A survey on online monitoring approaches of computer-based systems

This report surveys forms of online data collection that are in current use (as well as being the subject of research to adapt them to changing technology and demands), and can be used as inputs to assessment of dependability and resilience, although they are not primarily meant for this use

Skill-based reconfiguration of industrial mobile robots

Caused by a rising mass customisation and the high variety of equipment versions, the exibility of manufacturing systems in car productions has to be increased. In addition to a exible handling of production load changes or hardware breakdowns that are established research areas in literature, this thesis presents a skill-based recon guration mechanism for industrial mobile robots to enhance functional recon gurability. The proposed holonic multi-agent system is able to react to functional process changes while missing functionalities are created by self-organisation. Applied to a mobile commissioning system that is provided by AUDI AG, the suggested mechanism is validated in a real-world environment including the on-line veri cation of the recon gured robot functionality in a Validity Check. The present thesis includes an original contribution in three aspects: First, a recon - guration mechanism is presented that reacts in a self-organised way to functional process changes. The application layer of a hardware system converts a semantic description into functional requirements for a new robot skill. The result of this mechanism is the on-line integration of a new functionality into the running process. Second, the proposed system allows maintaining the productivity of the running process and exibly changing the robot hardware through provision of a hardware-abstraction layer. An encapsulated Recon guration Holon dynamically includes the actual con guration each time a recon guration is started. This allows reacting to changed environment settings. As the resulting agent that contains the new functionality, is identical in shape and behaviour to the existing skills, its integration into the running process is conducted without a considerable loss of productivity. Third, the suggested mechanism is composed of a novel agent design that allows implementing self-organisation during the encapsulated recon guration and dependability for standard process executions. The selective assignment of behaviour-based and cognitive agents is the basis for the exibility and e ectiveness of the proposed recon guration mechanism

Approach For Autonomous Control Of Intralogistics Considering Deterministic And Probabilistic Material Demand Information In Flexible Production Systems

In today's dynamic production landscape, flexible and resilient production systems are essential to meet the constant changes in internal product and production requirements as well as external market and customer demands. To meet these challenges, various flexible and resilient production system approaches offer the necessary structural, process-related and technological flexibility and resilience. However, the intralogistics material provision within these complex production systems is challenging due to increasing degrees of freedom and uncertainties caused by emerging turbulence, which has even risen very sharply in recent years due to global instability. This makes it difficult to coordinate material demands and material provision in the production system precisely regarding location and quantity. This paper presents a comprehensive approach for determining the material requirements and autonomously executing the corresponding material provision processes in a complex production system, which considers both deterministic and probabilistic information about the material demand’s location, quantity, and time. Utilizing autonomous control in intralogistics decentralizes complexity management in flexible production systems by transferring decision-making and process execution tasks to the system elements. For the development and verification of the comprehensive approach, an experimental research study was pursued based on a flexible production system, including simulation and practical experiments. Defining the deterministic and probabilistic material demands is based on the Monte Carlo method for carrying out simulation experiments with parameter variation. The autonomously controlled, target size-optimized execution of material provision to fulfil the determined material demands is based on an agent-based modelling and control approach for manual and automated intralogistics transport resources. The study showed that improved logistics performance (throughput time and adherence to schedules) can be achieved in flexible production systems in the event of turbulences by considering deterministic and probabilistic material demand information together with autonomous control of material provision

Integrating mission, logistics, and task planning for skills-based robot control in industrial kitting applications

This paper presents an integrated cognitive robotics systemfor industrial kitting operations in a modern factory setting.The robot system combines low-level robot control and execution monitoring with automated mission and task planning,and a logistics planner which communicates with the factory’smanufacturing execution system. The system has been implemented and tested on a series of automotive kitting problems,where collections of parts are picked from a warehouse anddelivered to the production line. The system has been empirically evaluated and the complete framework shown to besuccessful at assembling kits in a small factory environment

Autonomous Systems, Robotics, and Computing Systems Capability Roadmap: NRC Dialogue

Contents include the following: Introduction. Process, Mission Drivers, Deliverables, and Interfaces. Autonomy. Crew-Centered and Remote Operations. Integrated Systems Health Management. Autonomous Vehicle Control. Autonomous Process Control. Robotics. Robotics for Solar System Exploration. Robotics for Lunar and Planetary Habitation. Robotics for In-Space Operations. Computing Systems. Conclusion

Specification Patterns for Robotic Missions

Mobile and general-purpose robots increasingly support our everyday life, requiring dependable robotics control software. Creating such software mainly amounts to implementing their complex behaviors known as missions. Recognizing the need, a large number of domain-specific specification languages has been proposed. These, in addition to traditional logical languages, allow the use of formally specified missions for synthesis, verification, simulation, or guiding the implementation. For instance, the logical language LTL is commonly used by experts to specify missions, as an input for planners, which synthesize the behavior a robot should have. Unfortunately, domain-specific languages are usually tied to specific robot models, while logical languages such as LTL are difficult to use by non-experts. We present a catalog of 22 mission specification patterns for mobile robots, together with tooling for instantiating, composing, and compiling the patterns to create mission specifications. The patterns provide solutions for recurrent specification problems, each of which detailing the usage intent, known uses, relationships to other patterns, and---most importantly---a template mission specification in temporal logic. Our tooling produces specifications expressed in the LTL and CTL temporal logics to be used by planners, simulators, or model checkers. The patterns originate from 245 realistic textual mission requirements extracted from the robotics literature, and they are evaluated upon a total of 441 real-world mission requirements and 1251 mission specifications. Five of these reflect scenarios we defined with two well-known industrial partners developing human-size robots. We validated our patterns' correctness with simulators and two real robots

Search based software engineering: Trends, techniques and applications

© ACM, 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version is available from the link below.In the past five years there has been a dramatic increase in work on Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE), an approach to Software Engineering (SE) in which Search-Based Optimization (SBO) algorithms are used to address problems in SE. SBSE has been applied to problems throughout the SE lifecycle, from requirements and project planning to maintenance and reengineering. The approach is attractive because it offers a suite of adaptive automated and semiautomated solutions in situations typified by large complex problem spaces with multiple competing and conflicting objectives. This article provides a review and classification of literature on SBSE. The work identifies research trends and relationships between the techniques applied and the applications to which they have been applied and highlights gaps in the literature and avenues for further research.EPSRC and E

The model-based construction of a case-oriented expert system

Second generation expert systems should be based upon an expert\u27s high level understanding of the application domain and upon specific real world experiences. By having an expert categorize different types of relevant experiences and their components, hierarchies of abstract problems and operator classes are determined on the basis of the expert\u27s accumulated problem solving experiences. The expert\u27s global understanding of the domain is integrated with the experiences by a model of expertise. This model postulates problem classes at different levels of abstractions and associated skeletal plans. During a consultation with the expert system previously unseen types of input may be used to delineate a new problem. The application of the expert system can thus be situated in changing environments and contexts. With increasing dissimilarity between the cases that were analyzed during knowledge acquisition and the specific problem that is processed at the time of the application of the system, its performance gracefully degrades by supplying a more and more abstract skeletal plan. More specifically, the search space which is represented by the skeletal plan increases until the competence of the system is exceeded. This paper describes how such a case-oriented expert system is developed for production planning in mechanical engineering