53,801 research outputs found
Introduction to the Selected Papers from ICCPS 2016
Since their inception more than a decade ago, terms such as “cyber-physical systems” (CPS) or
“cooperating objects” have come to describe research and engineering efforts that tightly conjoin
real-world physical processes and computing systems. The integration of physical processes and
computing is not new; embedded computing systems have been in place for decades controlling
physical processes. The revolution is steaming from the extensive networking of embedded computing devices and the holistic cyber-physical co-design that integrates sensing, actuation, computation, networking, and physical processes. Such systems pose many broad scientific and technical
challenges, ranging from distributed programming paradigms to networking protocols, as well as
systems theory that combines physical models and networked embedded systems. Notably, as the
physical interactions imply that timing requirements are considered, real-time computing systems methodologies and technologies are also pivotal in many of those systems. Moreover, many
of these systems are often safety-critical, and therefore it is fundamental to guarantee other nonfunctional properties (such as safety, security, and reliability), which often interplay among them
and with timeliness requirements.
CPS is a growing key strategic research, development, and innovation area, and it is becoming
pivotal for boosting the development of the future generation of highly complex and automated
computing systems, which will be pervasive in virtually all application domains. Notable examples
are aeronautics, aerospace and defence systems, robotics, autonomous transportation systems, the
Internet of Things, energy-aware and green computing, smart factory automation, smart grids,
and advanced medical devices and applications.
This special issue contains a selection of extended versions of the best papers presented at the
Seventh ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS 2016), which was
held with the Cyber-Physical Systems Week in Vienna, Austria, on 11–14 April 2016. This selection
reflects effectively the growing pervasiveness of these systems in various applications domains.
These papers excel at describing the diversity of methodologies used to design and verify various
non-functional properties of these complex systems.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Ageing as a price of cooperation and complexity: Self-organization of complex systems causes the ageing of constituent networks
The analysis of network topology and dynamics is increasingly used for the description of the structure, function and evolution of complex systems. Here we summarize key aspects of the evolvability and robustness of the hierarchical network-set of macromolecules, cells, organisms, and ecosystems. Listing the costs and benefits of cooperation as a necessary behaviour to build this network hierarchy, we outline the major hypothesis of the paper: the emergence of hierarchical complexity needs cooperation leading to the ageing of the constituent networks. Local cooperation in a stable environment may lead to over-optimization developing an ‘always-old’ network, which ages slowly, and dies in an apoptosis-like process. Global cooperation by exploring a rapidly changing environment may cause an occasional over-perturbation exhausting system-resources, causing rapid degradation, ageing and death of an otherwise ‘forever-young’ network in a necrosis-like process. Giving a number of examples we explain how local and global cooperation can both evoke and help successful ageing. Finally, we show how various forms of cooperation and consequent ageing emerge as key elements in all major steps of evolution from the formation of protocells to the establishment of the globalized, modern human society. Thus, ageing emerges as a price of complexity, which is going hand-in-hand with cooperation enhancing each other in a successful community
The strategic importance of supply chains and the RFID radio data identification system
Purpose: The paper presents the issues related to the process of supply chain management. It presents the essence and classification of supply chains and the interpretation of global supply network management. Design/Methodology/Approach: Using systems theory as a basis, a RFID utilization and outcome(s) performance model was developed from the literature. The study uses surveys conducted among twenty companies in the 2016-2017 research year. Enterprises that use RFID technologies in the supply chain were analyzed.
Findings: The Findings indicate that application of RFID technology leads to improved manufacturing efficiency and manufacturing effectiveness, while improvement in efficiency lead directly to improved organizational performance, and improvements in effectiveness lead directly to improved supply chain performance. Practical Implications: Certain policy implications and obligations accrue are companies that use RFID technology in their supply order to manage the company more efficiently. Originality/Value: The publication presents the results of research carried out in enterprises using the new RFID system as a modern technique of supporting supply chain management to increase the efficiency of cooperation throughout the entire supply chain.peer-reviewe
Artificial Intelligence and Systems Theory: Applied to Cooperative Robots
This paper describes an approach to the design of a population of cooperative
robots based on concepts borrowed from Systems Theory and Artificial
Intelligence. The research has been developed under the SocRob project, carried
out by the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the Institute for Systems and
Robotics - Instituto Superior Tecnico (ISR/IST) in Lisbon. The acronym of the
project stands both for "Society of Robots" and "Soccer Robots", the case study
where we are testing our population of robots. Designing soccer robots is a
very challenging problem, where the robots must act not only to shoot a ball
towards the goal, but also to detect and avoid static (walls, stopped robots)
and dynamic (moving robots) obstacles. Furthermore, they must cooperate to
defeat an opposing team. Our past and current research in soccer robotics
includes cooperative sensor fusion for world modeling, object recognition and
tracking, robot navigation, multi-robot distributed task planning and
coordination, including cooperative reinforcement learning in cooperative and
adversarial environments, and behavior-based architectures for real time task
execution of cooperating robot teams
An extensible product structure model for product lifecycle management in the make-to-order environment
This paper presents a product structure model with a semantic representation technique that make the product structure extensible for developing product lifecycle management (PLM) systems that is flexible for make-to-order environment. In the make-to-order business context, each product could have a number of variants with slightly different constitutions to fulfill different customer requirements. All the variants of a family have common characteristics and each variant has its specific features. A master-variant pattern is proposed for building the product structure model to explicitly represent common characteristics and specific features of individual variants. The model is capable of enforcing the consistency of a family structure and its variant structure, supporting multiple product views, and facilitating the business processes. A semantic representation technique is developed that enables entity attributes to be defined and entities to be categorized in a neutral and semantic format. As a result, entity attributes and entity categorization can be redefined easily with its configurable capability for different requirements of the PLM systems. An XML-based language is developed for semantically representing entities and entity categories. A prototype as a proof-of-concept system is presented to illustrate the capability of the proposed extensible product structure model
Inter-organizational fault management: Functional and organizational core aspects of management architectures
Outsourcing -- successful, and sometimes painful -- has become one of the
hottest topics in IT service management discussions over the past decade. IT
services are outsourced to external service provider in order to reduce the
effort required for and overhead of delivering these services within the own
organization. More recently also IT services providers themselves started to
either outsource service parts or to deliver those services in a
non-hierarchical cooperation with other providers. Splitting a service into
several service parts is a non-trivial task as they have to be implemented,
operated, and maintained by different providers. One key aspect of such
inter-organizational cooperation is fault management, because it is crucial to
locate and solve problems, which reduce the quality of service, quickly and
reliably. In this article we present the results of a thorough use case based
requirements analysis for an architecture for inter-organizational fault
management (ioFMA). Furthermore, a concept of the organizational respective
functional model of the ioFMA is given.Comment: International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC
MOSS, an evaluation of software engineering techniques
An evaluation of the software engineering techniques used for the development of a Modular Operating System (MOSS) was described. MOSS is a general purpose real time operating system which was developed for the Concept Verification Test (CVT) program. Each of the software engineering techniques was described and evaluated based on the experience of the MOSS project. Recommendations for the use of these techniques on future software projects were also given
Expert system decision support for low-cost launch vehicle operations
Progress in assessing the feasibility, benefits, and risks associated with AI expert systems applied to low cost expendable launch vehicle systems is described. Part one identified potential application areas in vehicle operations and on-board functions, assessed measures of cost benefit, and identified key technologies to aid in the implementation of decision support systems in this environment. Part two of the program began the development of prototypes to demonstrate real-time vehicle checkout with controller and diagnostic/analysis intelligent systems and to gather true measures of cost savings vs. conventional software, verification and validation requirements, and maintainability improvement. The main objective of the expert advanced development projects was to provide a robust intelligent system for control/analysis that must be performed within a specified real-time window in order to meet the demands of the given application. The efforts to develop the two prototypes are described. Prime emphasis was on a controller expert system to show real-time performance in a cryogenic propellant loading application and safety validation implementation of this system experimentally, using commercial-off-the-shelf software tools and object oriented programming techniques. This smart ground support equipment prototype is based in C with imbedded expert system rules written in the CLIPS protocol. The relational database, ORACLE, provides non-real-time data support. The second demonstration develops the vehicle/ground intelligent automation concept, from phase one, to show cooperation between multiple expert systems. This automated test conductor (ATC) prototype utilizes a knowledge-bus approach for intelligent information processing by use of virtual sensors and blackboards to solve complex problems. It incorporates distributed processing of real-time data and object-oriented techniques for command, configuration control, and auto-code generation
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