<p>Resilience is an essential and highly desired characteristic of a social-ecological system’s ability to adapt and adjust to various stresses and shocks that cause disruption. As social and ecological systems are intertwined and continually experiencing changes and disturbances, a major challenge appears revolving around the ways in which this resilience can be built and investigated. Social-ecological resilience can be defined as the amount of stress or disturbance that a particular system can tolerate, while still maintaining the same functions and identity. This paper uses social-ecological resilience concepts as a research framework, and examines three main themes that allow for the building of water management resilience to occur. These themes include learning to live with change, nurturing the ability to adapt/adjust to changes, and also on creating opportunities for self-organization. Two ethnic minority villages in Northern Thailand were chosen as research sites, in which the village water management practices were studied within a specific time period. Varying degrees of quantity and quality water issues within both villages have brought about stress and disturbances within their water management practices and increased the need to deal with these problems. Research was conducted at a community scale and resilience analysis pertains only to this specific level. Through the utilization of focus groups and interviews, qualitative data was collected and analyzed within a SE resilience context. This paper sets out to explore how social-ecological resilience has been built or not, and to what degree this has occurred within these two villages water management practices. The analysis indicates how complex and interconnected the social and ecological systems are and how the water management practices of these two communities play a role in this complex, dynamic process. Conclusions drawn are not limited to these two communities, but can be applied to the wider Northern Thailand region.</p>

This dissertation focuses on predictability problems regarding the behaviour of the professional librarians in public-, school- and research libraries in specific crucial situations. The material was obtained by observations/participations (over 10 years) in the daily work in Swedish libraries by non-structured interviews and “free” discussions with librarians and library visitors. Over 200 interviews with 87 librarians and over 300 discussions with 261 library visitors are the fundament of the empirical basis of my study. These findings build up a theoretical basis (a heuristic model) grounded in ideas of deterministic chaos and complexity theory. Deterministic means, that the current state is the consequence of its preceding states, in my terms, the corporate memory in organizations. Chaotic means the sensitivity of initial condition. Deterministic chaos describes behaviour which satisfies the conditions of determinism but even shows the characteristics of chaos. The study shows that differences between the behaviour of the librarians and the predictions of the behaviour in crucial situations from the political leadership are essentially grounded in ·The history of Swedish libraries (deterministic rationality and self-rationality). ·The asymmetric information between librarians and politicians. ·Self-organization of librarians in the daily work. ·The “free” will of librarians in crucial situations grounded in the philosophy of Kant. The behaviour I could observe was studied in the following situations: ·The demand of a law, which secures the existence of public- and school libraries. ·The selection, development and installation of appropriate computer based information systems in public- school- and research libraries. ·The GÖK- and KUR-projects, which was based on the assumption that new ways to work with the daily patterns in libraries should open the library for more visitors, book loaners and information seekers. The issues discussed in this dissertation gave the following results: ·That the long time, in many cases even short time, unpredictability of librarian behaviour in for the library crucial situations is not only understandable – but also necessary for the development of the library. ·That the deterministic chaotic behaviour of the librarians is generated by self-rationality, asymmetric information, and self-organization. ·That the library is not a chaotic organization but a deterministic chaotic organization. Further I could see tendencies for the same behaviour in other professional, knowledge based Non Profit Organizations like schools, universities and hospitals.

The objective of this thesis is to establish the utility and limitations of using exergy (a thermodynamic measure of energy quality, or ability to perform work) as a resource consumption metric, and to investigate what role exergy may play in resource consumption decision-making. To do so, this thesis assessed three exergy-based resource consumption methodologies: the Exergy Replacement Cost; Eco-exergy; and Emergy. Furthermore, fundamental properties of exergy were revisited, including the exergy reference state, and the derivations of both concentration and non-flow exergy. The results of the analysis indicate three significant problem areas with applying exergy toward resource valuation. First, the exergy derivation level conflicts with the resource valuation level regarding important requirements and assumptions: the exergy reference environment is modelled as an infinitely large system in internal chemical equilibrium, and this is in incomparable to the real world; and, the derivation of non-flow exergy values items based solely upon chemical concentrations, whereas at the resource consumption level, work producing items are valuable based primarily upon chemical reactivity. Second, exergy proponents have not adequately addressed the many different and critical perspectives of exergy, including exergy as: harmful or helpful; organizing or disorganizing; a restricted or unrestricted measure of potential useful work; and applied to value systems or specific items. Third, none of the resource consumption methodologies properly apply exergy: the Exergy Replacement Cost primarily focuses on mineral upgrading; Eco-exergy is improperly derived from exergy; and Emergy has switched from being energy-based to exergy-based without any reformulation of the methodology. For the reasons provided above, among others, this author concludes there is currently no justified theoretical connection between exergy and resource value, and that there is a disjunction between how exergy is derived and how it is applied. Non exergy-based applications for the three resource consumption methodologies are proposed.

The objective of this thesis is to establish the utility and limitations of using exergy (a thermodynamic measure of energy quality, or ability to perform work) as a resource consumption metric, and to investigate what role exergy may play in resource consumption decision-making. To do so, this thesis assessed three exergy-based resource consumption methodologies: the Exergy Replacement Cost; Eco-exergy; and Emergy. Furthermore, fundamental properties of exergy were revisited, including the exergy reference state, and the derivations of both concentration and non-flow exergy. The results of the analysis indicate three significant problem areas with applying exergy toward resource valuation. First, the exergy derivation level conflicts with the resource valuation level regarding important requirements and assumptions: the exergy reference environment is modelled as an infinitely large system in internal chemical equilibrium, and this is in incomparable to the real world; and, the derivation of non-flow exergy values items based solely upon chemical concentrations, whereas at the resource consumption level, work producing items are valuable based primarily upon chemical reactivity. Second, exergy proponents have not adequately addressed the many different and critical perspectives of exergy, including exergy as: harmful or helpful; organizing or disorganizing; a restricted or unrestricted measure of potential useful work; and applied to value systems or specific items. Third, none of the resource consumption methodologies properly apply exergy: the Exergy Replacement Cost primarily focuses on mineral upgrading; Eco-exergy is improperly derived from exergy; and Emergy has switched from being energy-based to exergy-based without any reformulation of the methodology. For the reasons provided above, among others, this author concludes there is currently no justified theoretical connection between exergy and resource value, and that there is a disjunction between how exergy is derived and how it is applied. Non exergy-based applications for the three resource consumption methodologies are proposed.

In this thesis, we study self-organized flocking using a swarm of mobile robots. We first present a mobile robot platform having two novel sensing systems developed specifically for swarm robotic studies. We describe its infrared-based short-range sensing system, capable of measuring the range to obstacles and detecting kin robots. In particular, we describe a novel sensing system called the virtual heading sensor (VHS), which combines a digital compass and a wireless communication module to form a scalable method for sensing the relative headings of neighboring robots. We propose a behavior based on heading alignment and proximal control and show that it is capable of generating self-organized ocking in a group of seven robots. Then, we propose a number of metrics to evaluate the quality of flocking and use them to evaluate four main variants of this behavior. We characterize and model the sensing abilities of the robots and develop a physics-based simulator that is verified against the physical robots for flocking in open environments. After showing in simulation that we can achieve flocking in a group of up to 1000 robots in an open environment, we perform experiments to determine the performance of flocking under different controller parameters and characteristics of VHS using the predefined metrics. In the experiments, we vary the three main characteristics of VHS, namely: (1) The amount and nature of noise in heading measurement, (2) The number of neighboring robots that can be &quot / heard&quot / , and (3) the range of wireless communication. Ourresults show that range of communication is the main factor that determines the scale of flocking, and that the behavior is highly robust against the other two characteristics. We extend an existing particle-based model to determine the phase transition characteristics of flocking under different VHS characteristics. An analytical treatment of the model is also presented and verified against the results obtained from experiments in a physics-based simulator.

The most studies on ad hoc network mainly focus on TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) of transport layer, the routing of network layer, multi-hop of Data-link layer, and the integration of WWAN and WLAN to increase the load balancing, coverage, and power savings. Nevertheless, in this dissertation, the system performances of four schemes proposed are improved with respect to data-link and network layers. One purpose of the data link layer is to perform error correction or detection. The other is responsible for the way in which different users share the transmission medium. The Medium Access Control (MAC) sublayer is responsible for allowing frames to be sent over the shared media without undue interference with other users. This aspect is referred to as multi-access communications. In the first and third schemes, the FDMA (Frequently-division multiple access) is employed to improve system performance, while in the fourth scheme the CDMA (Code-division multiple access) is used to enhance performance. Network layer has several functions, first is to determine the routing information. A second function is to determine the quality of service. A third function is flow control to avoid network to become congested. In the third scheme, the data-link and network layers have been used to increase system performance. Furthermore, the second scheme mainly concentrates on power savings under wireless sensor network. In ad hoc wireless networks, most data delivery is accomplished through multi-hop routing (hop by hop). This approach may leads to long delay and routing overhead regardless of which routing protocol is used. To overcome this inherent characteristic, this work presents a novel idea adopting dual-card-mode and performing self-organization process with specific IP naming and channel assignment to form a hierarchical star-graph ad hoc network (HSG-ad hoc) which can not only expedite the data transmission but also eliminate the route discovery procedure during data transmission. Therefore, the overall network reliability and stability can be significantly improved. Simulation results show that the proposed approach achieves substantial improvements in terms of average end-to-end delay, throughput, and packet delivery ratio. In a large-scale wireless sensor network, a topology is needed to gather state-based data from sensor network and efficiently aggregate the data given the requirements of balanced load, minimal energy consumption and prolonged network lifetime. In this study, we proposed a ring-based hierarchical clustering scheme (RHC) consisting of four phases: pre-deployment, parent-child relationship building, deployment, and member join phases. Two node types are distributed throughout the network: cluster head nodes (type 1 node) and general sensor nodes (type 2 node). The type 1 node has better battery life, software capability and hardware features than the type 2 node does; therefore, the type 1 node is a better cluster head than type 2 node. Most routing protocols focus mainly on obtaining a workable route without considering network traffic conditions for a mobile ad hoc network. Consequently, real time and multimedia applications do not achieve adequate quality of service (QoS). To support QoS, this work proposes a QoS-aware routing protocol, i.e. QUality of service with Admission control RouTing (QUART), that incorporates an admission control scheme into route discovery and route setup procedures. One variant of QUART, called, QUART-DD, adopts a dual-card dual-signal mechanism to increase system performance. Simulation results indicate that QUART-DD can significantly improve packet delivery ratio and throughput, while having a lower average end-to-end delay than routing protocols without QoS support. The performance of ad hoc wireless network suffers from problems in multi-hop transmission. This study adopts code division to modulate the frame header and the frame payload separately. A common spreading code modulates the frame header, and a special spreading code is negotiated and to modulate the frame payload. A field in the frame header indicates the spreading code used to modulate the successive frame payload. The modulated frame is transparent for every node, enabling many frames to be transmitted simultaneously. To allow the special spreading code negotiation, the RTS/CTS command is modified as ERTS/ECTS, and a spreading code table (SCT) is maintained in every node. Due to the space reuse, the proposed scheme has superior performance in latency and bandwidth utilization, as revealed by the simulation results.

<p>This dissertation aim is to investigate the application of higher-ordered feedback architectures, as a control system for an autonomous robot, on delayed response task problems in the area of evolutionary robotics. For the two architectures of interest a theoretical and practical experiment study is conducted to elaborate how these architectures cope with the road-sign problem, and extended versions of the same. In the theoretical study conducted in this dissertation focus is on the features of the architectures, how they behave and act in different kinds of road-sign problem environments in earlier work. Based on this study two problem environments are chosen for practical experiments. The two experiments that are tested are the three-way and multiple stimuli road-sign problems. Both architectures seams to be cope with the three-way road-sign problem. Although, both architectures are shown to have difficulties solving the multiple stimuli road-sign problem with the current experimental setting used.</p><p>This work leads to two insights in the way these architectures cope with and behave in the three-way road-sign problem environment and delayed response tasks. The robot seams to learn to explicitly relate its actions to the different stimuli settings that it is exposed to. Firstly, both architectures forms higher abstracted representations of the inputs from the environment. These representations are used to guide the robots actions in the environment in those situations were the raw input not was enough to do the correct actions. Secondly, it seams to be enough to have two internal representations of stimuli setting and offloading some stimuli settings, relying on the raw input from the environment, to solve the three-way road-sign problem.</p><p>The dissertation works as an overview for new researchers on the area and also as take-off for the direction to which further investigations should be conducted of using higher-ordered feedback architectures.</p>

Nature uses fibrous surfaces for a wide range of functions such as sensing, adhesion, structural color, and self-cleaning. However, little is known about how fiber properties enable them to self-organize into diverse and complex functional forms. Using polymeric micro/nanofiber arrays with tunable properties as model systems, we demonstrate how the combination of mechanical and surface properties can be harnessed to transform an array of anchored nanofibers into a variety of complex, hierarchically organized dynamic functional surfaces. We show that the delicate balance between fiber elasticity and surface adhesion plays a critical role in determining the shape, chirality, and hierarchy of the assembled structures. We further report a strategy for controlling the long-range order of fiber assemblies by manipulating the shape and movement of the liquid-vapor interface. Our study provides fundamental understanding of the pattern formation by self-organization of bioinspired fibrous surfaces. Moreover, our new strategies offer a foundation for designing a vast assortment of functional surfaces with adhesive, optical, water-repellent, capture and release, and many more capabilities with the structural and dynamic sophistication of their biological counterparts. / Engineering and Applied Sciences

Die neu ins Leben gerufene Schriftenreihe EINGEBETTETE, SELBSTORGANISIERENDE SYSTEME (ESS) widmet sich einer sehr aktuellen Thematik der Technischen Informatik. Seit Jahren durchdringen eingebettete Systeme unseren Alltag in fast allen Lebensbereichen. Angefangen von automatisierten Türöffnungssystemen, über komplex gesteuerte Servicemaschinen, z.B. Waschmaschinen, bis hin zu mobilen, persönlich zugeordneten Systemen wie Mobiltelefone und Handheld-Computer sind eingebettete Systeme zur Selbstverständlichkeit geworden. Der Aspekt der rekonfigurierbaren Schnittstellen zwischen einzelnen Komponenten eingebetteter Systeme wird in diesem ersten Band aufgegriffen. Der erste Beitrag befasst sich mit der systematischen Modellierung von Schnittstellen. Zunächst werden aktive Tasks und Kommunikationsmedien unterschieden sowie die Parameter der Zielarchitektur in den Entwurfsprozess für Schnittstellen eingebracht. Darauf aufbauend wird eine systematische Konzeption von Schnittstellen vorgestellt und bewertet. Der zweite Beitrag betrachtet das Problem der Rekonfigurierung von Schnittstellen zur Gewährleistung von sicherer Funktionalität, auch im Fehlerfall. Die Fehlererkennung und –behandlung werden von der erweiterten Schnittstelle implementiert. In dem dritten Beitrag untersucht Marcel Flade Schnittstellen in Hardware/Software-Systemen. Dabei stellt sich das Problem, die Kontrolle über die Funktionalität der Schnittstelle auf den Software- und Hardwareteil aufzuteilen. Die Beiträge werden durch eine vollständige Implementierung eines Beispiels und eines Werkzeugs zur automatisierten Generierung der VHDL-Implementierung abgerundet. Mit diesen ausgewählten Arbeiten, die in den ersten Band dieser wissenschaftlichen Schriftenreihe aufgenommen sind, werden dem Leser grundlegende Aspekte rekonfigurierbarer Schnittstellen für eingebettete, selbstorganisierende Systeme vorgestellt.

Fire ants link their legs and jaws together to form functional structures called self- assemblages. Examples include floating rafts, towers, bridges, and bivouacs. We investigate these self-assemblages of fire ants. Our studies are motivated in part by the vision of providing guidance for programmable robot swarms. The goal for such systems is to develop a simple programmable element from which complex patterns or behaviors emerge on the collective level. Intelligence is decentralized, as is the case with social insects such as fire ants. In this combined experimental and theoretical study, we investigate the construction of two fire ant self-assemblages that are critical to the colony’s survival: the raft and the tower. Using time-lapse photography, we record the construction processes of rafts and towers in the laboratory. We identify and characterize individual ant behaviors that we consistently observe during assembly, and incorporate these behaviors into mathematical models of the assembly process. Our models accurately predict both the assemblages’ shapes and growth patterns, thus providing evidence that we have identified and analyzed the key mechanisms for these fire ant self-assemblages. We also develop novel techniques using scanning electron microscopy and micro-computed tomography scans to visualize and quantify the internal structure and packing properties of live linked fire ants. We compare our findings to packings of dead ants and similarly shaped granular material packings to understand how active arranging affects ant spacing and orientation. We find that ants use their legs to increase neighbor spacing and hence reduce their packing density by one-third compared to packings of dead ants. Also, we find that live ants do not align themselves in parallel with nearest neighbors as much as dead ants passively do. Our main contribution is the development of parsimonious mathematical models of how the behaviors of individuals result in the collective construction of fire ant assemblages. The models posit only simple observed behaviors based on local information, yet their mathe- matical analysis yields accurate predictions of assemblage shapes and construction rates for a wide range of ant colony sizes.