6,781 research outputs found
The Design and Performance of Cyber-Physical Middleware for Real-Time Hybrid Structural Testing
Real-time hybrid testing of civil structures, in which computational models and physical components must be integrated with high fidelity at run-time represents a grand challenge in the emerging area of cyber-physical systems. Actuator dynamics, complex interactions among computers and physical components, and computation and communication delays all must be managed carefully to achieve accurate tests. To address these challenges, we have developed a novel middleware for integrating cyber and physical components flexibly and with suitable timing behavior within a Cyber-physical Instrument for Real-time hybrid Structural Testing (CIRST). This paper makes three main contributions to the state of the art in middleware for cyber-physical systems: (1) a novel middleware architecture within which cyber-physical components can be integrated flexibly through XML-based configuration specifications, (2) an efficient middleware implementation in C++ that can maintain necessary real-time performance, and (3) a case study that evaluates the middleware\u27s performance and demonstrates its suitability for real-time hybrid testing
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
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Middleware architectures for the smart grid: A survey on the state-of-the-art, taxonomy and main open issues
The integration of small-scale renewable energy sources in the smart grid depends on several challenges that must be overcome. One of them is the presence of devices with very different characteristics present in the grid or how they can interact among them in terms of interoperability and data sharing. While this issue is usually solved by implementing a middleware layer among the available pieces of equipment in order to hide any hardware heterogeneity and offer the application layer a collection of homogenous resources to access lower levels, the variety and differences among them make the definition of what is needed in each particular case challenging. This paper offers a description of the most prominent middleware architectures for the smart grid and assesses the functionalities they have, considering the performance and features expected from them in the context of this application domain
Ensuring Cyber-Security in Smart Railway Surveillance with SHIELD
Modern railways feature increasingly complex embedded computing systems for surveillance, that are moving towards fully wireless smart-sensors. Those systems are aimed at monitoring system status from a physical-security viewpoint, in order to detect intrusions and other environmental anomalies. However, the same systems used for physical-security surveillance are vulnerable to cyber-security threats, since they feature distributed hardware and software architectures often interconnected by âopen networksâ, like wireless channels and the Internet. In this paper, we show how the integrated approach to Security, Privacy and Dependability (SPD) in embedded systems provided by the SHIELD framework (developed within the EU funded pSHIELD and nSHIELD research projects) can be applied to railway surveillance systems in order to measure and improve their SPD level. SHIELD implements a layered architecture (node, network, middleware and overlay) and orchestrates SPD mechanisms based on ontology models, appropriate metrics and composability. The results of prototypical application to a real-world demonstrator show the effectiveness of SHIELD and justify its practical applicability in industrial settings
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