The DS-Pnet modeling formalism for cyber-physical system development

This work presents the DS-Pnet modeling formalism (Dataflow, Signals and Petri nets), designed for the development of cyber-physical systems, combining the characteristics of Petri nets and dataflows to support the modeling of mixed systems containing both reactive parts and data processing operations. Inheriting the features of the parent IOPT Petri net class, including an external interface composed of input and output signals and events, the addition of dataflow operations brings enhanced modeling capabilities to specify mathematical data transformations and graphically express the dependencies between signals. Data-centric systems, that do not require reactive controllers, are designed using pure dataflow models. Component based model composition enables reusing existing components, create libraries of previously tested components and hierarchically decompose complex systems into smaller sub-systems. A precise execution semantics was defined, considering the relationship between dataflow and Petri net nodes, providing an abstraction to define the interface between reactive controllers and input and output signals, including analog sensors and actuators. The new formalism is supported by the IOPT-Flow Web based tool framework, offering tools to design and edit models, simulate model execution on the Web browser, plus model-checking and software/hardware automatic code generation tools to implement controllers running on embedded devices (C,VHDL and JavaScript). A new communication protocol was created to permit the automatic implementation of distributed cyber-physical systems composed of networks of remote components communicating over the Internet. The editor tool connects directly to remote embedded devices running DS-Pnet models and may import remote components into new models, contributing to simplify the creation of distributed cyber-physical applications, where the communication between distributed components is specified just by drawing arcs. Several application examples were designed to validate the proposed formalism and the associated framework, ranging from hardware solutions, industrial applications to distributed software applications

Use of the Internet for Remote Train Monitoring

Railways and mass transit transportation systems are experiencing a new growth that will have an important social impact in the global transport domain. Therefore new important steps are required to advance the urgent needs, such as interoperability at train and vehicle levels, support for commissioning and maintenance, communication with ground infrastructure and introduction of new services. The ROSIN project aims at the validation of a complete and open platform, which will be the basis for a new generation of vehicles, consisting of an on-board network that interconnects all various on-board systems and subsystems. Taking advantage of a 10 year effort to specify a standard Train Communication Network (TCN), carried out within the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) by Technical Committee 9, Working Group 22, the ROSIN project aims to work out a comprehensive solution that closely addresses users requirements and has been validated and demonstrated extensively, using available technology, in a wide range of applications. The project covers all aspects of the on-board networking problems, addressing key areas such as passenger trains, freight trains and mass-transit (metros and trams). Communication and application requirements are considered, including maintenance needs and openness toward ground networks. Internet technologies are used to bring ubiquitous and low cost access to train data

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Communication between PLC different vendors using OPC server improved with application device

Many industries often use different devices and controllers in automation systems. They all face the same difficulty how to exchange data between all those components. This paper proposed the implementation of OPC Server as software interface on communication between two different controllers, PLC Mitsubishi and PLC Omron. The main advantage of the method is the compatibility and solution for the factory difficulty problem because of using several driver controller. The compatibility among the different platforms of both controller, PLC Mitsubishi and PLC Omron, can be reached by use of KEPServerEx6 (OPC server) as a software interface. To test the compatibility amongst two different controllers, there was developed and implemented two field application devices, bottle unscramble and bottle filling station. This implementation shows OPC Server technology resolving data compatibility issues between different platforms and reducing development costs. It is envisaged that the method can be very useful to realize integration

Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) Method and Its Applications in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud

The integration of cyber-physical systems and cloud manufacturing has the potential to revolutionize existing manufacturing systems by enabling better accessibility, agility, and efficiency. To achieve this, it is necessary to establish a communication method of manufacturing services over the Internet to access and manage physical machines from cloud applications. Most of the existing industrial automation protocols utilize Ethernet based Local Area Network (LAN) and are not designed specifically for Internet enabled data transmission. Recently MTConnect has been gaining popularity as a standard for monitoring status of machine tools through RESTful web services and an XML based messaging structure, but it is only designed for data collection and interpretation and lacks remote operation capability. This dissertation presents the design, development, optimization, and applications of a service-oriented Internet-scale communication method named Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) for exchanging manufacturing services in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) to enable manufacturing with heterogeneous physically connected machine tools from geographically distributed locations over the Internet. MTComm uses an agent-adapter based architecture and a semantic ontology to provide both remote monitoring and operation capabilities through RESTful services and XML messages. MTComm was successfully used to develop and implement multi-purpose applications in in a CPMC including remote and collaborative manufacturing, active testing-based and edge-based fault diagnosis and maintenance of machine tools, cross-domain interoperability between Internet-of-things (IoT) devices and supply chain robots etc. To improve MTComm’s overall performance, efficiency, and acceptability in cyber manufacturing, the concept of MTComm’s edge-based middleware was introduced and three optimization strategies for data catching, transmission, and operation execution were developed and adopted at the edge. Finally, a hardware prototype of the middleware was implemented on a System-On-Chip based FPGA device to reduce computational and transmission latency. At every stage of its development, MTComm’s performance and feasibility were evaluated with experiments in a CPMC testbed with three different types of manufacturing machine tools. Experimental results demonstrated MTComm’s excellent feasibility for scalable cyber-physical manufacturing and superior performance over other existing approaches