The AFarCloud ECSEL Project

Farming is facing many economic challenges in terms of productivity and cost-effectiveness. Labor shortage partly due to depopulation of rural areas, especially in Europe, is another challenge. Domain specific problems such as accurate identification and proper quantification of pathogens affecting plant and animal health are key factors for minimizing economical risks, and not risking human health. The ECSEL AFarCloud (Aggregate FARming in the CLOUD) project will provide a distributed platform for autonomous farming that will allow the integration and cooperation of agriculture Cyber Physical Systems in real-time in order to increase efficiency, productivity, animal health, food quality and reduce farm labour costs. This platform will be integrated with farm management software and will support monitoring and decision-making solutions based on big data and real-time data mining techniques.The AFarCloud project is funded from the ECSEL Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n° 783221, and from National funding

Smart workstation of a Cyber Physical production system with digital human awareness

La cuarta revolución industrial es una transformación de los modelos de manufactura y servicios mediante la aplicación de tendencias digitales y nuevas tecnologías que permitan la flexibilización de los procesos y la creación de nuevos de mercados en las compañías. Las industrias actuales buscan una satisfacción elevada del cliente y un manejo eficiente de la cadena de abastecimiento que le permita permanecer en el entorno incierto y mercado volátil en el cual se encuentra. Mediante este enfoque nace los Sistemas Ciberfisicos, encargados de la coordinación y manejo de los diferentes componentes, siendo una tecnología habilitadora en el contexto de la transformación digital. Por otra parte, es innegable el aporte del capital humano en los procesos productivos. A pesar de esto, son pocos los avances que se tienen para la integración de los humanos dentro de los sistemas productivos de la cuarta revolución industrial. Mediante la articulación entre los sistemas ciberfisicos y nuevas tecnologías como lo es el Digital Twin, el presente trabajo busca brindar un modelo que tenga en cuenta el comportamiento del humano dentro del sistema sin afectar la eficiencia operativa.The fourth industrial revolution, or also known as the digital revolution, is a transformation of the manufacturing and service models through the application of digital technologies in the economic and societal world. This revolution permits the creation of new markets and the efficiency improvement in industries operations. In fact, industries seek high customer satisfaction and efficient supply chain management to tackle the continuous uncertain and volatile environment market. Cyber Physical Systems, an enabling technology that potentiate the digital revolution, is a system responsible for the coordination and management of virtual and physical components for solving certain global goals. However, including humans in this system represents a challenge in the development of the digital revolution. Certainly, the contribution of human operator in production processes is needed to execute certain industrial processes. Unfortunately, few advances have been made for integrating humans into the productive systems in the fourth industrial revolution. This paper aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the interaction of human in the 4.0 industrial environment for small companies. The project presents a representation of human being in a digital twin model for a Cyber Physical System.Magíster en Ingeniería IndustrialMaestrí

The UnCoVerCPS Verification Approach to Automated Driving

There are several benefits for bringing automated vehicles to the road: Possible reduction of traffic accidents, improvement of work life balance and social inclusion of aged or disabled persons, to name just a few. A significant challenge is the validation and verification of automated driving. Classical offline verification approaches require enumeration and discretization of all relevant state variables in all possible driving situations, which results in a state space explosion. A promising approach is the use of online verification techniques pursued in UnCoVerCPS . The methods developed in UnCoVerCPS are generally applicable to many safety critical, cyber physical systems. As a specific use case, we investigate a system which facilitates safe interactions of automated vehicles, leveraging a formal proof on a validated model. By exchanging and negotiating verified maneuver plans, the freedom of collisions and safe operation in general can be guaranteed for the situation at hand. The system design is tailored to make the complete system amenable to verification. An overview is given in fig. 1: The system is decomposed into three layers (green boxes), where each is fulfilling a contract, which guarantees correct operation under specific types of uncertainties. The combination of the three layers enables safe operation under disturbances, input- and parameter uncertainties, non-determinisms of the communication channel as well as nondeterminism of the decisions of cooperation partners. On the lowest layer is the physical vehicle, modeled as a set of nonlinear differential equations with bounded uncertain parameters and disturbances. The second layer is realized by a classical discrete time trajectory tracking controller “TTC”, which stabilizes the vehicle around a given set trajectory, while operating on noisy measurement data. Vehicle model and trajectory tracking controller are considered as a closed loop system by an offline analysis shown at the bottom of fig. 1 (steps 1.Modeling – 6.Verification), which computes bounds on state evolution of the physical system (rather than the model), for a finite set of atomic actions (maneuver database – “MDB”). During online execution, several maneuver planners “MP” assemble the guarantees of the pre-verified atomic actions and use conservative bounds on the environment perception to generate provably safe maneuvers. A timed-automaton (cooperative driving controller – “CDC”) controls negotiation of safe, cooperative maneuvers with other vehicles. It guarantees safe operation even under the assumption of message loss and delays, as well as non-deterministic planning times. This is achieved by prudent switching between cooperative, individual and failsafe maneuvers. In this paper we give an overview of the offline design process, which, besides classical development steps, involves (fig.1, step 4.) sampling possible vehicle actions, (5.) generating a reliable model by testing conformance between the actual physical system and a model with bounded uncertainties and (6.) verifying time in-variant constraints and admissible execution orders of the vehicle actions. Furthermore we focus on the online execution, where maneuver planners and the cooperative driving controller guarantee compliance to time varying constraints. Where “monolithic” verification schemes are hampered by the curse of dimensionality, our modular and layered approach of verifying lower-level, closed-loop subsystems offline and higher-level decision modules online provides formal safety guarantees for the overall system in a feasible manner

New Manufacturing Environments with Micro- and Nanorobotics

UIDB/04647/2020 UIDP/04647/2020The convergence of nano-, bio-, information, and cognitive sciences and technologies (NBIC) is advancing continuously in many societal spheres. This also applies to the manufacturing sector, where technological transformations in robotics push the boundaries of human–machine interaction (HMI). Here, current technological advances in micro- and nanomanufacturing are accompanied by new socio-economic concepts for different sectors of the process industry. Although these developments are still ongoing, the blurring of the boundaries of HMI in processes at the micro- and nano- level can already be observed. According to the authors, these new socio-technical HMIs may lead to the development of new work environments, which can also have an impact on work organization. While there is still little empirical evidence, the following contribution focuses on the question whether the “manufacturing (or working) life” using enhancement practices pushes the boundaries of HMI and how these effects enable new modes of working in manufacturing. Issues of standardization, acceleration of processes, and order-oriented production become essential for technological innovation in this field. However, these trends tend to lead to a “manufacturing life” in work environments rather than to new modes of work in industry.publishersversionepub_ahead_of_prin

Design of a methodology to determine the specifications of a cyber-physical human system. Case study : supply chains

Currently, the labor force is being affected by changes in the production systems presenting in the industry. These changes lead to employees being replaced by machines and robots. Because of this, there is a need to consider how technological advances are impacting workers, which remains as a vital resource in manufacturing companies. Therefore, Colombia is at a low level of technification, which means, there are numerous manual operations in companies, the study will focus on this knowledge gap, to improve integration of workers in cyber-physical systems in the country. To achieve the desired integration between humans and machines, this project proposes the creation of a methodology that aims to determine the specifications required in the configuration of a cyber-physical human system. Be part of the identification of the specifications that the system needs to reach to define the requirements of both the client and the product and considerations for the well-being of the human in the mention system. With the identification of these parameters, the characterization of the system is carried out to determine different alternatives of the components, structure, behavior, and dynamics, based on the systems modeling. In conclusion, the validation of the preliminary methodology created with experts and with the implementation is carried out of the system in a case study of the supply chain. Through the configuration of three Workstations according to the desired level of automatization, under a controlled simulation environment.Ingeniero (a) IndustrialPregrad

Is Malaysia ready for Industry 4.0? Issues and Challenges in Manufacturing Industry

Despite as a strong manufacturing economist in ASEAN, manufacturers in Malaysia are the beginners who are lack of proper understanding of the concepts and practices of Industry 4.0. The purpose of this paper is to identify the issues and challenges of Industry 4.0 from industry-based companies' aspect by conducting a literature review. This paper also highlighted the comparison between the potential challenges stated in the Malaysia National Policy on Industry 4.0 with the challenges proposed by previous studies of other countries. This paper is a literature review on previous studies regards to challenges or issues on implementation of Industry 4.0 from 2015 to 2019. Total 11 challenges in the processes of implementation Industry 4.0 into manufacturing companies are reviewed. Compared to previous studies, Malaysia National Policy on Industry 4.0 overlooked 3 challenges on Industry 4.0. This is the first review paper to compare the existing challenges in Industry 4.0 with the potential challenges stated in the Malaysia National Policy on Industry 4.0. &nbsp

Encoding the Enforcement of Safety Standards into Smart Robots to Harness Their Computing Sophistication and Collaborative Potential:A Legal Risk Assessment for European Union Policymakers

Until robots and humans mostly worked in fast-paced and yet separate environments, occupational health and safety (OHS) rules could address workers’ safety largely independently from robotic conduct. This is no longer the case: collaborative robots (cobots) working alongside humans warrant the design of policies ensuring the safety of both humans and robots at once, within shared spaces and upon delivery of cooperative workflows. Within the European Union (EU), the applicable regulatory framework stands at the intersection between international industry standards and legislation at the EU as well as Member State level. Not only do current standards and laws fail to satisfactorily attend to the physical and mental health challenges prompted by human–robot interaction (HRI), but they exhibit important gaps in relation to smart cobots (“SmaCobs”) more specifically. In fact, SmaCobs combine the black-box unforeseeability afforded by machine learning with more general HRI-associated risks, towards increasingly complex, mobile and interconnected operational interfaces and production chains. Against this backdrop, based on productivity and health motivations, we urge the encoding of the enforcement of OHS policies directly into SmaCobs. First, SmaCobs could harness the sophistication of quantum computing to adapt a tangled normative architecture in a responsive manner to the contingent needs of each situation. Second, entrusting them with OHS enforcement vis-à-vis both themselves and humans may paradoxically prove safer as well as more cost-effective than for humans to do so. This scenario raises profound legal, ethical and somewhat philosophical concerns around SmaCobs’ legal personality, the apportionment of liability and algorithmic explainability. The first systematic proposal to tackle such questions is henceforth formulated. For the EU, we propose that this is achieved through a new binding OHS Regulation aimed at the SmaCobs age.<br/