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Distribution warehouses are considered in this paper with the aim of scheduling the transportation of pallet and roll pallet loads from the storage area to the gates at which the trucks arrive. Transportation activities are carried out by forklift AGVs that can move freely along the warehouse's aisles (guide paths are not considered). In this paper, an optimization procedure is proposed, which is...
Composing distributed automation systems from components is challenging due to large variety and number of available components on the market. Multiple criteria need to be considered such as functional coverage, price, interoperability, vendor homogeneity, and energy. The paper introduces a novel heuristic approach for selecting devices considering such criteria. The performance of the approach is...
Industrial communication systems increasingly deploy wireless technologies. In order to benefit from flexibility and cost saving potentials, wireless systems have to cope with the requirements of industrial applications, in particular timing constraints. Due to their hard and isochronous real-time characteristics, control applications on the field level of factory automation have not been considered...
Part of the KOMOBAR project aims to support agricultural production processes in rural areas. These processes are subject to frequent disturbances that need to be accounted for. KOMOBAR proposes to reduce the (human to human) communication overhead by deploying a distributed system that allows for soft real-time monitoring of the respective processes in execution. Further, KOMOBAR considers a major...
In practice, software is often deployed with several hidden bugs despite various test processes and static analyses. Such bugs often cause a phenomenon called software aging that refers to the accumulation of errors occurring in long running software systems that results in a decrease of performance and an increases of the probability to crash the entire system. This paper presents a mechanism to...
EtherCAT is one of the most prominent representative of Industrial Ethernet communication technology. It provides high real-time performance together with rich functionality set. Some of its important features are very accurate distributed clock (DC) and cable redundancy. These features work perfectly when standalone. However there are some inherent problems when combined. There exist couple of solutions...
Design of assembly lines is a knowledge intensive process relying significantly on experience and associated with high costs, long lead times and high probability of risks and reworks. This paper presents a methodology to support the early stage design of assembly lines through Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE). In this introductory paper the authors discuss the methodology to implement the KBE approach...
In factory automation where reliable low-delay communication is essential to maintain the required Quality of Service (QoS), efficient medium access schemes play quite an important role. Therefore we propose a centralized cognitive medium access method that utilizes prediction of whitespaces to avoid collisions as well as improve utilization of transmission opportunities. Our simulation results show...
Current automation systems need to be able to cope with the continuously changing requirements of the applications in terms of complexity, extensibility and dynamism. To match these challenging requirements, modern automation systems need to incorporate new software engineering techniques. These techniques must provide to the automation systems additional abilities such as diagnosis and reconfiguration...
Today simulation is playing an important role at multiple steps within the life-cycle of a process plant. For the future it is expected that simulation will be integrated in the plant life-cycle and the backbone of an integrated engineering process. To simulate the different aspects of a plant multiple domains are necessary. Usually each domain requires specific simulation capabilities, thus multiple...
This paper investigates an original system for wireless control and monitoring of an agricultural machine. The system is implemented by means of an IEEE 802.11-based soft realtime communication architecture which enables the connection of the machine with off-the-shelf mobile devices, like widespread tablet PCs, that could hence replace traditional ad-hoc developed operator panels. The harsh surrounding...
Mobile robots are used in manufacturing workshops and storage plants to automate internal logistics. A model of a manufacturing plant which is representative of the forthcoming flexible systems is presented in this paper. It has been implemented in physical simulator V-Rep, with the KUKA youBot robot as the unit to perform material transportation and handling. This implementation has been used to...
This article presents a proof-of-concept implementation of a managed service for real-time rating, charging, and billing. The formal model of the usage tariffs and the operational interface utilized for this service are based on open standards. An end-to-end use case from the domain of medical image processing is outlined to illustrate the ease of integration of rating and charging into existing IT...
Industrial communication systems, like the very popular real-time Ethernet networks, are ever more used to carry multimedia traffic, i.e. that generated by applications employing complex sensors such as, for example, video cameras. Ethernet networks, however, revealed to be quite inefficient in terms of energy saving since the power consumption of a link between any two devices does not decrease significantly...
In this paper, the authors present an engineering approach for generating automation system solutions based on formalised requirements. This enables assistant systems which guide engineers during the design phase of todays more and more complex automation systems. A software prototype is used for the evaluation of this approach in practice. The main contribution is to directly use a formal requirements...
Industrial processes use energy to transform raw materials and intermediate goods into final products. Many efforts have been done on the minimization of energy costs in industrial plants. Apart from working on “how” an industrial process is implemented, it is possible to reduce the energy costs by focusing on “when” it is performed. Although, some manufacturing plants (e.g. refining or petrochemical...
A comprehensive smart office system is designed in this paper. Based on analyses of different kinds of scenarios, the corresponding sub-systems for ventilating, heating, lighting etc are realized respectively. On the basis of the investigation of an independent office, the smart system is expanded to the whole building, ie. smart office building. Then the corresponding subsystems are achieved for...
To reduce the aircraft weight and maintenance costs while guaranteeing system performance and reliability, an alternative avionic communication architecture based on Ultra Wide Band (UWB) and TDMA protocol is proposed to replace the back-up part of safety-critical avionics network. The analysis and performance optimization of such a proposal is tackled as follows. First, appropriate system modeling...
A smart electric grid incorporating local generation and storage is an area of active research in the industrial automation community. Very little attention has been given to similar possibilities in hot water grids that are used extensively for district heating in several countries, especially in Central and Northern Europe. In this paper, possibilities for heat trade in such a grid are investigated...
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