9,269 research outputs found
On Using Blockchains for Safety-Critical Systems
Innovation in the world of today is mainly driven by software. Companies need
to continuously rejuvenate their product portfolios with new features to stay
ahead of their competitors. For example, recent trends explore the application
of blockchains to domains other than finance. This paper analyzes the
state-of-the-art for safety-critical systems as found in modern vehicles like
self-driving cars, smart energy systems, and home automation focusing on
specific challenges where key ideas behind blockchains might be applicable.
Next, potential benefits unlocked by applying such ideas are presented and
discussed for the respective usage scenario. Finally, a research agenda is
outlined to summarize remaining challenges for successfully applying
blockchains to safety-critical cyber-physical systems
Design Criteria to Architect Continuous Experimentation for Self-Driving Vehicles
The software powering today's vehicles surpasses mechatronics as the
dominating engineering challenge due to its fast evolving and innovative
nature. In addition, the software and system architecture for upcoming vehicles
with automated driving functionality is already processing ~750MB/s -
corresponding to over 180 simultaneous 4K-video streams from popular
video-on-demand services. Hence, self-driving cars will run so much software to
resemble "small data centers on wheels" rather than just transportation
vehicles. Continuous Integration, Deployment, and Experimentation have been
successfully adopted for software-only products as enabling methodology for
feedback-based software development. For example, a popular search engine
conducts ~250 experiments each day to improve the software based on its users'
behavior. This work investigates design criteria for the software architecture
and the corresponding software development and deployment process for complex
cyber-physical systems, with the goal of enabling Continuous Experimentation as
a way to achieve continuous software evolution. Our research involved reviewing
related literature on the topic to extract relevant design requirements. The
study is concluded by describing the software development and deployment
process and software architecture adopted by our self-driving vehicle
laboratory, both based on the extracted criteria.Comment: Copyright 2017 IEEE. Paper submitted and accepted at the 2017 IEEE
International Conference on Software Architecture. 8 pages, 2 figures.
Published in IEEE Xplore Digital Library, URL:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7930218
Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges
High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security
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