ISADS 97 Third IEEE International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems
by Eckhard Moeller
The Third International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ISADS 97) took place in Berlin, Germany, 9-11 April 1997. The symposium brought together nearly 200 participants from research and industry, coming from 20 different countries all over the world. Major trends and developments in distributed applications that combine computing and telecommunication aspects with a unified development and run-time support environment were discussed and applications in such areas as factory automation, train traffic control and management, and building control were presented.
45 papers were selected from more than 100 submissions with emphasis on multi-agent systems, object-oriented middleware and telecommunication service development, and the above-mentioned application areas. The first invited speaker, Hagen Hultzsch, Deutsche Telekom AG Board of Management, discussed the convergence of decentralized information technology and telecommunications, paving the way for the telematic society. Together with entertainment electronics this convergence industry is the growth market today. The second invited speaker, Hiroshi Kuwahara, Representative Director and Executive Vice-President, Hitachi Ltd. Japan, presented in brief the major achievements of autonomous decentralized systems (ADS) in the last twenty years particular in the areas of manufacturing and train traffic control systems. Information services systems in the field of telecommunications will be an important application of the next generation ADS.
The three panels at the end of each symposium day discussed:
- the role of ADS in network computing from the object-oriented tele-communication application design and development point of view, including object-oriented middleware technologies such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), covering mobile agent aspects and emphasizing the need for applications and supporting system functions to be flexible and extensible (chaired by Liba Svobodova, IBM Research, Switzerland)
- standards for ADS, summarizing emerging ADS architectures, the needs and targets for standardization and emerging standards for information services and control applications (chaired by Kane Kim, UC Irvine, USA)
- challenges and future trends for ADS in terms of globally distributed control systems for the Internet and for the next generation computers including operating systems (chaired by Jürgen Nehmer, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany).
At the end of the symposium some 55 participants made use of the opportunity to visit the Production Technology Center Berlin (PTZ) which is operated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology in cooperation with the Institute for Machine Tools and Factory Management of the Technical University Berlin, and GMD FOKUS. The PTZ offered presentations in such areas as Simultaneous Engineering Broadband Integrated Development, Team Based European Automotive Manufacturing, Virtual Clay Modeling for Automotive Industry, Teleservices and Remote Diagnosis for Machine Tools, Multimedia Teleservices for Distributed Planning and Simulation of Deep Drawing Processes. The demonstrations at GMD FOKUS included developments in the context of Deutsche Telekom Berkom: TINA Based Telecommuni-cation Services in a Heterogeneous CORBA Execution Environment with Personal Mobility Support, Interactive Multimedia Services, Global Broadband Connectivity Services and Management, Network Interoperability and Performance and Internet Next Generation.
ISADS 97 was sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, the Information Processing Society of Japan and the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers of Japan, in cooperation with the International Federation for Information Processing, the International Federation of Automatic Control and the Gesellschaft für Informatik. The General Chair had Prof. Radu Popescu-Zeletin, GMD FOKUS; the Program Committee was co-chaired by Prof. Jürgen Nehmer, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, Dr. Yuji Inoue, NTT, Japan and Dr. Richard Soley, OMG, USA. The symposium was organized by GMD FOKUS. Financial support came from Hitachi, Deutsche Telekom Berkom, NEC, Digital, Hewlett Packard, IBM and GMD FOKUS.
After the first two symposia in Kawasaki, Japan (ISADS 93) and Phoenix, Arizona, USA (ISADS 95), the third ISADS, which was held under the patronage of the Governing Mayor of Berlin, was altogether a great success due to its excellent technical program and organisation. The symposium dinner was well received, not at least due to the perfectly well suited environment and exhibits of the Deutsche Technikmuseum Berlin. The proceedings of ISADS 97 have been published by the IEEE Computer Society Press. The fourth ISADS is scheduled to take place in Tokyo in March 1999.
Please contact:
Eckhard Moeller - GMD
Tel: +49 30 25499-234/200
E-mail: moeller@fokus.gmd.de