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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...
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...
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...
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...
This paper presents a new method to remove the effects of uneven ensonification in Side-Scan Sonar (SSS) acoustic images, facilitating their use in underwater robotics. A Lambertian model is used for the sonar scattering process, relating the received echo with the ensonification intensity, the sea bed reflectivity and the incidence angle. As for the ensonification intensity, a sensitivity pattern...
This article shows the proposal of a linear-assisted converter or linear-&-switching hybrid converter with a constant switching frequency. The control loop of the system is based on the current-mode technique. The main disadvantage of a converter with current-mode control is the inherent instability of the loop when switch duty ratios are greater than 0.5. In order to make stable the proposed...
The fault tree is a technique of high importance for reliability analysis in a industrial process. This paper describes an application that was developed for the automatic fault tree synthesis. In order to do so, the knowledge about industrial processes was structured through the development of a domain ontology. With this ontology is possible to represent the relationship between each component of...
Vibration and displacement sensors need to be compact for many applications in automation or consumer electronics, and microelectromechanical structures are a convenient way to implement such sensors. For these MEMS devices, optical readout methods have proven to be superior to capacitive or piezoresistive strategies in terms of sensitivity as well as noise and interference immunity, however the integration...
Network-based clock synchronization is an important prerequisite for many application areas and more and more required for the factory floor for network arbitration, control, and monitoring. Limitations of existing clock synchronization protocols are that they either support high redundancy and robustness or high precision. This paper presents an approach to integrate slave-side robustness into high...
This paper presents a novel technique for integrating process causality and topology which ultimately enables to determine the propagation path of oscillations in control loops. The integration is performed using a dedicated search algorithm which validates the quantitative results of the data-driven causality using the qualitative information on plant connectivity extracted from a piping and instrumentation...
The Flexible Time Triggered (FTT) paradigm provides online flexible scheduling for distributed embedded systems but it does not present adequate fault tolerance mechanisms so as to reach a very high reliability. Adding the adequate fault tolerance mechanisms to FTT-based architectures would open room for adaptive yet highly dependable systems. In this work we present a fault-tolerant system architecture...
This paper presents and innovative technique-referred to as trend-weighted rule-based expert system (TWRBES) — grounded in the integration of two existing tools of the artificial intelligence field, expert systems (ES) and qualitative trend analysis (QTA). The main goal of this approach is to benefit of the main advantages associated with each of the techniques used, such as the ability to represent...
Today, electronic devices may have multiple possibilities to communicate, either through wired or wireless interfaces. Despite this diversity, devices still fail to fully use the available resources by not simultaneously using multiple channels to their full extent. This is especially true in wireless channels where the efficient aggregation of multiple channels has proved to be a difficult task,...
Many applications in factory and process automation require robust wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for collecting sensor data with sampling and transmission rates up to 100 Hz from battery powered sensor nodes. To establish real-time communication in a star network topology, the LLDN mode of IEEE 802.15.4e amendment was released. We present a demonstration system which applies a recently introduced...
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