A CLR Virtual Machine Based Execution Framework for IEC 61131-3 Applications

The increased need of flexibility of automation systems and the increased capabilities of sensors and actuators paired with more capable bus systems, pave the way for the reallocation of IEC 61131-3 applications away from the field level into so-called compute pools. Such compute pools are decentralised with enough compute power for a large number of applications, while providing the required flexibility to quickly adapt to changes of the applications requirements. The paper proposes a framework able to deploy IEC 61131-3 applications to multiple computing platforms based on CLR VM; it uses C# language as intermediate code. The software solution proposed by the authors does not require any modifications of the IEC 61131-3 applications. Current literature does not provide solutions like that here presented; due to the spread current use of C# language in the development of industrial applications, adoption of the proposed solution seems very attractive. The paper will deeply describe the software implementation and will also present an analysis about the capability of the proposed framework to respect real-time constraints of the industrial processes, mainly focusing on the periodic ones

Using an MBSE approach for automation control system selection in long steel products hot rolling plants

Abstract: Automation systems in long steel products hot rolling plants are prone to performance failures with the potential of serious negative impact on the business. The selection process of these automation systems therefore requires careful consideration of various selection factors to maximize plant performance. The need was therefore identified to investigate the use of a suitable management approach to guide engineering automation teams in the long steel products hot rolling plants in the selection of automation systems. At the core is the need for an in-depth understanding of the issues surrounding distributed and hierarchical automation systems in long steel products plants. This includes identifying the challenges during the selection process, using sound engineering management principles. Current automation selection techniques were investigated through a survey, interviews and a case study. It was then decided to use a Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach, which utilises systems engineering principles together with digital technology to create models to simplify the understanding of complex problems and relationships. This was then used to develop a management framework for automation systems selection in support of the business case of long steel products hot rolling plants

Criação de projetos chave na mão em robótica industrial

A indústria está em constante mudança e as revoluções industriais são a prova disso. Desde o surgimento da industrialização que o objetivo da indústria é aumentar a produtividade. A automação industrial e a robótica são fulcrais para esse aumento de produtividade, sendo indispensáveis na produção hoje em dia. Este relatório surge da realização de um estágio curricular para a obtenção do grau de mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica, na área de especialização em Automação e Comunicações em Sistemas Industriais, desenvolvido na empresa Real Robotic Systems, Lda. Um dos principais objetivos do estágio foi adquirir conhecimentos gerais das atividades da empresa, desenvolvendo tarefas que permitiram ganhar um maior conhecimento na área da automação industrial e robótica, entre outras tecnologias da indústria 4.0. Este relatório de estágio está dividido em duas grandes partes, o enquadramento teórico-concetual e a apresentação das atividades desenvolvidas. Dentro das atividades desenvolvidas, são explicadas duas no decorrer do estágio, sendo que uma foi desenvolvida em teletrabalho e a outra no chão de fábrica. A primeira atividade é uma aplicação inovadora que permite realizar a conversão de linguagens de programação, de robôs industriais, entre diferentes modelos de controladores de sistemas robóticos. A segunda atividade foi desenvolvida no chão de fábrica e é um processo que interliga tecnologias de diferentes épocas, como um PLC com mais de 10 anos de idade e um robô colaborativo, e, ainda assim, se apresenta como uma solução atual e flexível como exigido atualmente pela indústria 4.0. O estágio revelou-se uma mais-valia pelos conhecimentos adquiridos e o contacto com múltiplas tecnologias, levando à aprendizagem de novas formas de programar, o que permitiu quebrar novos paradigmas que me levaram a ganhar experiência profissional

Preventing Capability Abuse through Systematic Analysis of Exposed Interface

Connectivity and interoperability are becoming more and more critical in today’s software and cyber-physical systems. Different components of the system can better collaborate, enabling new innovation opportunities. However, to support connectivity and interoperability, systems and applications have to expose certain capabilities, which inevitably expands their attack surfaces and increases the risk of being abused. Due to the complexity of software systems and the heterogeneity of cyber-physical systems, it is challenging to secure their exposed interfaces and completely prevent abuses. To address the problems in a proactive manner, in this dissertation, we demonstrate that systematic studies of exposed interfaces and their usage in the real world, leveraging techniques such as program analysis, can reveal design-level, implementation-level, as well as configuration-level security issues, which can help with the development of defense solutions that effectively prevent capability abuse. This dissertation solves four problems in this space. First, we detect inconsistent security policy enforcement, a common implementation flaw. Focusing on the Android framework, we design and build a tool that compares permissions enforced on different code paths and identifies the paths enforcing weaker permissions. Second, we propose the Application Lifecycle Graph (ALG), a novel modeling approach to describing system-wide app lifecycle, to assist the detection of diehard behaviors that abuse lifecycle interfaces. We develop a lightweight runtime framework that utilizes ALG to realize fine-grained app lifecycle control. Third, we study real-world programmable logic controller programs for identifying insecure configurations that can be abused by adversaries to cause safety violations. Lastly, we conduct the first systematic security study on the usage of Unix domain sockets on Android, which reveals both implementation flaws and configuration weaknesses.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149960/1/yurushao_1.pd

Maßgeschneiderte Produktlinienextraktion

Industry faces an increasing number of challenges regarding the functionality, efficiency and reliability of software. A common approach to reduce the linked development effort and respective costs are model-based languages, such as Matlab/Simulink and statecharts. While these languages help companies during development of single systems, the high demand for customized software is an increasing challenge. As a result, variants with high similarity and only slight differences have to be developed in an efficient way. As reimplementation of complex functionality for each variant is no option, copies of existing solutions are often modified for new customers. In the short-run, this so-called clone-and-own approach allows to save costs as existing solutions can easily be reused. However, this approach also involves risks as the relations between the copied systems are rarely documented and errors have to be fixed for each variant in isolation. Thus, with a growing number of potentially large system copies, the resulting maintenance effort can become a problem. To overcome these problems, this thesis contributes an approach to semi-automatically migrate existing model variants to software product lines. These product lines allow to generate all variants from the identified reusable artifacts. As industry uses a variety of different modeling languages, the focus of the approach lies on an easy adaptation for different languages. Furthermore, the approach can be custom-tailored to include domain knowledge or language-specific details in the variability identification. The first step of the approach performs a high-level analysis of variants to identify outliers (e.g., variants that diverged too much from the rest) and clusters of strongly related variants. The second step executes variability mining to identify corresponding low-level variability relations (i.e. the common and varying parts) for these clusters. The third step uses these detailed variability relations for an automatic migration of the compared variants to a delta-oriented software product line. The approach is evaluated using publicly available case studies with industrial background as well as model variants provided by an industry partner.Die Industrie steht einer steigenden Anzahl an Herausforderungen bezüglich der Funktionalität, Effizienz und Zuverlässigkeit von Software gegenüber. Um den damit verbundenen Entwicklungsaufwand und entsprechende Kosten zu reduzieren, werden häufig modellbasierte Sprachen wie Matlab/Simulink oder Zustandsautomaten eingesetzt. Obwohl diese Sprachen die Unternehmen während der Entwicklung von Einzelsystemen unterstützen, führt die große Nachfrage nach maßgeschneiderter Software zu neuen Herausforderungen. Entsprechend müssen Varianten mit hoher Ähnlichkeit und nur geringfügigen Unterschieden effizient entwickelt werden. Da eine Neuimplementierung komplexer Funktionalität für jede Variante keine Option darstellt, werden häufig Kopien existierender Lösungen für Kunden angepasst. Auf kurze Sicht ermöglicht dieser sogenannte clone-and-own-Ansatz Kosten zu sparen, da existierende Lösungen leicht wiederverwendet werden können. Jedoch birgt der Ansatz auch Risiken, da Beziehungen zwischen den Systemkopien selten dokumentiert werden und Fehler für jede der Variante einzeln behoben werden müssen. Somit kann mit einer wachsenden Anzahl an möglicherweise umfangreichen Systemkopien der Wartungsaufwand zu einem Problem werden. Um diese Probleme zu lösen, bietet diese Arbeit einen Ansatz zur semi-automatischen Überführung existierender Modellvarianten in Softwareproduktlinien. Diese ermöglichen eine anschließende Generierung der Varianten aus den identifizierten wiederverwendbaren Artefakten. Da in der Industrie eine große Menge von Modellierungssprachen eingesetzt wird, liegt der Fokus auf der einfachen Adaption für unterschiedliche Sprachen. Zusätzlich kann durch Einbeziehung von Expertenwissen oder sprachspezifische Details die Variabilitätsidentifikation beeinflusst werden. Der erste Schritt des Ansatzes analysiert die Varianten auf hohem Abstraktionslevel, um Außenseiter (z.B. Varianten die stark von den restlichen Variaten abweichen) und Cluster von stark verwandten Varianten zu identifizieren. Der zweite Schritt analysiert diese Cluster auf niedrigem Abstraktionslevel, um entsprechende Variabilitätsrelationen (d.h. gemeinsame und unterschiedliche Teile) zu identifizieren. Der dritte Schritt nutzt diese detaillierten Variabilitätsrelationen für eine automatische Migration der verglichenen Varianten in eine delta-orientierte Softwareproduktlinie. Der Ansatz ist an Fallstudien mit industriellem Kontext sowie Modellvarianten eines Industriepartners evaluiert worden

A Functional, Comprehensive and Extensible Multi-Platform Querying and Transformation Approach

This thesis is about a new model querying and transformation approach called FunnyQT which is realized as a set of APIs and embedded domain-specific languages (DSLs) in the JVM-based functional Lisp-dialect Clojure. Founded on a powerful model management API, FunnyQT provides querying services such as comprehensions, quantified expressions, regular path expressions, logic-based, relational model querying, and pattern matching. On the transformation side, it supports the definition of unidirectional model-to-model transformations, of in-place transformations, it supports defining bidirectional transformations, and it supports a new kind of co-evolution transformations that allow for evolving a model together with its metamodel simultaneously. Several properties make FunnyQT unique. Foremost, it is just a Clojure library, thus, FunnyQT queries and transformations are Clojure programs. However, most higher-level services are provided as task-oriented embedded DSLs which use Clojure's powerful macro-system to support the user with tailor-made language constructs important for the task at hand. Since queries and transformations are just Clojure programs, they may use any Clojure or Java library for their own purpose, e.g., they may use some templating library for defining model-to-text transformations. Conversely, like every Clojure program, FunnyQT queries and transformations compile to normal JVM byte-code and can easily be called from other JVM languages. Furthermore, FunnyQT is platform-independent and designed with extensibility in mind. By default, it supports the Eclipse Modeling Framework and JGraLab, and support for other modeling frameworks can be added with minimal effort and without having to modify the respective framework's classes or FunnyQT itself. Lastly, because FunnyQT is embedded in a functional language, it has a functional emphasis itself. Every query and every transformation compiles to a function which can be passed around, given to higher-order functions, or be parametrized with other functions

Impact of New Method for Laying Separate Sewer System on Pavement Layers

The method of installing underground infrastructure has a significant influence on road resistance and performance under live loads such as traffic. This research presents a new method for laying separate sewer systems by using one trench to sit both sanitary pipe and storm pipe and considers the effects of this approach on the pavement strength. Experimental tests have been conducted in the laboratory using a trench 2.5x0.45x1 metre to install two pipes one over the other (sanitary pipe in the bottom and storm pipe on top). Two cases have tested, the first case using 5 cm surface layer of cold mix asphalt while the second is using soil. A series of loads were applied to test the behaviour of this new system and its effects on the pavement surface layer and the buried pipe. The comparison between the rut print of the live load on the soil layer and the pavement layer was conducted. Results demonstrated that using the cold mix asphalt is still insufficient to provide enough safety to protect buried pipe as a reason of needing to relatively long time to acquire high stiffness. Therefore, minimum cover depth to protect pipelines still required

Recent Development of Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems

Abstract: The use of renewable energies continues to increase. However, the energy obtained from renewable resources is variable over time. The amount of energy produced from the renewable energy sources (RES) over time depends on the meteorological conditions of the region chosen, the season, the relief, etc. So, variable power and nonguaranteed energy produced by renewable sources implies intermittence of the grid. The key lies in supply sources integrated to a hybrid system (HS)