In a large and complex system, such as a railway network, it is often not an option to stop operation at any time. Even if a part of the system fails, is being repaired or modified, the system has to keep functioning. This leads to many requirements for on-line expansion, on-line maintenance, and fault-tolerance. Dynamic changes demand next-generation control, information and service systems to be based on adaptive, reliable and reusable technologies and applications. Such systems are expected to have the characteristics of living systems composed of largely autonomous and decentralized components. Hence they are called Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ADS). This work describes the concept, architecture and technologies of ADS and their applications in intelligent control, information and service systems, with a focus on transport. ADS is explained first using the example of the Japanese railway transport system; applications in other fields and countries follow. The goal is to describe the ADS concept and the technologies, applications and businesses on the basis of a consistent concept for achieving intelligent systems such as for manufacturing, transportation service, air traffic, robotic and distributed services.
Inspec keywords: railways; manufacturing industries; decentralised control; multivariable control systems; air traffic; transportation
Other keywords: engineering systems; information service; railway; ADS; smart system; manufacturing; robotic service; transportation; ticketing service; banking; autonomous decentralized systems; air traffic; blockchain; social service
Subjects: Control technology and theory (production); Transportation industry; General topics in manufacturing and production engineering; General and management topics; Control applications in manufacturing processes; Transportation system control
The advancement of technology is ensured by step-by-step innovation and its implementation into society. Autonomous decentralized systems (ADSs) have been growing since first proposed in 1977 by Kinji Mori, and then the ADS technologies and their implementations have interacted with the evolving markets, sciences, and technologies. The ADS concept is proposed on biological analogy, and its technologies have been advanced according to changing and expanding requirements. These technologies are now categorized into three generations for different missions according to the heterogeneous requirements of customers and systems. These technologies have been widely applied in manufacturing, telecommunications, information provision/utilization, transportation, and so on. They have been operating successfully throughout the world. The paradigm shift of ADS technologies is shown in this chapter.
Along with sophistication of society, multifunctionalities of social infrastructure systems and collaboration among the systems are advancing, and the system tends to be complicated. And dependence on the system is also increasing. This trend is no exception for safety critical systems like railway control systems. Conventionally, in safety-critical system, it has been considered that system integrity is the most significant requirement to ensure its safety. Since frequent system expansion involves a risk of impairing the integrity of the system, it is considered desirable to avoid expanding the safety system as much as possible, and extension of the system during operation has been prohibited. For that reason, the construction period for system expansion had been becoming long, and a technology to drastically shorten the construction period was required. In this chapter, as one of the solutions to the issue mentioned above, autonomous decentralized railway control system which has developed and introduced in JR East and its systemconstruction technology is described.
Control systems have been put into practical use in all the fields of the industrial world. In a conventional system, a central system controls devices directly. This is called a central control system. However, this system configuration has a limitation to meet variety of needs and situations that change from hour to hour. Therefore, autonomous decentralized techniques have come to utilization and have been put into practical use in various fields. Factory automation, public facility management, building facility management, steel production management, power equipment management, etc. are the examples. Train control systems have also been utilizing autonomous decentralized techniques. As a result, these systems have contributed to improve not only safety but also service, such as transport capacity increases and ride comfort improvement. In this chapter, the background of realization of these systems, transition of technology, and assurance techniques are described.
In traffic-management system (TMS) for existing lines of a metropolitan area, there was a limit in the control of a large station in the centralized TMS based on the conventional CTC (centralized traffic control). In the case of TMS, all information is gathered and judged based on train schedule, namely train diagram and traintracking data, in the center, and is controlled via CTC. For this reason, it is difficult to control all stations in a metropolitan area, which have many large stations, making introduction of the system difficult. Development to resolve this big issue was done in the Tokyo autonomous decentralized transport operation control system (ATOS). It is a total system that carries out transport operation control and signal control of the existing 24 lines in the Tokyo metropolitan area. It is the largest system in the world, covering complex and high-density operations of existing lines (minimum headway of about 2 min). Its features are as follows: (1) Including the electronic interlocking system into the transport operation control system, constituting an ATOS that arranges the diagram and route-control function at the station. This makes automatic control of line with complex large stations possible. (2) Even when the diagram is disturbed by any accident, it is a system that can quickly recover the diagram by the operation adjustment function that the operator can operate with the diagram-based operation*. (3) When the concept of new interlocking logic which integrates maintenance work management function was considered, the management of occupancy information of track was adopted to interlocking logic by the method of exclusively controlling this track occupancy information. (4) By adopting autonomous decentralized system (ADS), online testing of the system and step by step system construction of the system became possible, it became easier to construct a large scale system step by step and to partially replace. In this way, ATOS contributes greatly to the system construction of large-scale and complicated line sections.
In this chapter, an automatic dependent surveillance (ADS) application with fault tolerant property will be discussed. In narrow sense, fault-tolerant technologies guarantee continuous or uninterrupted operations of systems, units or devices under faulty conditions. In broader sense, fault-tolerant technologies guarantee to accomplish continuous or uninterrupted tasks under restricted conditions. An ADS technology for air-traffic radar systems accomplishes continuous or uninterrupted aircraft surveillance by sharing resources among radars with network. It guarantees safe and effective air-traffic operation in congested airspaces.
This chapter describes the implementation of an agile autonomous agent-based manufacturing system based on a set of cheap production machines placed in a grid. This grid contains production machines, represented by agents, capable to perform certain production steps and also an infrastructure for transporting the products to be made. Products to be made are also represented by agents. Many different products can be made in parallel, each product having its own sequence of production steps and its own path along the production machines. The whole manufacturing is based on interaction of autonomous agents living in a distributed environment. This chapter discusses the basic design considerations and includes a description of a simulation model of the transport system used during production. The chapter ends with a discussion of using agent technology during the whole life cycle of a product, where a life-cycle agent becomes the basis of Internet of Things technology.
Conventional automatic fare collection systems (AFCSs) present difficulties in collaborating with different systems, fulfilling various needs, and upgrading. Each terminal was designed to provide a single function such as ticketing, checking, or collecting in a stand-alone configuration, equipped with an embedded system. Upon designing the new AFCS, three points were expected: solutions to those problems, improved convenience for the passengers, and reduced maintenance costs. To satisfy such requirements, the contactless integrated circuit cards (IC cards) were proposed as the alternatives of the paper tickets, and the IC card ticket system named Suica has been developed and utilised by East Japan Railway Company, based on the concept of autonomous decentralised systems. Gate control, transaction process, and value-added services have been integrated in this system. Nowadays, it is becoming more and more important to integrate control, information, and service into a system. This integration enables not only the exchange of messages among heterogeneous systems but also the creation of adaptive integrated systems that satisfy a wide variety of user requirements. This chapter presents the development of Suica system as a case study.
Robot as a Service (RaaS) is a cloud-computing unit that facilitates the seamless integration of robots and embedded devices into Web and cloud-computing environments. The RaaS concepts can be applied to different types of IoT applications, including cyber-physical systems, autonomous decentralized systems, serverless computing systems, and Internet of Intelligent Things. This section presents the design and implementations of a number of RaaS units, as well as a Visual IoT/ Robotics Programming Environment that can visually program RaaS units through a drag-and-drop style. Multiple physical robots and simulated robots are implemented. The platform independence was ensured through a standard interface defined in a JavaScript Object Notation object. The development and testing of several sample applications is shown.
East Japan Railway Company (JR East) is all-round and the biggest railway company in the world. Our business domains are railway, lifestyle and IT&Suica business, and we intended to grow continuously while meeting our social responsibilities as a trusted lifestyle service creating group. JR East released the “JR East App”which is an application (app) for smartphones in March 2014 aiming to improve the level of satisfaction with information service for passengers. This app aims to help those who use JR East to easily obtain necessary information by using their smartphones anytime and anywhere in a timely manner. In order to achieve this aim, JR East utilizes various kinds of location technologies such as GPS, Wi-Fi and ultrasonic beacons and provides content using real-time data unique to railway business operators such as operation statuses, location information and occupancy of trains. JR East also provides information on shops in its station buildings and around its stations and entertainment content consisting of e-books, games, etc. As of the end of December 2016, over 2.3 million smartphone users mainly within Japan have downloaded this app, and many people actively use this app. Access logs show that the content mainly used is real-time information related to the use of railways. In addition, the questionnaire survey revealed that around 80% of respondents are satisfied with this information service, and around 90% of respondents are willing to continue to use this app.
The concepts of autonomous decentralised systems were developed for the control of large engineering systems such as high-speed trains with the goal of increasing their resilience where centralised control systems could not be trusted to be always operating and accessible. Historically, social organisations, both civic and commercial, were controlled or governed with a balance of centralised, top-down and decentralised, bottom-up mechanisms. We consider how the emergence of a `hyperconnected' world, together with advances in education, political, and management science, is changing this balance. We begin by considering the emergence of the management of large-scale enterprises during the Industrial Revolution and contrast this with the roles of complex systems in the emergence of autonomous social structures. We go on to examine how this changing balance is becoming manifest in public and private social structures and conclude with thoughts on its evolution.
The increasing autonomy, complexity, and decentralisation of modern systems require an increasing reliance on large-scale simulation to cope with the social, technical, economic, and environmental challenges of the world we live in. These large-scale simulations aid in the understanding of processes and design of complex systems. The Internet of Simulation (IoS) is an emerging trend towards a decentralised ecosystem of geographical disparate simulations that are readily combined to form more complex simulations. This chapter explores some of the challenges in implementing this distributed simulation system and its use in design, maintenance, analysis, and training of complex systems. These include the management of complex interactions between integrated simulation components and wider operational challenges. The contextualised applications of IoS and some of the relevant issues' post-deployment are discussed.
In a globalized market, technology evolution is neither an option nor an election but a necessity. The future of both humans and systems points toward a singularity within a short timeframe. We are converging into a symbiosis, which is why we have been evolving most traditional systems architectures and technologies into critical and high availability systems, so they can provide services available 24/7 in a precise and uninterruptible way. As a response to the necessities previously mentioned, there currently exist some efforts focused on solving said problems. A remarkable option among them is the autonomous decentralized system-oriented architecture (ADSOA), a novel architecture that takes as an analogy the survival mechanisms of living organisms, as well as the backbone of the specialization of functions through the genetic code that cells provide to a living thing, in order to deal with constant requirements that exist under a high demand system that provides uninterrupted services. Thus, ADSOA becomes a solid bridge between hitherto known architectures to business architectures that demand 24/7 services for internal and external business partners.
This chapter discusses the form of autonomous decentralized software known as the blockchain. It covers the original usage ofblockchain distributed ledger technology, a part of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. It summarizes the functional software architecture ofblockchain that provides secure and uninterruptible service. It briefly discusses the growth and proliferation of cryptocurrencies throughout the economy. The main focus of the section is the application of blockchain technology beyond currencies, as a disintermediating force in various industries, such as finance, healthcare, publishing, and software, including the potential for widespread distributed, autonomous organizations, based on smart contracts built on the blockchain technology. While the technology is complicated and the word blockchain isn't exactly sonorous, the main idea is simple. Blockchains enable us to send money directly and safely from me to you, without going through a bank, a credit card company, or PayPal. Rather than the Internet of Information, it's the Internet of Value or of Money. It's also a platform for everyone to know what is true-at least with regard to structured recorded information [1].
Due to global changes in social structure, the needs for social infrastructure are diversified and continually changing overtime. To capture the structural changes in the market and to sustainably and continuously improve the quality of life of users, innovative manufacturing is required to flexibly and incrementally innovate their business in finance, organizations, technology, and operations. In this chapter, we explain our incremental expansion of social infrastructure business to the UK railway market using the autonomous decentralized system concept.
With the rapid development of technologies such as information and communication technology (ICT) and the accompanying major social changes, it has become increasingly difficult for companies to offer highly satisfactory customer services of their own in current society where customer needs are very widely diversified. Under such circumstances, by alliances among different companies, it is important to combine individual specialties organically and create new value constantly. On the other hand, the dramatic development of ICT enables companies and customers co-create new values using social network service as common practice. In this chapter, the alliance strategy of Japan Railway East which has developed vertically integrated business model in railway business and its advantages is described. In addition, autonomous decentralized technology and assurance technology as system technologies supporting these business alliances are also described.
In this chapter, we analyze the main frameworks for developing cyber-physical systems, their interrelationships and impact. The technological history and their main concepts are described here. The main burdens for a practical use are identified. Based on an existing development on a smart city project, a reference model for smart city is identified. The business model characteristics and their implications for the governance of such operational system are addressed. The chapter concludes with recommendations on future-required developments.