1,496 research outputs found
Reconfigurable web service integration in the extended logistics enterprise
Transportation and warehousing logistics are activities that require strong information systems and computer support. This requirement has grown with the advent of e-commerce. Companies such as FedEx and UPS now allow their customers to track and monitor the fulfilment of their requested services on the Internet. In order for such a system to be effective, the goods need to be handled by the one corporation, with an integrated system. This is rare in the case of Small to Medium sized Enterprise (SME). With the advent of Business to Business (B2B), and Partner to Partner (P2P) e-commerce, there has been an increasing tendency for SMEs to set up consortia that represent several players in a given field in order to contend with larger competitors. This paper deals with the concept of an extended logistics enterprise and explores the software engineering issues underlying the development of such complex systems
Service-oriented infrastructure to support the control, monitoring and management of a shop floor system
Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em
Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresService-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is becoming a broadly deployed standard
for business and enterprise integration. It continuously spreads across the distinct
layers of the enterprise organization and disparate domains of application, envisioning
a unified communication solution. Service-oriented approaches are also entering the industrial automation domain in a top-down way. The recent application at device level
has a direct impact on how industrial automation deployments will evolve. Similarly
to other domains, the crescent ubiquity of smart devices is raising important lifecycle
concerns related to device control, monitoring and management. From initial setup and deployment to system lifecycle monitoring and evolution, each device needs to be taken into account and to be easily reachable.
The current work includes the specification and development of a modular, adaptive
and open infrastructure to support the control, monitoring and management of devices
and services in an industrial automation environment, such as a shop floor system. A
collection of tools and services to be comprised in this same infrastructure will also be researched and implemented. Moreover, the main implementation focuses on a SOA-based infrastructure comprising SemanticWeb concepts to enhance the process of exchanging a device in an industrial automation environment. This is done by assisting (and even automate)this task supported by service and device semantic matching whenever a device has a problem. The infrastructure was implemented and tested in an educational shop floor setup composed by a set of distributed entities each one controlled by its own SOAready
PLC. The performed tests revealed that the tasks of discovering and identifying
new devices, as well as providing assistance when a device is down offered a valuable
contribution and can increase the agility of the overall system when dealing with operation disruptions or modifications at device level
Engineering framework for service-oriented automation systems
Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Informática. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201
Interim research assessment 2003-2005 - Computer Science
This report primarily serves as a source of information for the 2007 Interim Research Assessment Committee for Computer Science at the three technical universities in the Netherlands. The report also provides information for others interested in our research activities
An approach to open virtual commissioning for component-based automation
Increasing market demands for highly customised products with shorter time-to-market and
at lower prices are forcing manufacturing systems to be built and operated in a more efficient
ways. In order to overcome some of the limitations in traditional methods of automation
system engineering, this thesis focuses on the creation of a new approach to Virtual
Commissioning (VC).
In current VC approaches, virtual models are driven by pre-programmed PLC control
software. These approaches are still time-consuming and heavily control expertise-reliant as
the required programming and debugging activities are mainly performed by control
engineers. Another current limitation is that virtual models validated during VC are difficult
to reuse due to a lack of tool-independent data models. Therefore, in order to maximise the
potential of VC, there is a need for new VC approaches and tools to address these limitations.
The main contributions of this research are: (1) to develop a new approach and the related
engineering tool functionality for directly deploying PLC control software based on
component-based VC models and reusable components; and (2) to build tool-independent
common data models for describing component-based virtual automation systems in order to
enable data reusability. [Continues.
Performance evaluation and limitations of a vision system on a reconfigurable/programmable chip
This paper presents a survey of the characteristics of a vision system implemented in
a reconfigurable/programmable chip (FPGA). System limitations and performance have been
evaluated in order to derive specifications and constraints for further vision system synthesis.
The system hereby reported has a conventional architecture. It consists in a central
microprocessor (CPU) and the necessary peripheral elements for data acquisition, data storage
and communications. It has been designed to stand alone, but a link to the programming and
debugging tools running in a digital host (PC) is provided. In order to alleviate the
computational load of the central microprocessor, we have designed a visual co-processor in
charge of the low-level image processing tasks. It operates autonomously, commanded by the
CPU, as another system peripheral. The complete system, without the sensor, has been
implemented in a single reconfigurable chip as a SOPC. The incorporation of a dedicated visual
co-processor, with specific circuitry for low-level image processing acceleration, enhances the
system throughput outperforming conventional processing schemes. However, timemultiplexing
of the dedicated hardware remains a limiting factor for the achievable peak
computing power. We have quantified this effect and sketched possible solutions, like
replication of the specific image processing hardware
- …