IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics

2. "Intelligent Control and Integration Software for Flexible Manufacturing Cells"

Abstract: Flexible Manufacturing Cells (FMC) are capable of producing a broad variety of products and changing their characteristics quickly and frequently. This flexibility provides for more efficient use of resources, but makes the control of these systems more difficult. This paper presents several software applications developed for industrial robots and CNC machines. The objective of this software is to allow these equipments to be integrated, in an easy and efficient way, in modern FMC. For the industrial robots we developed the “winRS232ROBOTcontrol” and “winEthernetROBOTcontrol” software. For the CNC machines the software that was developed was “winMILLcontrol”, for the mill and “winTURNcontrol”, for the lathe. With this software, industrial robots and CNC machines can be integrated in modern FMC, in an easy and efficient way. An FMC was developed, with industrial characteristics, with the objective of showing the potentialities of the developed software. Thus, the proposed software in this work was tested and validated in the developed FMC and the experimental results show the viability and success of this software in the coordination of the different sectors in the FMC and in the improvement of their performance.

Abstract: Field buses are used to network sensors, actuators, and control devices inside automation systems. The Internet integration of field bus systems enables information from these devices to be exchanged across enterprises and businesses. An essential prerequisite to this aim is the interoperability of field bus systems with external systems and applications. Therefore, many efforts are made to establish a common information exchange standard which all field bus systems are supposed to support. However, the longer these efforts are ongoing the less it seems that they will ever yield the expected breakthrough. The present paper introduces an entirely different approach to interoperability. Field bus systems may keep their individual application interfaces and data exchange formats. All the same, external infrastructures do not have to be redesigned to match the specific needs of certain field bus systems. Rather, field bus systems become capable of adapting the information exchange flexibly according to the needs of the outside environment.

Abstract: Existing communication utilities, such as the ISO/OSI model and the associated automation pyramid, have limitations regarding the increased complexity of modern automation systems. The introduction of profiles for fieldbus systems, or Field Area Networks (FANs), was an important innovation. However, in the foreseeable future the number of FAN nodes in building automation systems is expected to increase drastically. And here the authors see an opportunity to revolutionize the operation of intelligent, autonomous systems based on FANs. The paper introduces a system based on bionic principles to process the information obtained from a large number of diverse sensors. By means of multilevel symbolization, the amount of information to be processed is substantially reduced. A symbolic processing model is introduced that enables the processing of real world information, creates a world representation, and evaluates scenarios that occur in this representation. Two applications involving human actions in a building automation environment are briefly discussed. It is argued that the use of internal symbolization leads to greater flexibility in the case of a large number of sensors, providing the ability to adapt to changing sensor inputs in an intelligent way.

Abstract: In this paper, a jumping genes paradigm is proposed for optimizing the wireless local area network (WLAN) for IC factory. Through the base station placement, not only the best quality of service of the network is guaranteed, but also the performance of the network can be trade-off with the number of allowable base stations. This provides a greater flexibility for the designer when the factory environment such as physical space, building structure, equipments, and cost determines the significant part of the overall design criteria and particularly when conflicting dilemma is encountered. The main feature of this optimization scheme is its capacity to yield the extreme minmax solutions under a specific allowable design power loss threshold. It provides a much wider range of solutions for selection which includes the ultimate low-cost design but without sacrificing the performance or vice versa. The obtained results revealed from this study indicated that the jumping genes paradigm is an effective and reliable methodology for this type of design problem.

6. "Efficient Memory Protected Integration of Add-on Software Subsystems in Small Embedded Automotive Applications"

Abstract: Current innovations in the automotive industry evolve mainly in the electronics and software domain. This leads to an increasing integration of additional software subsystems into already existing electronic control units (ECUs) to cope with the raised amount and complexity of present ECUs in modern high-end vehicles. This paper discusses different approaches which are required to integrate such add-on software subsystems in an isolated memory domain, and considers particularly the special needs of small embedded systems—including the limited hardware support. Special focus is brought to the efficient detection of malicious memory accesses as well as the benefits of a thereupon possible and adaptable failure handling strategy. All investigations are based on a developed memory protection framework which has been tailored to the special needs of a sample vehicle dynamics control system. Its usage allows the combination in integrating additional subsystems without reducing the main application's availability.

Abstract: Applying classical dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) techniques to real-time systems running on processors with discrete voltage/frequency modes causes a waste of computational resources. In fact, whenever the ideal speed level computed by the DVS algorithm is not available in the system, to guarantee the feasibility of the task set, the processor speed must be set to the nearest level greater than the optimal one, thus underutilizing the system. Whenever the task set allows a certain degree of flexibility in specifying timing constraints, rate adaptation techniques can be adopted to balance performance (which is a function of task rates) vs. energy consumption (which is a function of the processor speed). In this paper, we propose a new method that combines discrete DVS management with elastic scheduling to fully exploit the available computational resources. Depending on the application requirements, the algorithm can be set to improve performance or reduce energy consumption, so enhancing the flexibility of the system. A reclaiming mechanism is also used to take advantage of early completions. To make the proposed approach usable in real-world applications, the task model is enhanced to consider some of the real CPU characteristics, such as discrete voltage/frequency levels, switching overhead, task execution times non linear with the frequency, and tasks with different power consumption. Implementation issues and experimental results for the proposed algorithm are also discussed.

8. "Architecture Design and Implementation of an Ad-hoc Network for Disaster Relief Operations"

Pogkas, N., Karastergios, G. E., Antonopoulos, C. P., Koubias, S., Papadopoulos, G.

Abstract: This paper presents an ad-hoc sensor network especially developed for a disaster relief application that provides the rescue teams with a quickly deployable, cost-effective and reliable tool to collect information about the presence of people in a collapsed building space and the state of the ruins. The hardware/software architecture of the wireless sensor nodes is developed for a low cost design implementation. Energy efficiency is another objective of this paper, achieved by the combination of a low power mode algorithm and a power aware routing strategy. A selected set of simulation studies indicate a reduction in energy consumption and a significant increase in node lifetime whereas network performance is not affected significantly. Finally, a lightweight management architecture is presented to facilitate autonomous management of ad-hoc sensor networks.

Abstract: In this paper, a data-mining approach is used to develop a model for optimizing the efficiency of an electric-utility boiler subject to operating constraints. Selection of process variables to optimize combustion efficiency is discussed. The selected variables are critical for control of combustion efficiency of a coal-fired boiler in the presence of operating constraints. Two schemes of generating control settings and updating control variables are evaluated. One scheme is based on the controllable and non-controllable variables. The second one incorporates response variables into the clustering process. The process control scheme based on the response variables produces the smallest variance of the target variable due to reduced coupling among the process variables. An industrial case study and its implementation illustrate the control approach developed in the paper.

Abstract: Coating automation of a complex product family with changes and uncertainties is investigated. A CAD and scanner-based robotic coating system is proposed. Its software system consists of a data processing system and automatic programming and simulation system. The data processing system is capable of generating accurate surface model from points-cloud and/or as-designed CAD model. The automatic programming and simulation system is capable of creating robot programs based on the surface models. In this paper, the system framework and the methodology for generating robot programs are focused.

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IEEE Industrial Electronics Society

IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics

Volume 3, Number 1, February 2007

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