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.

In Video-on-Demand (VoD) services, the playback continuity is one of the most crucial factors for end-user to judge service quality. It is even more significant than the actual video image quality since new generation VoD users commonly have heterogeneous requirements on service according to their context. Moreover, managing dynamic situations in VoD service is always a challenge, especially in the unpredictable user preferences and network conditions. In this paper, i) Autonomous Decentralized VoD System (ADVODS) has been proposed to satisfy different service quality demands of users and, ii) the Autonomous Node Allocation Technology (ANAT) is proposed for assuring service continuity. With the help of autonomous nodes and mobile agents, ANAT can applies different backup policies to users with different Service Level Agreements (SLA), and dynamically update the backup schema to adapt the changing situations such as various service time or congestion events. Drawing on the evaluation results this paper shows that proposed system architecture has a better performance on streaming service provision and continuity.

To address the extreme dynamism and the rapidly changing user's requirements in current information systems, an Autonomous Community Information System (ACIS) has been developed. ACIS is a decentralized architecture that forms a community of individual end-users (community members) having the same interests and demands at specified time and location. It admits them to mutually cooperate and share information without loading up any single node excessively. ACIS does not embrace the advantage of heterogeneity of the community nodes-nodes latencies. In this paper, ACIS-Hierarchy, decentralized hierarchical community architecture is proposed. It considers latency between community nodes as an important criterion that need to be optimized. It takes advantage of heterogeneity of the community nodes-nodes latencies to improve the communication delay among the community. In this paper, an efficient autonomous decentralized community construction technology is proposed to reduce: the communication delays among members taking into consideration the latency among them and the required time to join/leave. This paper illustrates the step-step construction technology and the membership management operations for ACIS-Hierarchy. Experimental results show that ACIS-Hierarchy improves the community communication delay.

Autonomous Decentralized Community Information System (ADCS) is a proposition made to meet the rapidly changing users' requirements and cope with the extreme dynamism in current information services. ADCS is a decentralized architecture that forms a community of individual end-users (community members) having the same interests and demands in specified time and location. It allows those members to mutually cooperate and share information without loading up any single node excessively. In this paper, an autonomous decentralized community communication technology is proposed to assure a productive cooperation, a flexible and timely communication among the community members. The main ideas behind this communication technology are: content-code communication (service-based) for flexibility and multilateral 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 is shown through simulation. Thus, the autonomous decentralized community communication technology reveals significant results when the total number of members in the community increases sharply.

Wireless sensor networks represent a new data collection paradigm in which expandability plays an important role. In a practical monitoring environment, for example, food factory monitoring system, sensor relocations and reorganizations are necessary with reorganization of production lines and starting of new production lines. These relocations sometime make congestion in some area of the network. In this dynamic changing environment online expansion is a challenging problem for resource constraint network. This paper proposes a two-tier autonomous decentralized community architecture for wireless sensor network to solve the problem. The first layer consists of sensors and second layer consists of routers. In the architecture routers make community (a group of nodes mutually cooperate for a common goal is a community). The goal of this paper is to introduce the concept of sharing information among routers of the community to decrease sensor connection time for the network especially for the dynamic changing environment. Results show that our proposed technologies can reduce sensor connection time to achieve online expansion.

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. Since 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 six generations on the basis of requirements and system structures, but the ADS concept and its system architecture have not changed. The requirements for the system can be divided in operation-oriented, mass service-oriented, and personal service-oriented categories. Moreover, these technologies have been realized in homogeneous system structure and, as the next step, in heterogeneous system structure. These technologies have been widely applied in manufacturing, telecommunications, information provision/utilization, data centers, transportation, and so on. They have been operating successfully throughout the world. In particular, ADS technologies have been applied in Suica, the IC card ticket system (ICCTS) for fare collection and e-commerce. This system is not only expanding in size and functionality but also its components are being modified almost every day without stopping its operation. This system and its technologies are shown here. Finally, the future direction of ADS is discussed, and one of its technologies is presented.

The turn of the century is witnessing radical changes in the way information services are spreading due to the progress of IT and the constantly increase in the number of users of the WWW. Therefore, the business market is changing its strategy for a modern online business environment. Autonomous Decentralized Database System (ADDS), based on autonomous coordinating subsystems, has been proposed as a system architecture in order to meet the innovative e-business requirements for consistency and high response among distributed database systems. Autonomy and decentralization of subsystems help achieving high response time in highly competitive situation and autonomous Mobile Agent based coordination has been proposed to achieve flexibility in a highly dynamic environment. In this paper, it is analyzed the case in which the system size increases; and a multi agent coordination, the same number of mobile agents and sites coexist in the system, is proposed for achieving the timeliness property. The response time in the system is conformed by those transactions that require coordination and those that can be satisfied immediately. In accordance, the distribution of the data in the system for coordination is a medullar issue for the improvement of the response time. A trade-off exits between these two kind of transactions depending on the coordination of the Mobile Agents, the capacity of allocating data among the sites, and as well as the distribution of the data and user requests in the system. In this sense, since the system requires high response time, a data allocation technology in which each mobile agent autonomously determine its own capacity for adjusting data among the sites is proposed. Thus, the system will adapt itself to the dynamic environment. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture and technologies are evaluated by simulation.

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.