An Approach to Automatically Distribute and Access Knowledge within Networked Embedded Systems in Factory Automation

This thesis presents a novel approach for automatically distribute and access knowledge within factory automation systems built by networked embedded systems. Developments on information, communication and computational technologies are making possible the distribution of tasks within different control resources, resources which are networked and working towards a common objective optimizing desired parameters. A fundamental task for introducing autonomy to these systems, is the option for represent knowledge, distributed within the automation network and to ensure its access by providing access mechanisms. This research work focuses on the processes for automatically distribute and access the knowledge.Recently, the industrial world has embraced service-oriented as architectural (SOA) patterns for relaxing the software integration costs of factory automation systems. This pattern defines a services provider offering a particular functionality, and service requesters which are entities looking for getting their needs satisfied. Currently, there are a few technologies allowing to implement a SOA solution, among those, Web Technologies are gaining special attention for their solid presence in other application fields. Providers and services using Web technologies for expressing their needs and skills are called Web Services. One of the main advantage of services is the no need for the service requester to know how the service provider is accomplishing the functionality or where the execution of the service is taking place. This benefit is recently stressed by the irruption of Cloud Computing, allowing the execution of certain process by the cloud resources.The caption of human knowledge and the representation of that knowledge in a machine interpretable manner has been an interesting research topic for the last decades. A well stablished mechanism for the representation of knowledge is the utilization of Ontologies. This mechanism allows machines to access that knowledge and use reasoning engines in order to create reasoning machines. The presence of a knowledge base allows as clearly the better identification of the web services, which is achievable by adding semantic notations to the service descriptors. The resulting services are called semantic web services.With the latest advances on computational resources, system can be built by a large number of constrained devices, yet easily connected, building a network of computational nodes, nodes that will be dedicated to execute control and communication tasks for the systems. These tasks are commanded by high level commanding systems, such as Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) modules. The aforementioned technologies allow a vertical approach for communicating commanding options from MES and ERP directly to the control nodes. This scenario allows to break down monolithic MES systems into small distributed functionalities, if these functionalities use Web standards for interacting and a knowledge base as main input for information, then we are arriving to the concept of Open KnowledgeDriven MES Systems (OKD-MES).The automatic distribution of the knowledge base in an OKD-MES mechanism and the accomplishment of the reasoning process in a distributed manner are the main objectives for this research. Thus, this research work describes the decentralization and management of knowledge descriptions which are currently handled by the Representation Layer (RPL) of the OKD-MES framework. This is achieved within the encapsulation of ontology modules which may be integrated by a distributed reasoning process on incoming requests. Furthermore, this dissertation presents the concept, principles and architecture for implementing Private Local Automation Clouds (PLACs), built by CPS.The thesis is an article thesis and is composed by 9 original and referred articles and supported by 7 other articles presented by the author

Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems

The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments

Analysis of knowledge transformation and merging techniques and implementations

scharffe2007bDealing with heterogeneity requires finding correspondences between ontologies and using these correspondences for performing some action such as merging ontologies, transforming ontologies, translating data, mediating queries and reasoning with aligned ontologies. This deliverable considers this problem through the introduction of an alignment life cycle which also identifies the need for manipulating, storing and sharing the alignments before processing them. In particular, we also consider support for run time and design time alignment processing

Genome visualisation and user studies in biologist-computer interaction

We surveyed a number of genome visualisation tools used in biomedical research. We recognised that none of the tools shows all the relevant data geneticists who look for candidate disease genes would like to see. The biological researchers we collaborate with would like to view integrated data from a variety of sources and be able to see both data overviews and details. In response to this need, we developed a new visualisation tool, VisGenome, which allows the users to add their own data or data downloaded from other sources, such as Ensembl. VisGenome visualises single and comparative representations of the rat, the mouse, and the human chromosomes, and can easily be used for other genomes. In the context of VisGenome development we made the following research contributions. We developed a new algorithm (CartoonPlus) which allows the users to see different kinds of data in cartoon scaling depending on a selected basis. Also, two user studies were conducted: an initial quantitative user study and a mixed paradigm user study. The first study showed that neither Ensembl nor VisGenome fulfil all user requirements and can be regarded as user-friendly, as the users make a significant number of mistakes during data navigation. To help users navigate their data easily, we improved existing visualisation techniques in VisGenome and added a new technique CartoonPlus. To verify if this solution was useful, we conducted a second user study. We saw that the users became more familiar with the tool, and found new ways to use the application on its own and in connection with other tools. They frequently used CartoonPlus, which allowed them to see small regions of their data in a way that was not possible before

Towards Scalable Model Indexing

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a software engineering discipline promoting models as first-class artefacts of the software lifecycle. It offers increased productivity, consistency, maintainability and reuse by using these models to generate other necessary products, such as program code or documentation. As such, persisting, accessing, manipulating, transforming and querying such models needs to be efficient, for maintaining the various benefits MDE can offer. Scalability is often identified to be a bottleneck for potential adapters of MDE, as large-scale models need to be handled seamlessly, without causing disproportionate losses in performance or limiting the ability of multiple stakeholders to work simultaneously on the same collection of large models. This work identifies the primary scalability concerns of MDE and tackles those related to the querying of large collections of models in collaborative modeling environments; it presents a novel approach whereby information contained in such models can be efficiently retrieved, orthogonally to the formats in which models are persisted. This approach, coined model indexing leverages the use of file-based version control systems for storing models, while allowing developers to efficiently query models without needing to retrieve them from remote locations or load them into memory beforehand. Empirical evidence gathered during the course of the research project is then detailed, which provides confidence that such novel tools and technologies can mitigate these specific scalability concerns; the results obtained are promising, offering large improvements in the execution time of certain classes of queries, which can be further optimized by use of caching and database indexing techniques. The architecture of the approach is also empirically validated, by virtue of integration with various state-of-the-art modeling and model management tools, and so is the correctness of the various algorithms used in this approach

The development and use of bioinformatic web applications for infectious disease microbiology

The ever-increasing generation and submission of DNA sequences, and associated biological data, to publicly available databases demands software for the analysis of the biological meanings held within. The web provides a common platform for the provision of tools enabling the concurrent deposition, visualisation and analysis of data collected by many users from many different locations. Open programmatic web standards allow the development of applications addressing diverse biological questions and, more recently, are providing methods enabling functionality more traditionally associated with desktop software to be provided via the internet. In this work I detail the development and use of web applications addressing different, but not exclusive, areas of infectious disease microbiology. Firstly, an application utilised by a group of researchers (including myself) to undertake a comparative genetic analysis of the capsular biosynthetic locus from serotypes of the pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae is detailed. Secondly, an application widely used by communities of researchers and public health laboratories for the assignment of microbial isolates to strains via the internet: mlst.net is described. Thirdly, I describe a generic electronic taxonomy application for assigning strains to bacterial species, exemplified using sequences from the viridans group streptococci, the taxonomy of which is notoriously difficult to define. Lastly, I describe the use of web mapping tools for molecular epidemiological databases, such as mlst.net, and further detail their application to the European distribution of genotypes of Staphylococcus aureus, to catalogue the global distribution of the emerging amphibian fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and to provide geocoding tools to encourage users to submit and explore their own data in the geographical context they were collected. Each application has been designed with generality in mind and through reference to user workflows and biological examples, I demonstrate the extensibility and general applicability of current web development methodologies to enable the provision of applications addressing a diversity of biological questions

An approach for joint estimation of physical and logical security by semantic modelling

Key activities in critical systems are the monitoring, observation and comprehension of different phenomena, aimed at providing an updated and meaningful description of the monitored scenario, as well as its possible evolutions, to enable proper decisions and countermeasures for the protection and safety of people and things. The threats coming from many different sources, internally and externally. The diffusion of new technologies have made more accessible the assets of a system. In this thesis we demonstrate that the use of a semantic model for the information management it is suitable in order to meet these issues. In particular, thesis proposes and implement a methodology and approach for the early situation awareness recognizing a threat situation on time, for decision support to automatically activate recovery strategies. The threat on which the thesis focus on are regarded the logical and physical security. In particular for the logical security estimation will be presented a an approach guided by metrics. Then will be presented some results and example of real application