Brief
Bio
Mihaela Ulieru is a Professor of Computer Science and holds the
NSERC Canada Research Chair in Adaptive Information Infrastructures
for the e-Society at the University of New Brunswick. She chairs
and is on the board of several international R&D initiatives
and is on the governing board of the IEEE Industrial Electronic
Society, in charge with the emerging area of Industrial Informatics.
With a PhD (1995) in computational intelligence applied to systems
diagnostics under the illustrious supervision of Professor Rolf
Isermann at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany, Dr. Ulieru
started her academic career as Lecturer in Computer Science and
Information Systems at Brunel University, London, UK. A postdoctoral
fellowship (1997) with Prof. William Gruver in the Intelligent
Manufacturing and Robotics Group at Simon Fraser University brought
her to Canada where she was awarded the Junior Nortel Chair at
the University of Calgary in 1998. In 2001 Dr. Ulieru founded
(under NSERC International Opportunity Fund) the Canadian GAIN
(Global Agents Integration Network) that joined the research efforts
of 19 Universities and Research Institutes across the Country
working together with the industry to develop intelligent web
services for collaborative virtual organizations. Several international
consortia were involved, among which the Intelligent Manufacturing
Systems Consortium and the Foundation for Intelligent Physical
Agents. In 2002 she founded (under contract of international cooperation
with Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing) the Emergent Information
Systems Laboratory at the University of Calgary which she led
until she left Calgary for the CRC award at UNB. Her extensive
work with the industry earned her the Chairmanship of the 1st
IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics in 2003
and in the same year she founded the IEEE Technical Sub-Committee
on Industrial Agents.
Since July 1, 2005 Dr. Ulieru directs the Adaptive Risk Management
Laboratory funded by CFI (Canada Foundation for Innovation) at
the University of New Brunswick to support her work related to
the Canada Research Chair award. Her current research is focused
on distributed intelligent environments (coined as 'ambient intelligence')
and their applications to e-Health, emergency response management
and intelligent manufacturing.
Abstract
Industrial Informatics naturally emerged from the development
of science and technology in the last two decades. The meaning
of the two words "Industrial Informatics", can give just a shallow
clarification. Industrial suggests the approach for real-world,
complex applications. The term informatics refers to the infrastructure
enabling the development and deployment of such complex, real-world
applications, and suggests techniques for information analysis,
manipulation, transformation and distribution. In particular the
distribution aspect emerges into a broader context with the advent
of globalization facilitated by the Internet. New, reach applications
and sciences emerge based on more powerful paradigms. One of them
is the distributed intelligence/multi-agent systems paradigm.
Today, new standards for distributed industrial architectures,
such as IEC 1499 call for large scale use of the novel agent paradigm
in production systems. After a thorough introduction into the
essentials of multi-agent systems our tutorial will give an overview
of this new standard with examples from several projects completed
within the Holonic Manufacturing Systems Consortium.
We will as well introduce new technologies from the Industrial
Informatics arena which are being explored by the IEEE-IES Industrial
Agents Committee: collaborative / open systems, service oriented
architecture and agents, autonomous e-services, e-logistics, intelligent
distributed production systems, heterogeneous interoperability.
In particular the information infrastructures supporting distributed
automation, the extended enterprise and its services and the novel
paradigms related to e-Systems design and development will be
examined. |
