A Sequential Control Language for Industrial Automation

Current market trends for industrial automation are the need for customizable production, shorter time to market, and powerful global competitive pressure. Based on these trends two challenges have been identified: 1) flexible production systems and 2) integration and utilization of devices and software. Applications from both process automation, manufacturing, and robotics have been considered. More flexible languages and tools are needed to get a flexible production system. The graphical programming language Grafchart, based on the IEC 61131-3 standard language Sequential Function Charts (SFC), is considered with the aim to make both the language and its implementation more flexible. In particular, new constructs have been added to the Grafchart language and modern compiler techniques are evaluated for JGrafchart, a Grafchart implementation, with focus on an extensible language implementation. A first step toward real-time execution of Grafchart applications is also taken to make it possible to use Grafchart for hard real-time control. High execution rates often reveal concurrency issues and thus execution concurrency has also been investigated. Access to more data from industrial devices and software can be used to optimize production. Architectures for factory integration have been considered as this is the foundation to connect all devices and thus address the challenge of integrating and utilizing devices and software. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a flexible software design methodology widely used in IT systems and for business processes. SOA service orchestration is brought to industrial automation by integrating support for both Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) and OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) in JGrafchart. Looking further, SOA 2.0 is event driven and features extremely loose coupling between components. An architecture based on SOA 2.0 where it is easy to integrate any device or software, in particular legacy devices with limited knowledge and capabilities, has been developed with focus on service choreography in industrial manufacturing. Another step toward real-time execution of Grafchart applications is integrated support for the high performance communication protocol LabComm. Additionally, it is investigated how Grafchart can be connected to Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) for co-simulation to further address the shorter time to market trend by introducing simulation support. The PID controller is the most common controller for industrial automation. A PID implementation has been added to a Grafchart library and a flaw with the PID algorithm has been discovered. The problem occurs for PID controllers with a derivative part when the process value saturates. The derivative part then backs off which leads to undesired changes in the control signal. This issue has been analyzed and a solution to the problem is proposed

Performance evaluation of a distributed integrative architecture for robotics

The eld of robotics employs a vast amount of coupled sub-systems. These need to interact cooperatively and concurrently in order to yield the desired results. Some hybrid algorithms also require intensive cooperative interactions internally. The architecture proposed lends it- self amenable to problem domains that require rigorous calculations that are usually impeded by the capacity of a single machine, and incompatibility issues between software computing elements. Implementations are abstracted away from the physical hardware for ease of de- velopment and competition in simulation leagues. Monolithic developments are complex, and the desire for decoupled architectures arises. Decoupling also lowers the threshold for using distributed and parallel resources. The ability to re-use and re-combine components on de- mand, therefore is essential, while maintaining the necessary degree of interaction. For this reason we propose to build software components on top of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Web Services. An additional bene t is platform independence regarding both the operating system and the implementation language. The robot soccer platform as well as the associated simulation leagues are the target domain for the development. Furthermore are machine vision and remote process control related portions of the architecture currently in development and testing for industrial environments. We provide numerical data based on the Python frameworks ZSI and SOAPpy undermining the suitability of this approach for the eld of robotics. Response times of signi cantly less than 50 ms even for fully interpreted, dynamic languages provides hard information showing the feasibility of Web Services based SOAs even in time critical robotic applications

Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

Practical applications of multi-agent systems in electric power systems

The transformation of energy networks from passive to active systems requires the embedding of intelligence within the network. One suitable approach to integrating distributed intelligent systems is multi-agent systems technology, where components of functionality run as autonomous agents capable of interaction through messaging. This provides loose coupling between components that can benefit the complex systems envisioned for the smart grid. This paper reviews the key milestones of demonstrated agent systems in the power industry and considers which aspects of agent design must still be addressed for widespread application of agent technology to occur

A State-of-the-art Integrated Transportation Simulation Platform

Nowadays, universities and companies have a huge need for simulation and modelling methodologies. In the particular case of traffic and transportation, making physical modifications to the real traffic networks could be highly expensive, dependent on political decisions and could be highly disruptive to the environment. However, while studying a specific domain or problem, analysing a problem through simulation may not be trivial and may need several simulation tools, hence raising interoperability issues. To overcome these problems, we propose an agent-directed transportation simulation platform, through the cloud, by means of services. We intend to use the IEEE standard HLA (High Level Architecture) for simulators interoperability and agents for controlling and coordination. Our motivations are to allow multiresolution analysis of complex domains, to allow experts to collaborate on the analysis of a common problem and to allow co-simulation and synergy of different application domains. This paper will start by presenting some preliminary background concepts to help better understand the scope of this work. After that, the results of a literature review is shown. Finally, the general architecture of a transportation simulation platform is proposed

ERIGrid Holistic Test Description for Validating Cyber-Physical Energy Systems

Smart energy solutions aim to modify and optimise the operation of existing energy infrastructure. Such cyber-physical technology must be mature before deployment to the actual infrastructure, and competitive solutions will have to be compliant to standards still under development. Achieving this technology readiness and harmonisation requires reproducible experiments and appropriately realistic testing environments. Such testbeds for multi-domain cyber-physical experiments are complex in and of themselves. This work addresses a method for the scoping and design of experiments where both testbed and solution each require detailed expertise. This empirical work first revisited present test description approaches, developed a newdescription method for cyber-physical energy systems testing, and matured it by means of user involvement. The new Holistic Test Description (HTD) method facilitates the conception, deconstruction and reproduction of complex experimental designs in the domains of cyber-physical energy systems. This work develops the background and motivation, offers a guideline and examples to the proposed approach, and summarises experience from three years of its application.This work received funding in the European Community’s Horizon 2020 Program (H2020/2014–2020) under project “ERIGrid” (Grant Agreement No. 654113)