safety-related indicators in ATM such as conflict rates and types, workload of human operators and failure rates and effects of technical systems. ATM, however, is the result of complex interactions between multiple human operators, procedures and technical systems, all of which are highly distributed. This yields that providing safety is more than making sure that each of the ATM elements function properly safe; it is the complex interaction between them that determines safety. The assessment of isolated indicators falls short in covering the complex interactions between procedures, human operators and technical systems in safety-critical non-nominal situations. To improve this situation, this paper outlines a novel probabilistic risk assessment methodology, which has specifically been developed for application to ATM. In addition, this paper presents risk assessment results which have been obtained with this approach for two en route streams of required navigational performance, 95% of time within 1 n mile (RNPl), equipped traffic flying in opposite direction within two conventional ATM concepts and two airborne separation assurance based concepts. These results illustrate that our new methodology supports safety-based ATM design.

Accident Risk Assessment for Advanced Air Traffic Management

Piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDPs) are known as the largest class of Markov processes virtually describing all continuous-time processes not involving diffusions. For PDPs, a substantial amount of powerful analysis and control results are available. As such, PDPs are attractive for use in modelling complex distributed systems. However, the specification of an appropriate PDP model for complex distributed systems that exist in practice is far from trivial. This difficulty already applies for the specification of a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC). For a compositional specification of a CTMC model, Petri Nets have proven to be extremely useful. In order to realise a similar situation for PDP, this paper develops a novel type of Petri Net, named dynamically coloured Petri Net (DCPN), and proves that there exist into-mappings between PDPs and DCPNs.† †Part of this research has been performed within the project HYBRIDGE of the European Commission, contract number IST-2001-32460

Piecewise deterministic Markov processes represented by dynamically coloured Petri nets

Commercial aviation is feasible thanks to the complex socio-technical air transportation system, which involves interactions between human operators, technical systems, and procedures. In view of the expected growth in commercial aviation, significant changes in this socio-technical system are in development both in the USA and Europe. Such a complex socio-technical system may generate various types of emergent behavior, which may range from simple emergence, through weak emergence, up to strong emergence. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that agent-based modeling and simulation allows identifying changed and novel rare emergent behavior in this complex socio-technical system. An agent based model of a specific operation at an airport has been developed. The specific operation considered is the controlled crossing by a taxiing aircraft of a runway that is in use for controlled departures. The agent-based model includes all relevant human and technical agents, such as the aircraft, the pilots, the controllers and the decision support systems involved. This agent-based model is used to conduct rare event Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. The MC simulation results obtained confirm that agent based modeling and simulation of a socio-technical air transportation system allows to identify rare emergent behavior that was not identified through earlier, non-agent-based simulations, including human-in-the-loop simulations of the same operation. A typical example of such emergent behavior is the finding that alerting systems do not really reduce the safety risk. Agent based MC simulations of commercial aviation operations has been demonstrated as a viable way to be evaluated regarding rare emergent behaviour. This rare emergent behaviour could not have been found through the more traditional simulation approaches.

/pdf/agent-based-modeling-and-simulation-of-emergent-behavior-in-4ny1yr5755.pdf

Agent-based modeling and simulation of emergent behavior in air transportation

Compositional Specification of a Multi-Agent System by Stochastically and Dynamically Coloured Petri Nets

Air Traffic Management (ATM) involves interactions between multiple human operators, procedures and technical systems, all of which are highly distributed. This yields that providing safety is more than making sure that each of the ATM elements functions properly safe; it is the complex interaction between them that determines safety. The assessment of isolated indicators falls short in covering the complex interactions between procedures, human operators and technical systems in safety-critical non-nominal situations. To improve this situation, this paper develops an approach towards the modelling and assessment of risk of mid-air collision between aircraft.

http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/skoge/prost/proceedings/ecc03/pdfs/379.pdf

Mariken H. C. Everdij

Papers

Accident Risk Assessment for Advanced Air Traffic Management

Piecewise deterministic Markov processes represented by dynamically coloured Petri nets

Agent-based modeling and simulation of emergent behavior in air transportation

Compositional Specification of a Multi-Agent System by Stochastically and Dynamically Coloured Petri Nets

Collision risk modeling of air traffic