2009 IEEE Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation

This research treats power optimization for energy converters, such like thermal, solar and chemical engines. Thermodynamic analyses lead to converter's efficiency and limiting power. Steady and dynamic systems are investigated. Static optimization of steady systems applies the differential calculus or Lagrange multipliers, dynamic optimization of unsteady systems uses variational calculus and dyn... View full abstract»

The increasing number and range of automation functions along with the decrease of qualified personal makes an upgraded engineering process necessary. This article gives a general overview of one approach, called the automation of automation, i.e. the automated execution of human tasks related to the engineering process of automation systems. Starting with a definition and a model describing the t... View full abstract»

In the industry there is a growing trend to use real-time Ethernet for factory communication. In this case study from the digital print industry a new communication standard is selected to host an automation protocol. It would have been a natural choice to migrate to a real-time-Ethernet derivative. However, after a research project an industry consortium chose not to adopt real-time-Ethernet but ... View full abstract»

Data-driven control is a methodology that attempts to find a suitable controller, based only on data taken from the system. Within this method, the virtual reference feedback tuning (VRFT), is a one-shot data-driven approach that transforms the control problem into an identification problem using restricted complexity controllers. However, how to choose the number of parameters, or the relation be... View full abstract»

Nowadays, one important goal of automation is to optimize the complete work and material flow under the constraints of energy consumption, quality and throughput. As a matter of fact, the whole control process should be flexible and reconfigurable which targets the three levels of the control pyramid (ERP, MES, Field). In the context of our ongoing research project LK3S an agent platfor... View full abstract»

Laser welding has a whole series of benefits such as high welding velocity or minor heat yield which is why it is becoming increasingly important. Meeting strength and quality requirements for welding seams is of eminent significance in automobile design. Unfortunately, there might be problems due to the degassing gaps needed between the joining parts when using the galvanized sheet metal that is ... View full abstract»

For Service-oriented Architectures, Web Services are claimed as state of the art to connect business execution layers as well as networking devices. Additionally, the deployment of Wireless Sensor Networks became applicable over the last years. The usage of application layer gateways and proxy concepts allow the integration of these sensor networks into real world scenarios and existing networks t... View full abstract»

It is desirable to be able to combine ease of implementation of a network with the ability to analyze the properties of the network. In order to address this we present a MAC protocol where the network acts as a FIFO, and examine the resulting properties of the network using both a theoretical study of the waiting times and a simulation experiment. It turns out that this type of protocol would all... View full abstract»

This paper analyzes optimal controller settings for controllers with One-Degree-of-Freedom (1-DoF) Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) structure. The analysis is conducted from the point of view of the operating mode (either servo or regulation mode) of the control-loop and tuning mode of the controller. Performance of the optimal tuning settings can be degraded when the operating mode is diffe... View full abstract»

In this paper we show that it is possible to retrofit a security layer on top of PROFINET IO without changing the underlying transmission system or standards. By introducing security modules, end-to-end network security can be achieved and ensure authentication, integrity and confidentiality for real-time communication. The concept of security modules is a flexible framework and countermeasures ca... View full abstract»

With increasing system complexity and extensive use of computerized control of industrial processes and plants, it is essential to have a systematic approach for identifying failures that can expose people and environment for unacceptable risks. With focus on a drive system used to control a linear motor, the fault tree analysis method is utilized to reveal design weaknesses and to find mitigation... View full abstract»

A configurable asynchronous CMOS TSMC90 nm Analogue to Digital Converter (ADC) with 4, 8 or 12-bits resolution, using a binary tree structure is presented which needs very low silicon area and relatively low power consumption for its implementation. The sampling rate of the 12-bit ADC exceeds 140MS/s and requires only 0.12 mm² of area making it appropriate for ultra wideband... View full abstract»

With eyes focused on simulation the authors review some of the main topics of hybrid renewable energy systems (HRES). Then they describe an object oriented model of a simple example of one of such systems, a micro-grid, oriented to designing a decentralized supervisor control. The model has been implemented using AnyLogic. View full abstract»

Support for real-time traffic and multi-hop is a basic requirement in certain applications as, for example, cooperative robot team missions. Normally, point-to-point communication is sufficient to allow such a collaboration. However, there exist situations in which multicast and/or broadcast capabilities, even with real-time requirements, allow a better usage of the available bandwidth leaving mor... View full abstract»

A wireless networked control system exploits a shared wireless network to logically link its sub-systems. Due to the peculiarities of the wireless channel, it is important to understand in which measure the quality of service provided by the communication infrastructure affects the quality of control. The aim of this work is to analyze the performance of a wireless networked control system based o... View full abstract»

Insufficiently marked siphons cause deadlocks in FMS. To avoid deadlocks, monitors and control arcs are added upon these siphons. The number of such siphons grows exponentially with the size of the net modeling the FMS. Li et al. propose to add monitors only to elementary siphons (linear complexity) and indicated that it may be extended to weighted resource allocation systems (RAS). Computational ... View full abstract»

A Chebyshev optimization approach can be employed effectively for the determination of the (reference) command input to be applied to a feedback PID control system in order to achieve a minimum-time output transition subject to constraints on both the control variable and the system output. The resulting command input function is given in polynomial form, for which a practical implementation can b... View full abstract»

This paper presents the schedulability analysis for control messages when networked control loops, built on top of the controller area network (CAN), are dynamically allocating bandwidth in terms of their controlled plants' dynamics. The bandwidth allocation policy is theoretically described by an optimization problem and practically solved by the distributed bitwise arbitration of CAN messages wh... View full abstract»

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have drawn a lot of attention and a lot of work has been done to provide an efficient communication infrastructure for these systems. This paper focuses on another -not so well studied- class of embedded networks: embedded networks used for control and automation purposes. In contrast to WSNs, these networks have a comparably stable infrastructure, with a low probab... View full abstract»

This paper proposes a multi-loop decentralized control strategy for the control of a wastewater treatment plant based on an activated sludge (ASP) model. The ASP is a described by means of a nonlinear model and results on a two-input two-output multivariable system. Even though advanced control strategies have been presented in the literature, the proposal of this paper is to show that by appropri... View full abstract»

Switched Ethernet is being used for real time transmissions in industrial automation more and and more. Most modern industrial switches are equipped with mechanisms to deal with time predictability. However, real-time transmission not only requires these mechanisms, but also the proper policies for managing network resources. This paper proposes the use of contracts. A contract is a set of transmi... View full abstract»