Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

Dpws middleware to support agent-based manufacturing control and simulation

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresIn present manufacturing systems, the current challenge is the development of highly reconfigurable, truly distributed solutions. The tendency is to build manufacturing systems with autonomous, intelligent and distributed components that will support reconfiguration and adaptability. The most promising paradigms for the implementation of such systems are multi-agents and service oriented architectures (SOA), mainly over the DPWS (Device Profile for Web Services) implementation which was aimed at devices. An important limitation of most current multi-agent systems is that the management system is not totally distributed. Failure in the agent responsible for the registry can overthrow the entire system. DPWS does not have this limitation, since the management system is totally distributed. However, DPWS does not support agent autonomy notions as efficiently. The possibility of creating a truly distributed multi-agent system by linking both approaches led to this thesis. A Middleware layer was developed that enables agents to benefit from DPWS functionalities in order to reach the proposed goal. This middleware layer joins agents, databases, hardware, simulators, human interface applications such as production system management, error correction and maintenance, etc. To prove this concept a 3D model of an agent controlled manufacturing system with transporters augmented with DPWS communication interfaces was developed

Understanding Behavior of System of Systems Through Computational Intelligence Techniques

The world is facing an increasing level of systems integration leading towards systems of systems (SoS) that adapt to changing environmental conditions. The number of connections between components, the diversity of the components and the way the components are organized can lead to different emergent system behavior. Therefore, the need to focus on overall system behavior is becoming an unavoidable issue. The problem is to develop methodologies appropriate for better understanding behavior of system of systems before the design and implementation phase. This paper focuses on computational intelligence techniques used for analysis of complex adaptive systems with the aim of identifying areas that need methodology customization for SoS analysis

Lightweight robust behavior industrial agent methodology

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresAssembly systems today face significant pressure to provide highly adaptable and quickly deployable solutions in order to deal with unpredictable changes according to market trends. However, control of assembly processes are dominated by the use of Programmable Logical Controllers (PLC) which do not provide the necessary mechanisms to easily deal with these challenges. The concept of agent-based control has been introduced as a solution to deal these challenges and support new production paradigms based on the plug and produce concept. However, this solution has not yet been proven to be a real alternative to the traditional PLC approach in terms of performance. This work is investigating the use an approach that is able to benefit from the relative advantages of both PLC and agents solutions. A new hybrid architecture is presented which combines the functionalities of a PLC with those of industrial agents. The focus is on assessing the performance of this approach and help change the minds of an industry averse to changes

Toward a conceptual framework for designing sustainable cyber-physical system architectures: A systematic mapping study

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) represent devices whose components enable interaction between machines and processes. One of the biggest challenges of these systems today is the ability to adjust to changes at the time of execution as they are implemented in environments with a multidimensional complexity, this challenge is currently addressed from the design of the systems themselves by integrating sustainability. With this problem in mind, the present document describes a systematic mapping study of the literature with the goal of demonstrating the current panorama of the frameworks, designs, and/or models used at the time of initiating the development of a cyber-physical system. As a result, it has been concluded that there is a lack of guidelines to construct sustainable, and evolvable cyber-physical systems. To address these issues, a framework for designing sustainable CPS architectures is outlined

Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

Cooperation Patterns and Adaptation Patterns for Service-Based Inter-Organizational Workflows

International audienceModernization is an effective approach to making existing mainframe and distributed systems more responsive to business needs. SOA (service-oriented architecture) is an adequate paradigm that allows companies to tap into the business value in their current systems and position IT for rapid future changes to the business model. In our research works, we focus on the use of SOA to implement Inter- Organizational WorkFlows (IOWF). The goal is to take benefits from the advantages offered by the SOA paradigm like interoperability, reusability and flexibility in order to deal with workflow models easily adaptable, evolvable and reusable. This paper focuses on two specific architectures of IOWF which are the "chained execution" and the "subcontracting"; the first issue of this work is to define Service-Based Cooperation Patterns (SBCP) suitable to the two architectures considered. A SBCP is based on SOA; it is defined through three main dimensions: the distribution of services among the partner's sites, the control of instance execution and the structure of interaction between the workflows involved in the cooperation. The second issue of the paper consists of adaptation and evolution of IOWF process models obeying to the defined SBCP. Then, we state the main operations of adaptation that can be applied on these models; we focus on adaptation at process and interactional levels. Conformably to the three dimensions of SBCP, we define three classes of adaptation patterns: "service adaptation", "control flow adaptation" and "interaction adaptation" patterns. Also, we particularly distinguish some operations of adaptation called evolution of process models based on two perspectives: the expansion of the global functionality of the process and the expansion of the cooperation; we show that some evolutions are realized by reuse of existing IOWF models. For implementation, we consider IOWF process models specified with BPEL

Enabling discoverable trusted services for highly dynamic decentralized workflows

Fifth generation (5G) mobile networks will revolutionize edge-based computing by providing fast and reliable network capabilities to remote sensors, devices and microservices. This heralds new opportunities for researchers, allowing remote instrumentation and analytic capabilities to be as accessible as local resources. The increased availability of remote data and services presents new opportunities for collaboration, yet introduces challenges for workflow orchestration, which will need to adapt to consider an increased choice of available services, including those from trusted partners and the wider community. In this paper we outline a workflow approach that provides decentralized discovery and orchestration of verifiably trustable services in support of multi-party operations. We base this work on the adoption of standardised data models and protocols emerging from hypermedia research, which has demonstrated success in using combinations of Linked Data, Web of Things (WoT) and semantic technologies to provide mechanisms for autonomous goal-directed agents to discover, execute and reuse new heterogeneous resources and behaviours in large-scale, dynamic environments. We adopt Verifiable Credentials (VCs) to securely share information amongst peers based on prior service usage in a cryptographically secure and tamperproof way, providing a trust-based framework for ratifying service qualities. Collating these new service description channels and integrating with existing decentralized workflow research based on vector symbolic architecture (VSA) provides an enhanced semantic search space for efficient and trusted service discovery that will be necessary for 5G edge-computing environments

A survey on engineering approaches for self-adaptive systems (extended version)

The complexity of information systems is increasing in recent years, leading to increased effort for maintenance and configuration. Self-adaptive systems (SASs) address this issue. Due to new computing trends, such as pervasive computing, miniaturization of IT leads to mobile devices with the emerging need for context adaptation. Therefore, it is beneficial that devices are able to adapt context. Hence, we propose to extend the definition of SASs and include context adaptation. This paper presents a taxonomy of self-adaptation and a survey on engineering SASs. Based on the taxonomy and the survey, we motivate a new perspective on SAS including context adaptation