PERPLEXUS special session at the
IEEE Congress on Evolutionary
Computation
PERPLEXUS: Pervasive reconfigurable platforms for modelling
complex systems
May 18-21, 2009
Trondheim, Norway
Call for Papers
(download PDF here)
The PERPLEXUS Vision
“The most profound
technologies are those that disappear. They weave
themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are
indistinguishable from it”
Mark Weiser, 1952-1999
“The Computer for the 21st Century”, September
1991
The aim of the PERPLEXUS project is to develop a scalable
hardware platform made of custom reconfigurable devices
endowed with bio-inspired capabilities that will enable the
simulation of large-scale complex systems and the study of
emergent complex behaviours in a virtually unbounded
wireless network of computing modules.
At the heart of these ubiquitous computing modules
(ubidules), we will use a custom reconfigurable electronic
device capable of implementing bio-inspired mechanisms such
as growth, learning, and evolution. This reconfigurable
circuit will be associated to rich sensory elements and
wireless communication capabilities.
The PERPLEXUS platform offers several advantages compared
to classical software simulations: speed-up, an inherent
real-time interaction with the environment,
self-organization capabilities, simulation in the presence
of uncertainty, and distributed multi-scale simulations.
We will test our modelling infrastructure to prove its
usefulness as a powerful and innovative simulation tool in
the following applications: neural networks modelling,
culture dissemination modelling, and cooperative collective
robotics modelling. We will perform comparisons between
classical software simulations and simulations running on a
network of ubidules, our PERPLEXUS platform.
The PERPLEXUS platform will thus provide an unprecedented
modelling framework thanks to the pervasive nature of the
hardware platform, its bio-inspired capabilities, its
strong interaction with the environment, and its dynamical
topology.
PERPLEXUS has come into existence thanks to a grant from
the European Commission 6th framework programme and
regroups eight research institutions, from four different
countries, including an industrial partner. PERPLEXUS runs
for three years, starting from September 1st,
2006.
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