This paper presents ACIS, an Autonomous Community Information System. ACIS is a proposition made to meet the rapidly changing users' requirements and cope with the extreme dynamism in current information services. ACIS is a decentralized bilateral-hierarchy architecture formed by a community of individual end-users (community members) having the same interests and demands at specified time and location. It allows those members to mutually cooperate and share information without loading up any single node excessively. In this paper, autonomous decentralized community construction and communication technologies are proposed to assure a productive cooperation, a flexible and timely communication among large number of community members. The main ideas behind the proposed communication technology are: content-code communication (service-based) for flexibility and multilateral benefits communication for timely and productive cooperation among members. All members communicate productively for the satisfaction of all the community members. The scalability of the system's response time regardless of the number of the community members has been shown by simulation. Thus, the autonomous decentralized community communication technology reveals interesting results when the total number of members in the community increases dramatically.

Under dynamic and heterogenous environment, the need for adaptability and rapid response time to information service systems has become increasingly important. To cope with the continuously changing conditions of service provision and utilization, Faded Information Field (FIF) has been proposed, which is an agent-based distributed information service system architecture. In the case of a mono-service request, the system is designed to improve users' access time and preserve load balancing through the information structure. However, with interdependent requests of multi-service increasing, adaptability, reliability and timeliness have to be assured by the system. In this paper, the relationship between the timeliness and the reliability of correlated services allocation and access is clarified. Based on these factors, the autonomous network-based heterogeneous information services integration technology to provide one-stop service for users' multi-service requests is proposed. We proved the effectiveness of the proposed technology through the simulation and the results show that the integrated service can reduce the total users access time compared with the conventional systems.

Autonomous Decentralized Community System (ADCS) makes its basis on offering customized and dynamic services to group of end-users having common preferences at specified time and location. Owing to extreme dynamism in the system caused by rapidly varying user's demands, and severe mobility of users, it is quite difficult to assure timely service provision to all community members. This paper presents autonomous decentralized community system construction by autonomous division and integration technologies to procure service assurance under dynamic situations, without involving significant communication overhead. By adopting the concept of size threshold, the proposed technique continuously maintains the appropriate size of community in constantly and rapidly changing operating environment, to deliver optimal quality of service in terms of response time. The effectiveness of proposed technology has been shown through simulation, which reveals remarkable improvement (up to 29%) in response time.

A high assurance on-line recovery technology for a space on-board computer that can be realized using commercial devices is proposed whereby a faulty processor node confirms its normality and then recovers without affecting the other processor nodes in operation. Also, the result of an evaluation test using the breadboard model implementing this technology is reported. Because this technology enables simple and assured recovery of a faulty processor node regardless of its degree of redundancy, it can be applied to various applications, such as a launch vehicle, a satellite, and a reusable launch vehicle. As a result, decreasing the cost of an on-board computer is possible while maintaining its high reliability.

The market and users' requirements have been rapidly changing and diversified. Under these heterogeneous and dynamic situations, not only the system structure itself, but also the accessible information services would be changed constantly. To cope with the continuously changing conditions of service provision and utilization, Faded Information Field (FIF) has been proposed, which is a agent-based distributed information service system architecture. In the case of a mono-service request, the system is designed to improve users' access time and preserve load balancing through the information structure. However, with interdependent requests of multi-service increasing, adaptability and timeliness have to be assured by the system. In this paper, the relationship that exists among the correlated services and the users' preferences for separate and integrated services is clarified. Based on these factors, the autonomous preference-aware information services integration technology to provide one-stop service for users multi-service requests is proposed. As compared to the conventional system, we show that proposed technology is able to reduce the total access time.

To meet users' multi-service requests under dynamic and heterogenous environment with high-assurance, the Autonomous Network-Based Integration System based on Faded Information Field (FIF) has been proposed, which permits to actively integrate the correlated information services according to the current situation of the system. However, the increase in the total number of users' requests and changes in users' preferences cause the unbalancing load in the system and the overload in the locality. In this paper, based on the autonomous access distribution in the locality, a new approach of autonomous correlated services access is proposed to reduce the load of the system and achieve the adaptability and timeliness of correlated services utilization. We proved the effectiveness of the proposed technology through the simulation and the results show that the system can improve the average response time not only for joint requests of correlated services, but also for separate requests of each service under changing environments.

Due to the advancements in Information Technology, such as the Internet and the presence of fierce competition in the market, the business environment is changing rapidly. To cope with these dynamic changes, heterogeneous systems are now required to integrate in order to form alliances with different business units or within individual business units. Since business operations can not be stopped to carry out these changes in the existing systems, the systems are required to integrate flexibly, preserving each constituent's individual characteristics. By implementing Atomic Action through a gateway and across constituent systems in a Heterogeneous Autonomous Decentralized System (HADS), higher degrees of assurance can be achieved through cooperation. However, if all the transactions are passed through a gateway, the response time worsens and the result cannot be obtained within an appropriate timeframe. Hence, a new technique of suppressing the flow passing through the gateway, while achieving a maximum number of successful transaction within the appropriate timeframe, is required.

To meet the highly competitive and dynamic needs in the market, an e-Business company needs to flexibly integrate its heterogeneous database systems together, e.g., the integration of makers and retailers in a Supply Chain Management System (SCM). The customers demand one-click response and also their access requirements change too frequently. Moreover, different retailers and makers in a SCM, being the autonomous entities, have their own specific requirements for stock-cost and opportunity-loss, depending on their local situation that is also changing with time. Under this background, the integrated DBs of the SCM are required to provide real-time response, heterogeneity satisfaction and flexibility to adapt to changing requirements. The conventional approach of strict consistency leads to low response and less flexibility due to the strong interdependence of the systems. In this paper, Autonomous Decentralized Database System has been proposed as an application-oriented database technology based on the concept of autonomy and loose-consistency among the distributed DB systems thus providing real-time, flexibility and high availability. The autonomy in the system has been achieved by defining a data attribute, Allowable Volume, within which each component DB has autonomy to update the data in real-time. Moreover, the system adapts to the dynamically changing heterogeneous access requirements at each DB by managing the distribution of AV among different DBs through an active coordination mechanism. Due to the dynamic and unpredictable environment, the component DBs are provided with complete autonomy for their local and coordination decisions, thus diminishing the interdependency and improving the response time. As the system consists of loosely-connected subsystems, it also has high availability. Therefore, the proposed system provides highly decentralized architecture with flexibility and high availability. The performance of the system has been shown significantly effective by simulating the internet based SCM system, from the communication-cost and response time point of view.

Wireless Sensor Network(WSN) is widely used in Emergency Management System(EMS) to assure high safety. Real-timely transmitting emergency information in dynamically changing environment should be assured in mission critical district. Conventional methods based on static situations and centralized approaches can not satisfy this requirement. In this paper, to assure real-time property, autonomous community construction technology is proposed to set special area called community which includes a special passage composed of several routers for emergency information's transmission and routers around this passage in one hop range. Emergency information's transmission is protected by routers around this passage from interference of other sensing information's transmission in and outside community. Moreover, autonomous community reconstruction technology is proposed to guarantee real-time property at failure conditions. In this technology, community members autonomously cooperate and coordinate with each other to setup a bypass in community for transmitting emergency information if fault happens. Evaluation results indicate effectiveness of proposed technology.

The Internet is a heterogeneous and rapidly evolving environment. New information services have been added, modified, and diversified, while legacy services have been abandoned. Users' requirements for services are also changing very quickly. It is becoming very difficult to find required information services from extremely huge amount of information in the Internet. It is necessary to design information service system, which can meet user's heterogeneous requirements for services, adaptability of services to cope with ever-changing situation and to provide assurance. Faded information field architecture and Push/Pull Mobile Agent (MA) technologies are proposed as basic components of autonomous information service system to achieve these goals. The system is proposed from users' and providers' point of view, therefore we present a technique for balancing users' and providers' communication cost based on `through rate' for faded information field realization. On the basis of this technique, autonomous information allocation algorithm is proposed, in which each node may determine information amount based on push/pull cost. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is shown through simulation.

The recent real time systems have the needs of system expandability with heterogeneous functions and operations. High assurance system is very important for such systems. In order to realize the high assurance system, we research the autonomous step-by-step construction technique based on assurance evaluation. In this paper we propose the average functional reliability as the best index to indicate the assurance performance for system construction. We also propose the autonomous step-by-step construction technique to decide the construction sequence to maximize the assurance performance.

Information service provision and utilization is an important infrastructure in the high-assurance distributed information service system. In order to cope with the rapidly evolving situations of providers' and users' heterogeneous requirements, one autonomous information service system has been proposed, called Faded Information Field (FIF). FIF is a distributed information service system architecture, sustained by push/pull mobile agents, through a recursive demand-oriented provision of the most popular information closer to the users to make a tradeoff between the cost of service allocation and access. In this system, users' requests are autonomously driven by pull mobile agents in charge of finding the relevant service. In the case of a mono-service request, the system is designed to reduce the time needed for users to access the information and to preserve the consistency of the replicas. However, when the user requests joint selection of multiple services, synchronization of atomic actions and timeliness have to be assured by the system. In this paper, the relationship that exists among the contents, properties and access ratios of information services is clarified. Based on these factors, the ratio of correlation and degree of satisfaction are defined and the autonomous integration and optimal allocation of information services for heterogeneous FIFs to provide one-stop service for users' multi-service requirements are proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed technology is shown through evaluation and the results show that the integrated services can reduce the total users access time and increase services consumption compared with separate systems.

Location Based Services (LBS) are expected to become one of the major drivers of ubiquitous services due to recent inception of GPS-enabled mobile devices, the development of Web2.0 paradigm, and emergence of 3G broadband networks. Having this vision in mind, Community Context-attribute-oriented Collaborative Information Environment (CCCIE) based Autonomous Decentralized Community System (ADCS) is proposed to enable provision of services to specific users in specific place at specific time considering various context-attributes. This paper presents autonomous community construction technology that share service discovered by one member among others in flexible way to improve timeliness and reduce network cost. In order to meet crucial goal of real-time and context-aware community construction (provision of service/ service information to users with common interests), and defining flexible service area in highly dynamic operating environment of ADCS, proposed progressive ripple based service discovery technique introduces novel idea of snail's pace and steady advancing search followed by swift boundary confining mechanism; while service area construction shares the discovered service among members in defined area to further improve timeliness and reduce network cost. Analysis and empirical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed technique.

Recently with the advent of the IT and the wide spread use of the Internet, new user oriented production and logistic systems, such as the Supply Chain Management System, have been required in order to cope with the drastic and continuous changes on the markets and users' preferences. Therefore, heterogeneous database systems need to be integrated in a common environment which can cope with the heterogeneous requirements of each company under an ever-evolving changing environment. That is assurance. Autonomous Decentralized Database System (ADDS) is proposed as a system architecture in order to realize assurance in distributed database systems. In this system architecture, a loosely-consistency management technology is proposed in order to maintain the consistency of the system, each database can update autonomously, and confer the real time property. A background coordination technology, performed by an autonomous mobile agent, is devised to adapt the system to evolving situations. The system can achieve real time by allocating the information in advance among the sites that has different time constraints for updating. Moreover, an assurance information allocation technology is proposed when considering that a failure in the background coordination mechanism may lead to loss of data and unavailability of the system. This mechanism, in which the mobile agent autonomously regulate its own capacity for allocating the information, is proposed based on the real-time property and system's availability considerations. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture and technologies are evaluated by simulation.

The challenge in resource utilization under dynamic environment is how to utilize appropriate resources to the right users at the right time and the right location. In conventional system, centralized management system is applied but it tends to congest when user requests increase or resources rapidly move. Therefore, this paper proposes Autonomous Coordination Technology (ACT) through community organization for resource utilization. In ACT, a node which has surplus resources autonomously constructs community with a surplus-level based size and distributes resources to members which are deficient in resources. ACT consists of autonomous coordination within community and among communities. According to community organization, online property and flexibility can be satisfied. However, it is difficult to achieve service provision timeliness and resource allocation operatability in the mean time. Thus, ACT includes successive transportation method, and autonomous resource allocation which dynamic decision is made by a tradeoff between timeliness and operatability. As a result, the service assurance in terms of timeliness and operatability can be assured. The effectiveness of proposed technology is affirmed through the simulation of taxi dispatching application in terms of response time and standard deviation versus user rates.

The requirements to integrate the heterogeneous application system are rapidly emerging. When integrating heterogeneous systems, it is necessary not to violate their respective characteristics, and also the complex works related to the integration should be reduced. The on-line property of the autonomous decentralized system (ADS) provides the on-line expansion, or the on-line maintenance of the systems, and the recursive model of ADS makes it easy to integrate heterogeneous systems without violating each other. In the heterogeneous systems, the conventional reliability is not applicable, because each system has different characteristics. When a transaction is processed not only by one system, but also by the integrated heterogeneous systems, it is more guaranteed from the different points of view. The new measurement, assurance, is new proposed. The atomicity of the transaction processing in the heterogeneous systems is also defined in three levels, that is, the Global Atomic Action, the Semi-global Atomic Action and the Local Atomic Action. It is proposed to evaluate the effect of the integration of the heterogeneous systems by the non-assured risk, which represent how degree the transaction is additionally assured by the application objects from different points of view. The realization and design techniques for these atomic actions are also proposed, and the design guidance for the Global Atomic Action has been shown from the simulation results how to balance the non-assured risk and the transaction response time.

Autonomous Information Service System is a proposition made to cope with the continuously changing conditions of service provision and utilization in current information systems. The faded information field (FIF), sustained by push/pull mobile agent technology, is such a distributed architecture that brings high-assurance of the system through a balanced selective replication of the information. When the demand changes, the information environment is restructured so that the same response time to services for all unspecified users can be achieved whatever the demand volume. However, once the structure is fixed, dispatching the randomly incoming requests on the FIF is still required to guarantee the same quality of service. Our goal is to warrant the autonomous dispatching of the pull mobile agents to adjust the continuously evolving arrival distribution of the demand to the current information environment. In this paper, we explain the concepts and realization of autonomous navigation under the goal of an autonomous load balancing of the pull mobile agent volume in the FIF structure. The appropriateness of this method for FIF environments has been shown by simulation.

Autonomous Decentralized System (ADS) has been making progress in these 31 years since it was proposed in 1977. During these long years in the rapidly advancing computer and communication technologies, the ADS concept has not been changed but its technologies have been growing in accordance with the change and diversity of the social, economical and personal requirements and through the globalization of the market and the restructuring organizations. The ADS technologies are systematized to cover all processes of system design, operation, maintenance and modification. This paper reviews the work done in fields of ADS in past 31 years from not only technological perspectives, but it also encompasses users requirements and value, system design, industrial activity, academic activity and standardization [1]-[26]. Moreover the new directions of the ADS are suggested.