The paper presents the multi-agent approach for developing cyber-physical system for managing precise farms with digital twins of plants. It discusses complexity of the problem caused by a priori incompleteness of knowledge about factors of plant growth and development, high uncertainty of crops cultivation, variety of weather, business and technical requirements, etc. The approach proposes knowledge bases and multi-agent technology in combination with machine learning methods for designing considered systems. Digital twin of plant is specified as an agent based on ontology model of objects relevant for plant cultivation (specific sort of plant, soil, etc) associated with history of operations and environment conditions. The architecture and functions of system components are designed. The expected results of system implementation and the benefits for farmers are discussed.

A thorough analysis of data on aircraft lifecycle revealed inadequacy of current lifecycle management methods in the face of increased complexity of the Internet-based global market. A new method for managing lifecycle has been developed by authors and their teams using concepts and principles of the emerging complexity science with the aim of reducing lead times and costs. Centralised control has been replaced with distributed decision-making empowering all lifecycle stakeholders. The solution described in this paper is the first of its kind and it represents a genuine advance in knowledge, which leads to considerable reduction in design/production lead times and decrease in the lifecycle cost. The method has been validated in a variety of applications. Keywords: aircraft, complex adaptive systems, complexity, lifecycle management, real-time spare parts management. INTRODUCTIONThe lifecycle of a large aerospace product such as an airliner or a military aircraft consists of a very large number of interconnected activities, which are normally partitioned into several phases such as: Design, Production, Operation and Decommissioning. Each phase of the lifecycle consists of activities as outlined below.Design consists of all activities needed to produce, operate and recycle a product, including: market research, requirements specification, conception, design management, overall design (including design for X, where X is performance, safety, reliability, operability, manufacturing, assembly, maintainability and recycling) and design of components.Production includes the selection and development of production technologies, production planning and management, supply of materials and components, manufacturing, assembly, testing and quality assurance.Operation includes the scheduling and management of the use of aircraft and its crew within a fleet; the maintenance and repair tasks and resources; and the logistics support tasks and resources.Decommissioning includes safe disposal and recycling of components and/or materials. The current practice is to consider each phase of the lifecycle separately managed by a different team of specialists, often from different organisations, with a limited interaction between them. As a rule, there is no central lifecycle management team charged with coordinating all activities from the creation of the idea of the future product to its disposal and recycling. Moreover, each phase of the lifecycle is normally supported by stand-alone computer systems, such as computer-aided design, computer-aided engineering, computer-aided manufacturing, enterprise resource planning and various production and logistic schedulers, which are rarely fully compatible with each other and never integrated into a single lifecycle system.Partitioning of lifecycle activities into individual phases and managing each phase by different management systems supported by stand-alone computer systems weakens important connections between key lifecycle activities and thus delays useful flow of information, p...

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Whilst launching of astronauts is always in the news, little is known about logistics support that must be in place for the successful spaceflight to be possible. This paper describes some details of the Intelligent Logistics Management System, conceived by the authors, and developed by two sister companies, one in the UK and the other in Russia, which supports Russian contribution to the international space exploration. The System is designed as a complex adaptive network of interacting real-time schedulers, believed to be the first of its kind in the world. At present, five real-time schedulers cooperate or compete with each other, depending on the context. They schedule flights, cargo flow, storage allocation, scientific experiments, and resource allocation within the international space station (ISS). Further, schedulers can be developed and easily connected to the network, as the need arises. When two cargo vehicles were lost in 2015, the Logistics Management System rapidly re-scheduled deliveries, ensuring that astronauts were not left short of food, water, healthcare material, and laboratory equipment for space exploration. The System is based on multi-agent technology and exhibits Emergent Intelligence.