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Engineering is a major cost factor in automation system projects. Hence, both industry and academia aim to develop new methods and concepts to increase engineering efficiency. However, the verification and comparison of those methods is difficult because the measurement of engineering efficiency is unsolved and is considered to be a possible breakthrough in the domain of engineering. This paper proposes...
Future manufacturing systems have to be more adaptable to be able to compete in fast changing markets and address specific customer demands. To increase adaptability of production systems, the software and communication infrastructures have to be adaptable as well. Current communication paradigms tightly couple manufacturing systems to communication infrastructures. Changes in the manufacturing system...
This paper introduces the application of off-the-shelf Android tablet computers as real-time capable control devices. We present an IDE to create and execute PLC programs written in Structured Text on a tablet running RTAndroid. This derivative of Android with support for real-time applications ensures the predictable execution of PLC programs. A USB-driven field device adapter enables interaction...
Virtualization has been used as the de facto technology to allow multiple operating systems (virtual machines) to run on top of the same hardware platform. In the embedded systems domain, virtualization research has focused on the coexistence of real-time requirements with non-real-time characteristics. However, existent standard software-based virtualization solutions have been shown to negatively...
The advent of many-core processors came with the increase in computational power needed for future applications. However new challenges arrived at the same time, especially for the real-time community. Each core on such a processor is a heat source and uneven usage can lead to hot spots on the processor, affecting its lifetime and reliability. For real-time systems, it is therefore of paramount importance...
Since the inception of the concept of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), their applicability within the context of environmental monitoring systems (EMS) has constantly been explored. Egypt stands to gain much from WSN-based EMS systems if they are properly applied within its considerably large agricultural industry. A system is developed and tested using locally available hardware within the technical,...
The software architecture AUTOSAR has become a standard in the automotive domain in recent years. It supports the development of reusable standardized software components that can be easily assigned to electronic control units (ECUs) at design time. At the end of the development process the AUTOSAR middleware is configured and compiled into a static configuration. However, future automotive systems...
Machine-to-Machine technology supports several application scenarios, such as smart metering, automotive, healthcare and city monitoring. Smart metering applications have attracted the interest of companies and governments since these applications bring many benefits (e.g. costs reduction and increased reliability) for production, monitoring and distribution of utilities, such as gas, water and electricity...
For companies in the automation industry, the development of real-time Ethernet to connect devices is of high economic interest to replace conventional fieldbus systems. Therefore, many approaches for adapting Ethernet to real-time requirements come from industrial applications. This is a challenging task as the original Ethernet standard IEEE 802.3 was not designed for real-time data transmission...
Current Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) must cope with complex requirements that involve diverse hardware and software platforms, communication networks and middleware, legacy systems integration, programming languages, or tools and methodologies. Thus, one of the most challenging aspects in such systems is heterogeneity. On the other hand, such systems often integrate resource constrained embedded systems,...
Automation Systems have to deal with breakdowns of their components which potentially lead to drop-off in production and high follow-up costs. The current solution for this problem is the use of redundant hardware ensuring high availability but causing high costs. Starting from nowadays often used distributed automation systems, this paper proposes a software-based solution for high availability using...
Simulations are often used to improve the development and test time of industrial embedded systems in different domains, such as healthcare, railway, automobile and aerospace. This paper introduces a general framework capable of simulating real components simultaneously with simulated ones, in real-time, and with a low impact on the performance of the overall system. Our framework is loosely dependent...
Automation Systems have become an inseparable part of daily life. Therefore, they must be usable to a wide range of users. Introduction of enabling technologies and modern infrastructures, such as smartphones or cloud-based systems, has changed the context of use; it has become more dynamic and includes different hardware and software platforms. The usability of a system is measured according to the...
In Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WSANs) sensor and actuator devices are connected through radio links to perform tasks in many different contexts. Conventionally, applications for WSANs are developed using traditional operating systems which application code is linked with at the end of a cross-compilation process. We propose instead an alternative approach for building applications on WSANs...
Modern multicore platforms feature multiple levels of cache memory placed between the processor and main memory to hide the latency of ordinary memory systems. The primary goal of this cache hierarchy is to improve average execution time (at the cost of predictability). The uncontrolled use of the cache hierarchy by real-time tasks may impact the estimation of their worst-case execution times (WCET)...
Performing system test for large-scale industrial systems is a challenging activity due to the complexity involved in managing the variety of distributed hardware systems in general, and the hardware-related challenges in test environment in particular. Virtualization technology opens up the possibility to address these challenges, e.g., with respect to cost efficient scalability. In this paper, we...
The flexibility and reconfigurability requirements of factories and manufacturing plants of the future can be partially met by adopting technologies and solutions already available for testing and experimentation. Openness and adherence to international standards are becoming increasingly important in modern distributed production and automation systems, especially when they have to cope with ever-increasing...
Mixed-criticality architectures with support for modular certification make the integration of application subsystems with different safety assurance levels both technically and economically feasible. Strict segregation of these subsystems is a key requirement to avoid fault propagation and unintended side-effects due to integration. Also, mixed-criticality architectures must deal with the heterogeneity...
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are at the core of the future industrial control systems. Most industrial CPSs are usually implemented over expensive and domain-specific hardware platforms, such as industrial embedded control systems, mainly for safety and security reasons. In less-critical applications the use of open, low-cost hardware platforms that provide adequate computing capabilities, such as...
This paper presents optimization techniques for implementing software-based redundancy in industrial control devices. Initially, a brief survey of software-based state replication techniques with a special focus on their applicability in industrial control devices is conducted. The scalability, predictability and low latency of the technique are of particular interest in this case. Based on this survey,...
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