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Some obsolete — but common — practices in the application of fertilizers and pesticides are causing serious environmental problems in Colombia; a situation that could be addressed by combining robotics and modern farming management principles, for example, the Precision Agriculture. This paper describes a novel application of Plexil — an experimental synchronous programming language developed by NASA-for...
Today distributed development depend on an ever-growing plethora of tools that provide a continual stream of updates and place developers into a situation of channel overload and information fragmentation. In this paper, we present our initial work on the definition of a model, named hub-and-spoke, for a loosely-coupled integration of development tools that can help developers cope with these issues,...
This practice paper presents how a test team of a software engineering organization spread across three countries successfully optimized the system testing effort for a large mission-critical software system that had to conform to regulatory requirements. Multiple releases of the system of the system have been delivered to customers over the 15 years it has been in the market. Each new release added...
The presented machinery concept CESA3R (Concept for Engineering free, Scalable, Advanced Automated Assembly system for Rapid ramp up) addresses today's challenges in production such as product variety and quantity variation by enhancing versatility. Central elements are function oriented standardized automation devices, which are technically featured with independent structure recognition and self-descriptive...
Dealing with the requirement to produce many different products at the same automated production system, flexible material flow modules, which are connected to a material flow system (MFS) are required. Therefore a definition of the architecture and interfaces of such modules is provided by a model based engineering approach and an appropriate meta model. Hence, a reduced engineering effort for setting...
Energy conserved is energy generated. Energy plays a pivotal role in our life. The requisite for energy is soaring. The intensifying demand can be met either by furthering the energy generation or by conserving the usage of energy. Generation of energy is an expensive affair; hence it is very important to conserve energy. Electrical energy audit is the process of examining the patterns in consumption...
Due to the still increasing interconnectedness of systems it is very much important to further strengthen activities towards assuring security requirements of those systems. Quality assurance methods like coding guidelines with a focus on security related issues, and static analysis tools are necessary but not sufficient because of the fact that security is a system property. Therefore, it is important...
Mankind has inherited the earth. But, up to now there is little hint on the meaning and the purpose of this inheritance. Science, thus far, has explained only a tiny fraction. The real issue is identified as the problem of surviving the permanently uncertain future. Technically, the problem can be called the Requirement of Permanence. All the knowledge discoveries of the past, the present, and the...
Deviations are known as unexpected situations that could arise during Software Process (SP) enactment. They are the difference between what is expected and what is carried out in real world. Experience has shown that the appearance of such situations is unescapable, especially within large software development projects. Moreover, their occurrence often leads to software development failure if they...
A secure and reliable critical infrastructure is a concern of industry and governments. SCADA systems (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) are a subgroup of ICS (Industrial Control Systems) and known to be well interconnected with other networks. It is not uncommon to use public networks as transport route but a rising number of incidents of industrial control systems shows the danger of excessive...
Closed-loop model checking, a formal verification technique for industrial automation systems, increases the richness of specifications to be checked and often helps to reduce size of the state space to be verified compared with the open-loop case. To be applied, it needs two components — the controller and the plant models — to be coupled. While there are approaches for obtaining controller models...
Prevention of data loss in each scan cycle is of utmost importance in control system programming. For each variable to reflect the latest value, compilers compute the order of execution of control logic objects according to data flow. But this technique for ensuring data integrity fails when a circular dependency or a “code loop” is found. In this paper, we propose an approach to help solve this issue...
Due to increased market demands for highly customized and machine-specific solutions in manufacturing, industrial software systems are often developed as software product lines (SPL) and organized as software ecosystems (SECO) with internal and external developers composing individual solutions based on a common technological platform. In such settings, software development usually occurs in a multistage...
Cyber-physical production systems' main feature is adaptability. They shall adapt quickly to new requirements such as new products or product variants. Nowadays, the bottleneck is the automation system, which requires high manual engineering efforts for every new adaption. For new requirements, an automation software is created by combining pre-defined software components. But this also means that...
Research as well as industrial projects in the field of micro- and nanorobotics often incorporate complex experimental setups using different devices with varying and often complex interfaces. In order to provide an easier interface to these devices, this paper outlines the extension of a versatile software framework called OFFIS Automation Framework, for automation, image processing and controlling...
In this paper a new modelling approach is presented to be used for formal-verification of block-diagram executable specifications of distributed industrial cyber-physical systems following the IEC 61499 standard. The approach allows usage of timers and arithmetic operations in the controller code. SMV model-checker is used as the target tool. The function block modelswith multiple communicating plant-controller...
In this paper the problem of data flows managing in networks with two or more lines of communication between the various segments are considered and a modern way of solving it is shown. The network model, which is built with a network simulator ns-3 using the module «OpenFlow Switch Device», and the results of its study are shown.
In recent years there has been a great deal of academic and practitioner interest in the role of ‘benefits realisation management’ [BRM] approaches, as a means of proactively leveraging value from IT investments. However, as automated technologies are increasingly being introduced on the basis that they deliver more cost-efficient solutions than their human counterparts, important questions needs...
In an increasingly competitive environment the successful functioning of any business requires continuous improvement of services, expanding the range of products and range of services, standardization, and implementation of new busines ideas, establishment and dissemination of innovative solutions on the market. The implementation of such measures were carried out in a well-developed business projects...
With the proliferation of new and improved sensors for military and civilian vehicles, the challenges for integrating the sensors, retrieving and processing data from them have become more complex. Typically, these sensors come with APIs as specified by the manufacturer and hence integrating newer sensors on the existing and newer platforms as well as interoperability with other platform sub-systems...
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