Optimal use of computing equipment in an automated industrial inspection context

This thesis deals with automatic defect detection. The objective was to develop the techniques required by a small manufacturing business to make cost-efficient use of inspection technology. In our work on inspection techniques we discuss image acquisition and the choice between custom and general-purpose processing hardware. We examine the classes of general-purpose computer available and study popular operating systems in detail. We highlight the advantages of a hybrid system interconnected via a local area network and develop a sophisticated suite of image-processing software based on it. We quantitatively study the performance of elements of the TCP/IP networking protocol suite and comment on appropriate protocol selection for parallel distributed applications. We implement our own distributed application based on these findings. In our work on inspection algorithms we investigate the potential uses of iterated function series and Fourier transform operators when preprocessing images of defects in aluminium plate acquired using a linescan camera. We employ a multi-layer perceptron neural network trained by backpropagation as a classifier. We examine the effect on the training process of the number of nodes in the hidden layer and the ability of the network to identify faults in images of aluminium plate. We investigate techniques for introducing positional independence into the network's behaviour. We analyse the pattern of weights induced in the network after training in order to gain insight into the logic of its internal representation. We conclude that the backpropagation training process is sufficiently computationally intensive so as to present a real barrier to further development in practical neural network techniques and seek ways to achieve a speed-up. Weconsider the training process as a search problem and arrive at a process involving multiple, parallel search "vectors" and aspects of genetic algorithms. We implement the system as the mentioned distributed application and comment on its performance

Securely extending and running low-code applications with C#

Low-code development platforms provide an accessible infrastructure for the creation of software by domain experts, also called "citizen developers", without the need for formal programming education. Development is facilitated through graphical user interfaces, although traditional programming can still be used to extend low-code applications, for example when external services or complex business logic needs to be implemented that cannot be realized with the features available on a platform. Since citizen developers are usually not specifically trained in software development, they require additional support when writing code, particularly with regard to security and advanced techniques like debugging or versioning. In this thesis, several options to assist developers of low-code applications are investigated and implemented. A framework to quickly build code editor extensions is developed, and an approach to leverage the Roslyn compiler platform to implement custom static code analysis rules for low-code development platforms using the .NET platform is demonstrated. Furthermore, a sample application showing how Roslyn can be used to build a simple, integrated debugging tool, as well as an abstraction of the version control system Git for easier usage by citizen developers, is implemented. Security is a critical aspect when low-code applications are deployed. To provide an overview over possible options to ensure the secure and isolated execution of low-code applications, a threat model is developed and used as the basis for a comparison between OS-level virtualization, sandboxing, and runtime code security implementations

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation

The InfoSec Handbook

Computer scienc

Kommunikation und Bildverarbeitung in der Automation

In diesem Open Access-Tagungsband sind die besten Beiträge des 11. Jahreskolloquiums "Kommunikation in der Automation" (KommA 2020) und des 7. Jahreskolloquiums "Bildverarbeitung in der Automation" (BVAu 2020) enthalten. Die Kolloquien fanden am 28. und 29. Oktober 2020 statt und wurden erstmalig als digitale Webveranstaltung auf dem Innovation Campus Lemgo organisiert. Die vorgestellten neuesten Forschungsergebnisse auf den Gebieten der industriellen Kommunikationstechnik und Bildverarbeitung erweitern den aktuellen Stand der Forschung und Technik. Die in den Beiträgen enthaltenen anschauliche Anwendungsbeispiele aus dem Bereich der Automation setzen die Ergebnisse in den direkten Anwendungsbezug

Dependability where the mobile world meets the enterprise world

As we move toward increasingly larger scales of computing, complexity of systems and networks has increased manifold leading to massive failures of cloud providers (Amazon Cloudfront, November 2014) and geographically localized outages of cellular services (T-Mobile, June 2014). In this dissertation, we investigate the dependability aspects of two of the most prevalent computing platforms today, namely, smartphones and cloud computing. These two seemingly disparate platforms are part of a cohesive story—they interact to provide end-to-end services which are increasingly being delivered over mobile platforms, examples being iCloud, Google Drive and their smartphone counterparts iPhone and Android. ^ In one of the early work on characterizing failures in dominant mobile OSes, we analyzed bug repositories of Android and Symbian and found similarities in their failure modes [ISSRE2010]. We also presented a classification of root causes and quantified the impact of ease of customizing the smartphones on system reliability. Our evaluation of Inter-Component Communication in Android [DSN2012] show an alarming number of exception handling errors where a phone may be crashed by passing it malformed component invocation messages, even from unprivileged applications. In this work, we also suggest language extensions that can mitigate these problems. ^ Mobile applications today are increasingly being used to interact with enterprise-class web services commonly hosted in virtualized environments. Virutalization suffers from the problem of imperfect performance isolation where contention for low-level hardware resources can impact application performance. Through a set of rigorous experiments in a private cloud testbed and in EC2, we show that interference induced performance degradation is a reality. Our experiments have also shown that optimal configuration settings for web servers change during such phases of interference. Based on this observation, we design and implement the IC 2engine which can mitigate effects of interference by reconfiguring web server parameters [MW2014]. We further improve IC 2 by incorporating it into a two-level configuration engine, named ICE, for managing web server clusters [ICAC2015]. Our evaluations show that, compared to an interference agnostic configuration, IC 2 can improve response time of web servers by upto 40%, while ICE can improve response time by up to 94% during phases of interference

Parallel and Distributed Computing

The 14 chapters presented in this book cover a wide variety of representative works ranging from hardware design to application development. Particularly, the topics that are addressed are programmable and reconfigurable devices and systems, dependability of GPUs (General Purpose Units), network topologies, cache coherence protocols, resource allocation, scheduling algorithms, peertopeer networks, largescale network simulation, and parallel routines and algorithms. In this way, the articles included in this book constitute an excellent reference for engineers and researchers who have particular interests in each of these topics in parallel and distributed computing