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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

Strategic Energy Plan: Playa de Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico

Un Nuevo Amanecer Inc. (UNA), a community-based NGO (501C(3)), sought technical assistance through the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Energy Technology Innovation Partnership Project (ETIPP) to develop a strategic energy plan (SEP) for the community of Playa de Ponce on the south coast of Puerto Rico. A SEP helps communities identify energy goals and priority projects, and outline strategies and actions to build a shared path toward their energy vision. The primary goal of this SEP is to collaboratively explore pathways for the community's energy future. Researchers from the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) engaged with the community for a period of seven months and facilitated a series of in-person community engagement workshops along with ETIPP regional partner Puerto Rico Hispanic Federation, UNA, and community leaders. The SEP workshops were held twice, March 18-20 and June 24-26, 2025. Through facilitated discussions, the community worked together to define and articulate a clear vision for its short-, medium-, and long-term energy goals. The workshops played a key role in identifying the specific strategies and priority projects that would best suit the needs of the community. The discussions outlined the community's energy aspirations, establishing a shared vision, setting goals, and outlining the priority actions needed to bring them to fruition. During the workshops, the community shared some of the most pressing energy challenges that they face on a regular basis, such as high energy costs that disproportionately impact an aging population and unreliable electricity during extreme weather events that result in frequent power outages. These issues have also exacerbated risks to public health and safety of the community. In response, UNA requested technical assistance through ETIPP to inform the development of a SEP tailored to Playa de Ponce to support its energy vision. This document explores four community-driven energy strategies aligned with that vision. Figure 1 shows the strategies outlined in this plan, which are categorized into three focus areas as identified by the community: energy reliability; safety and security; and stakeholder participation, education, and capacity building. This document serves as a shared roadmap for developing and implementing energy solutions that meet the needs of Playa de Ponce. It is intended to serve as a public resource for the community, UNA, and local authorities - providing tools, information and a shared foundation to inform future implementation efforts. This plan is intended to complement ongoing planning frameworks at the municipal, regional, and island-wide levels. As a living document, this SEP can evolve alongside Playa de Ponce's changing energy goals, while offering a framework to help them realize their energy vision.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
NASA NTRS1972

Optimization of engines for a commercial Mach 0.85 transport using advanced turbine cooling methods

A parametric study was made of a group of separate-flow-turbofan engines for use in advanced technology airplanes designed for a cruise Mach number of 0.85 at 40,000 feet. The three-engined airplanes were sized to carry 200 passengers 3000 nautical miles. Supercritical aerodynamics were assumed. Film-cooled turbines were used and sea-level-static turbine-rotor-inlet temperature was always 2600 F. The optimum cycle depends on the noise goal assumed. Without a noise goal the best fan pressure ratio (FPR) is about 1.90. At noise goals of FAR 36, -10 EPNdb, and -20 EPNdb, the best FPR's are 1.85, 1.76, and 1.70, respectively, at cruise. The take-off FPR's are progressively less than the cruise value as the noise goal approaches -20 EPNdb. The penalties in take-off gross weight incurred were 8.5, 19, and 64 percent at goals of FAR 36, -10 EPNdb, and -20 EPNdb, respectively.

Kraft, G. A.↗
NASA NTRS1976

Experimental clean combustor program, phase 2

Combustor pollution reduction technology for commercial CTOL engines was generated and this technology was demonstrated in a full-scale JT9D engine in 1976. Component rig refinement of the two best combustor concepts were tested. These concepts are the vorbix combustor, and a hybrid combustor which combines the pilot zone of the staged premix combustor and the main zone of the swirl-can combustor. Both concepts significantly reduced all pollutant emissions relative to the JT9D-7 engine combustor. However, neither concept met all program goals. The hybrid combustor met pollution goals for unburned hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide but did not achieve the oxides of nitrogen goal. This combustor had significant performance deficiencies. The Vorbix combustor met goals for unburned hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen but did not achieve the carbon monoxide goal. Performance of the vorbix combustor approached the engine requirements. On the basis of these results, the vorbix combustor was selected for the engine demonstration program. A control study was conducted to establish fuel control requirements imposed by the low-emission combustor concepts and to identify conceptual control system designs. Concurrent efforts were also completed on two addendums: an alternate fuels addendum and a combustion noise addendum.

Roberts, R.↗
NASA NTRS1987

Optimum culture in the cockpit

Even with the same program and objectives, if the culture is different, there will be different approaches to the goal of flight safety. However, the cockpit environment is culture-free so it is not as important to think of a person's cultural background as it is to think of the approach to the goal of ultimate safety. Crew members can look at their individual safety goals and compare them to their own performance to see if their behavior matches their own safety goals. The cockpit environment must be culture-free in order to obtain the ultimate safety goal. One must first realize how their culture affects their behavior before they can begin to change their attitude and actions in the cockpit.

Yamamori, Hisaaki↗
NASA NTRS1989

Computational Methods for Structural Mechanics and Dynamics, part 1

The structural analysis methods research has several goals. One goal is to develop analysis methods that are general. This goal of generality leads naturally to finite-element methods, but the research will also include other structural analysis methods. Another goal is that the methods be amenable to error analysis; that is, given a physical problem and a mathematical model of that problem, an analyst would like to know the probable error in predicting a given response quantity. The ultimate objective is to specify the error tolerances and to use automated logic to adjust the mathematical model or solution strategy to obtain that accuracy. A third goal is to develop structural analysis methods that can exploit parallel processing computers. The structural analysis methods research will focus initially on three types of problems: local/global nonlinear stress analysis, nonlinear transient dynamics, and tire modeling.

Stroud, W. Jefferson↗
NASA NTRS1990

Investigation of air transportation technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988-1989

There are four areas of research being pursued in 1988 under sponsorship of the FAA/NASA Joint University Research Program, and one area which has been completed. The four active areas were: (1) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in Air Traffic Control. The purpose of this research effort is to demonstrate the feasibility of using ASR technology within the ATC environment and to address the problems involved, especially the relevant human factors issues. (2) A Rule-Based Planning and Scheduling System. Planning denotes the formulation of a detailed scheme, program, or method worked out beforehand for the accomplishment of a goal. It involves the analysis of the desired goal and its division into sub-goals which are subsequently treated in the same way until a set of primitive objectives is obtained. (3) Modeling of Ice Accretion on Aircraft in Glaze Icing Conditions. The work in aircraft icing over the past year has focused on the fundamental aspects of glaze ice accretion, with the goal of improving analytical ice accretion models. Over the past year, studies have been conducted on the generation of surface roughness on accreting ice surfaces with the goal of providing a deterministic surface roughness in the ice accretion models. (4) Cockpit Display of Hazardous Weather Information. Information transfer and display issues associated with the dissemination of hazardous weather warnings are studied in the context of windshear alerts.

Simpson, Robert W.↗
NASA NTRS1991

The flow of plasma in the solar terrestrial environment

The overall goal of our NASA Theory Program is to study the coupling, time delays, and feedback mechanisms between the various regions of the solar-terrestrial system in a self-consistent, quantitative, manner. To accomplish this goal, it will eventually be necessary to have time-dependent macroscopic models of the different regions of the solar-terrestrial system and we are continually working toward this goal. However, our immediate emphasis is on the near-earth plasma environment, including the ionosphere, the plasmasphere, and the polar wind. In this area, we have developed unique global models that allow us to study the coupling between the different regions. These results are highlighted. Another important aspect of our NASA Theory Program concerns the effect that localized structure has on the macroscopic flow in the ionosphere, plasmasphere, thermosphere and polar wind. The localized structure can be created by structured magnetospheric inputs (i.e., structured plasma convection, particle precipitation or Birkeland current patterns) or time variations in these inputs due to storms and substorms. Also, some of the plasma flows that we predict with our macroscopic models may be unstable. Another one of our goals is to examine the stability of our predicted flows. Because time-dependent three-dimensional numerical models of the solar-terrestrial environment generally require extensive computer resources, they are usually based on relatively simple mathematical formulations (i.e., simple MHD or hydrodynamic formulations). Therefore, another long-range goal of our NASA Theory Program is to study the conditions under which various mathematical formulations can be applied to specific solar-terrestrial regions. This may involve a detailed comparison of kinetic, semikinetic, and hydrodynamic predictions for a given polar wind scenario or it may involve the comparison of a small-scale particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation of a plasma expansion event with a similar macroscopic expansion event. The different mathematical formulations have different strengths and weaknesses and a careful comparison of model predictions for similar geophysical situations will provide insight into when the various models can be used with confidence.

Schunk, Robert W.↗
NASA NTRS1990

The flow of plasma in the solar terrestrial environment

The overall goal of our NASA Theory Program was to study the coupling, time delays, and feedback mechanisms between the various regions of the solar-terrestrial system in a self-consistent, quantitative manner. To accomplish this goal, it will eventually be necessary to have time-dependent macroscopic models of the different regions of the solar-terrestrial system and we are continually working toward this goal. However, with the funding from this NASA program, we concentrated on the near-earth plasma environment, including the ionosphere, the plasmasphere, and the polar wind. In this area, we developed unique global models that allowed us to study the coupling between the different regions. These results are highlighted in the next section. Another important aspect of our NASA Theory Program concerned the effect that localized 'structure' had on the macroscopic flow in the ionosphere, plasmasphere, thermosphere, and polar wind. The localized structure can be created by structured magnetospheric inputs (i.e., structured plasma convection, particle precipitation or Birkland current patterns) or time variations in these input due to storms and substorms. Also, some of the plasma flows that we predicted with our macroscopic models could be unstable, and another one of our goals was to examine the stability of our predicted flows. Because time-dependent, three-dimensional numerical models of the solar-terrestrial environment generally require extensive computer resources, they are usually based on relatively simple mathematical formulations (i.e., simple MHD or hydrodynamic formulations). Therefore, another goal of our NASA Theory Program was to study the conditions under which various mathematical formulations can be applied to specific solar-terrestrial regions. This could involve a detailed comparison of kinetic, semi-kinetic, and hydrodynamic predictions for a given polar wind scenario or it could involve the comparison of a small-scale particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation of a plasma expansion event with a similar macroscopic expansion event. The different mathematical formulations have different strengths and weaknesses and a careful comparison of model predictions for similar geophysical situations provides insight into when the various models can be used with confidence.

Schunk, Robert W.↗
NASA NTRS1992

CSM activities at the NASA Langley Research Center

The objective and goals of the Computational Structural Mechanics (CSM) Program as applied to airframe structures are given. It is recognized that the rapid evolution of computer hardware has opened up new opportunities for solving more complex and larger structural analysis problems than was hitherto imagined. To utilize these computers, new methods of computational structural mechanics are required. Methods are now being developed, assessed, and validated to meet the goals, and each of these goals is addressed. Plans and approaches are shown and highlights of results achieved in meeting these goals are given. Three research thrusts are shown in the five-year plan: advanced robust CSM methods, large-scale solutions, and validation/demonstration studies. The areas of research activity reflect the CSM goals. The mapping of developed methods onto high-performance and massively parallel computers is an integral part of the CSM five-year plan.

Housner, Jerrold M.↗
NASA NTRS1992

The flow of plasma in the solar terrestrial environment

The overall goal of our NASA Theory Program is to study the coupling, time delays, and feedback mechanisms between the various regions of the solar-terrestrial system in a self-consistent, quantitative manner. To accomplish this goal, it will eventually be necessary to have time-dependent macroscopic models of the different regions of the solar-terrestrial system and we are continually working toward this goal. However, our immediate emphasis is on the near-earth plasma environment, including the ionosphere, the plasmasphere, and the polar wind. In this area, we have developed unique global models that allow us to study the coupling between the different regions. Another important aspect of our NASA Theory Program concerns the effect that localized structure has on the macroscopic flow in the ionosphere, plasmasphere, thermosphere, and polar wind. The localized structure can be created by structured magnetospheric inputs (i.e., structured plasma convection, particle precipitation or Birkeland current patterns) or time variations in these inputs due to storms and substorms. Also, some of the plasma flows that we predict with our macroscopic models may be unstable, and another one of our goals is to examine the stability of our predicted flows. Because time-dependent, three-dimensional numerical models of the solar-terrestrial environment generally require extensive computer resources, they are usually based on relatively simple mathematical formulations (i.e., simple MHD or hydrodynamic formulation). Therefore, another long-range goal of our NASA Theory Program is to study the conditions under which various mathematical formulations can be applied to specific solar-terrestrial regions. This may involve a detailed comparison of kinetic, semikinetic, and hydrodynamic predictions for a given polar wind scenario or it may involve the comparison of a small-scale particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation of a plasma expansion event with a similar macroscopic expansion event. The different mathematical formulations have different strengths and weaknesses and a careful comparison of model predictions for similar geophysical situations will provide insight into when the various models can be used with confidence.

Schunk, R. W.↗
NASA NTRS1993

Integration of domain and resource-based reasoning for real-time control in dynamic environments

A real-time software controller that successfully integrates domain-based and resource-based control reasoning to perform task execution in a dynamically changing environment is described. The design of the controller is based on the concept of partitioning the process to be controlled into a set of tasks, each of which achieves some process goal. It is assumed that, in general, there are multiple ways (tasks) to achieve a goal. The controller dynamically determines current goals and their current criticality, choosing and scheduling tasks to achieve those goals in the time available. It incorporates rule-based goal reasoning, a TMS-based criticality propagation mechanism, and a real-time scheduler. The controller has been used to build a knowledge-based situation assessment system that formed a major component of a real-time, distributed, cooperative problem solving system built under DARPA contract. It is also being employed in other applications now in progress.

Morgan, Keith↗
NASA NTRS1992

Human-like agents with posture planning ability

Human body models are geometric structures which may be ultimately controlled by kinematically manipulating their joints, but for animation, it is desirable to control them in terms of task-level goals. We address a fundamental problem in achieving task-level postural goals: controlling massively redundant degrees of freedom. We reduce the degrees of freedom by introducing significant control points and vectors, e.g., pelvis forward vector, palm up vector, and torso up vector, etc. This reduced set of parameters are used to enumerate primitive motions and motion dependencies among them, and thus to select from a small set of alternative postures (e.g., bend vs. squat to lower shoulder height). A plan for a given goal is found by incrementally constructing a goal/constraint set based on the given goal, motion dependencies, collision avoidance requirements, and discovered failures. Global postures satisfying a given goal/constraint set are determined with the help of incremental mental simulation which uses a robust inverse kinematics algorithm. The contributions of the present work are: (1) There is no need to specify beforehand the final goal configuration, which is unrealistic for the human body, and (2) the degrees of freedom problem becomes easier by representing body configurations in terms of 'lumped' control parameters, that is, control points and vectors.

Jung, Moon R.↗
NASA NTRS1995

SEL's Software Process-Improvement Program

The goals and operations of the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) is reviewed. For nearly 20 years the SEL has worked to understand, assess, and improve software and the development process within the production environment of the Flight Dynamics Division (FDD) of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The SEL was established in 1976 with the goals of reducing: (1) the defect rate of delivered software, (2) the cost of software to support flight projects, and (3) the average time to produce mission-support software. After studying over 125 projects of FDD, the results have guided the standards, management practices, technologies, and the training within the division. The results of the studies have been a 75 percent reduction in defects, a 50 percent reduction in cost, and a 25 percent reduction in development time. Over time the goals of SEL have been clarified. The goals are now stated as: (1) Understand baseline processes and product characteristics, (2) Assess improvements that have been incorporated into the development projects, (3) Package and infuse improvements into the standard SEL process. The SEL improvement goal is to demonstrate continual improvement of the software process by carrying out analysis, measurement and feedback to projects with in the FDD environment. The SEL supports the understanding of the process by study of several processes including, the effort distribution, and error detection rates. The SEL assesses and refines the processes. Once the assessment and refinement of a process is completed, the SEL packages the process by capturing the process in standards, tools and training.

Basili, Victor↗
NASA NTRS2000

Autonomy Architectures for a Constellation of Spacecraft

Until the past few years, missions typically involved fairly large expensive spacecraft. Such missions have primarily favored using older proven technologies over more recently developed ones, and humans controlled spacecraft by manually generating detailed command sequences with low-level tools and then transmitting the sequences for subsequent execution on a spacecraft controller. This approach toward controlling a spacecraft has worked spectacularly on previous missions, but it has limitations deriving from communications restrictions - scheduling time to communicate with a particular spacecraft involves competing with other projects due to the limited number of deep space network antennae. This implies that a spacecraft can spend a long time just waiting whenever a command sequence fails. This is one reason why the New Millennium program has an objective to migrate parts of mission control tasks onboard a spacecraft to reduce wait time by making spacecraft more robust. The migrated software is called a "remote agent" and has 4 components: a mission manager to generate the high level goals, a planner/scheduler to turn goals into activities while reasoning about future expected situations, an executive/diagnostics engine to initiate and maintain activities while interpreting sensed events by reasoning about past and present situations, and a conventional real-time subsystem to interface with the spacecraft to implement an activity's primitive actions. In addition to needing remote planning and execution for isolated spacecraft, a trend toward multiple-spacecraft missions points to the need for remote distributed planning and execution. The past few years have seen missions with growing numbers of probes. Pathfinder has its rover (Sojourner), Cassini has its lander (Huygens), and the New Millenium Deep Space 3 (DS3) proposal involves a constellation of 3 spacecraft for interferometric mapping. This trend is expected to continue to progressively larger fleets. For example, one mission proposed to succeed DS3 would have 18 spacecraft flying in formation in order to detect earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. A proposed magnetospheric constellation would involve 5 to 500 spacecraft in Earth orbit to measure global phenomena within the magnetosphere. This work describes and compares three autonomy architectures for a system that continuously plans to control a fleet of spacecraft using collective mission goals instead of goals or command sequences for each spacecraft. A fleet of self-commanding spacecraft would autonomously coordinate itself to satisfy high level science and engineering goals in a changing partially-understood environment making feasible the operation of tens or even a hundred spacecraft (such as for interferometry or plasma physics missions). The easiest way to adapt autonomous spacecraft research to controlling constellations involves treating the constellation as a single spacecraft. Here one spacecraft directly controls the others as if they were connected. The controlling "master" spacecraft performs all autonomy reasoning, and the slaves only have real-time subsystems to execute the master's commands and transmit local telemetry/observations. The executive/diagnostics module starts actions and the master's real-time subsystem controls the action either locally or remotely through a slave. While the master/slave approach benefits from conceptual simplicity, it relies on an assumption that the master spacecraft's executive can continuously monitor the slaves' real-time subsystems, and this relies on high-bandwidth highly-reliable communications. Since unintended results occur fairly rarely, one way to relax the bandwidth requirements involves only monitoring unexpected events in spacecraft. Unfortunately, this disables the ability to monitor for unexpected events between spacecraft and leads to a host of coordination problems among the slaves. Also, failures in the communications system can result in losing slaves. The other two architectures improve robustness while reducing communications by progressively distributing more of the other three remote agent components across the constellation. In a teamwork architecture, all spacecraft have executives and real-time subsystems - only the leader has the planner/scheduler and mission manager. Finally, distributing all remote agent components leads to a peer-to-peer approach toward constellation control.

Barrett, Anthony↗
NASA NTRS2000

Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS): A Collaborative Effort Between Nebraska EPSCoR and NASA Langley Research Center

Implementing SATS in Nebraska will require a number of changes, both technical and administrative. SATS will require major improvements in the infrastructure of Nebraska airports. Improving airport infrastructure so that it can accommodate SATS is first and most obvious goal. A second goal is to make airports financially sustainable over the long term with limited federal assistance. A third goal, closely related to the second, is to link the implementation of SATS with anticipated local economic growth. This can leverage local funds without tax increases, enhance the equity of the finance approach, improve planning of facility size, and reduce long-term per unit cost. Many of these goals are national issues, and presumably federal policy will determine how these goals are addressed. This study examines several financing options and discusses their ease of application to Nebraska's airports.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2002

Innovative Airbreathing Propulsion Concepts for High-speed Applications

The current cost to launch payloads to low earth orbit (LEO) is approximately loo00 U.S. dollars ($) per pound ($22000 per kilogram). This high cost limits our ability to pursue space science and hinders the development of new markets and a productive space enterprise. This enterprise includes NASA's space launch needs and those of industry, universities, the military, and other U.S. government agencies. NASA's Advanced Space Transportation Program (ASTP) proposes a vision of the future where space travel is as routine as in today's commercial air transportation systems. Dramatically lower launch costs will be required to make this vision a reality. In order to provide more affordable access to space, NASA has established new goals in its Aeronautics and Space Transportation plan. These goals target a reduction in the cost of launching payloads to LEO to $lo00 per pound ($2200 per kilogram) by 2007 and to $100'~ per pound by 2025 while increasing safety by orders of magnitude. Several programs within NASA are addressing innovative propulsion systems that offer potential for reducing launch costs. Various air-breathing propulsion systems currently are being investigated under these programs. The NASA Aerospace Propulsion and Power Base Research and Technology Program supports long-term fundamental research and is managed at GLenn Research Center. Currently funded areas relevant to space transportation include hybrid hyperspeed propulsion (HHP) and pulse detonation engine (PDE) research. The HHP Program currently is addressing rocket-based combined cycle and turbine-based combined cycle systems. The PDE research program has the goal of demonstrating the feasibility of PDE-based hybrid-cycle and combined cycle propulsion systems that meet NASA's aviation and access-to-space goals. The ASTP also is part of the Base Research and Technology Program and is managed at the Marshall Space Flight Center. As technologies developed under the Aerospace Propulsion and Power Base Research and Technology Program mature, they are incorporated into ASTP. One example of this is rocket-based combined cycle systems that are being considered as part of ASTP. The NASA Ultra Efficient Engine Technology (UEET) Program has the goal of developing propulsion system component technology that is relevant to a wide range of vehicle missions. In addition to subsonic and supersonic speed regimes, it includes the hypersonic speed regime. More specifically, component technologies for turbine-based combined cycle engines are being developed as part of UEET.

Whitlow, Woodrow, Jr.↗
NASA NTRS2002

Automating CPM-GOMS

CPM-GOMS is a modeling method that combines the task decomposition of a GOMS analysis with a model of human resource usage at the level of cognitive, perceptual, and motor operations. CPM-GOMS models have made accurate predictions about skilled user behavior in routine tasks, but developing such models is tedious and error-prone. We describe a process for automatically generating CPM-GOMS models from a hierarchical task decomposition expressed in a cognitive modeling tool called Apex. Resource scheduling in Apex automates the difficult task of interleaving the cognitive, perceptual, and motor resources underlying common task operators (e.g. mouse move-and-click). Apex's UI automatically generates PERT charts, which allow modelers to visualize a model's complex parallel behavior. Because interleaving and visualization is now automated, it is feasible to construct arbitrarily long sequences of behavior. To demonstrate the process, we present a model of automated teller interactions in Apex and discuss implications for user modeling. available to model human users, the Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection (GOMS) method [6, 21] has been the most widely used, providing accurate, often zero-parameter, predictions of the routine performance of skilled users in a wide range of procedural tasks [6, 13, 15, 27, 28]. GOMS is meant to model routine behavior. The user is assumed to have methods that apply sequences of operators and to achieve a goal. Selection rules are applied when there is more than one method to achieve a goal. Many routine tasks lend themselves well to such decomposition. Decomposition produces a representation of the task as a set of nested goal states that include an initial state and a final state. The iterative decomposition into goals and nested subgoals can terminate in primitives of any desired granularity, the choice of level of detail dependent on the predictions required. Although GOMS has proven useful in HCI, tools to support the construction of GOMS models have not yet come into general use.

GOMS↗
NASA NTRS2005

Designing Agent Utilities for Coordinated, Scalable and Robust Multi-Agent Systems

Coordinating the behavior of a large number of agents to achieve a system level goal poses unique design challenges. In particular, problems of scaling (number of agents in the thousands to tens of thousands), observability (agents have limited sensing capabilities), and robustness (the agents are unreliable) make it impossible to simply apply methods developed for small multi-agent systems composed of reliable agents. To address these problems, we present an approach based on deriving agent goals that are aligned with the overall system goal, and can be computed using information readily available to the agents. Then, each agent uses a simple reinforcement learning algorithm to pursue its own goals. Because of the way in which those goals are derived, there is no need to use difficult to scale external mechanisms to force collaboration or coordination among the agents, or to ensure that agents actively attempt to appropriate the tasks of agents that suffered failures. To present these results in a concrete setting, we focus on the problem of finding the sub-set of a set of imperfect devices that results in the best aggregate device. This is a large distributed agent coordination problem where each agent (e.g., device) needs to determine whether to be part of the aggregate device. Our results show that the approach proposed in this work provides improvements of over an order of magnitude over both traditional search methods and traditional multi-agent methods. Furthermore, the results show that even in extreme cases of agent failures (i.e., half the agents failed midway through the simulation) the system's performance degrades gracefully and still outperforms a failure-free and centralized search algorithm. The results also show that the gains increase as the size of the system (e.g., number of agents) increases. This latter result is particularly encouraging and suggests that this method is ideally suited for domains where the number of agents is currently in the thousands and will reach tens or hundreds of thousands in the near future.

Tumer, Kagan↗