569 research outputs found
An approach to open virtual commissioning for component-based automation
Increasing market demands for highly customised products with shorter time-to-market and
at lower prices are forcing manufacturing systems to be built and operated in a more efficient
ways. In order to overcome some of the limitations in traditional methods of automation
system engineering, this thesis focuses on the creation of a new approach to Virtual
Commissioning (VC).
In current VC approaches, virtual models are driven by pre-programmed PLC control
software. These approaches are still time-consuming and heavily control expertise-reliant as
the required programming and debugging activities are mainly performed by control
engineers. Another current limitation is that virtual models validated during VC are difficult
to reuse due to a lack of tool-independent data models. Therefore, in order to maximise the
potential of VC, there is a need for new VC approaches and tools to address these limitations.
The main contributions of this research are: (1) to develop a new approach and the related
engineering tool functionality for directly deploying PLC control software based on
component-based VC models and reusable components; and (2) to build tool-independent
common data models for describing component-based virtual automation systems in order to
enable data reusability. [Continues.
FOS: A Modular FPGA Operating System for Dynamic Workloads
With FPGAs now being deployed in the cloud and at the edge, there is a need
for scalable design methods which can incorporate the heterogeneity present in
the hardware and software components of FPGA systems. Moreover, these FPGA
systems need to be maintainable and adaptable to changing workloads while
improving accessibility for the application developers. However, current FPGA
systems fail to achieve modularity and support for multi-tenancy due to
dependencies between system components and lack of standardised abstraction
layers. To solve this, we introduce a modular FPGA operating system -- FOS,
which adopts a modular FPGA development flow to allow each system component to
be changed and be agnostic to the heterogeneity of EDA tool versions, hardware
and software layers. Further, to dynamically maximise the utilisation
transparently from the users, FOS employs resource-elastic scheduling to
arbitrate the FPGA resources in both time and spatial domain for any type of
accelerators. Our evaluation on different FPGA boards shows that FOS can
provide performance improvements in both single-tenant and multi-tenant
environments while substantially reducing the development time and, at the same
time, improving flexibility
- …