Context-aware adaptation in DySCAS

DySCAS is a dynamically self-configuring middleware for automotive control systems. The addition of autonomic, context-aware dynamic configuration to automotive control systems brings a potential for a wide range of benefits in terms of robustness, flexibility, upgrading etc. However, the automotive systems represent a particularly challenging domain for the deployment of autonomics concepts, having a combination of real-time performance constraints, severe resource limitations, safety-critical aspects and cost pressures. For these reasons current systems are statically configured. This paper describes the dynamic run-time configuration aspects of DySCAS and focuses on the extent to which context-aware adaptation has been achieved in DySCAS, and the ways in which the various design and implementation challenges are met

The Chameleon Architecture for Streaming DSP Applications

We focus on architectures for streaming DSP applications such as wireless baseband processing and image processing. We aim at a single generic architecture that is capable of dealing with different DSP applications. This architecture has to be energy efficient and fault tolerant. We introduce a heterogeneous tiled architecture and present the details of a domain-specific reconfigurable tile processor called Montium. This reconfigurable processor has a small footprint (1.8 mm$^2$ in a 130 nm process), is power efficient and exploits the locality of reference principle. Reconfiguring the device is very fast, for example, loading the coefficients for a 200 tap FIR filter is done within 80 clock cycles. The tiles on the tiled architecture are connected to a Network-on-Chip (NoC) via a network interface (NI). Two NoCs have been developed: a packet-switched and a circuit-switched version. Both provide two types of services: guaranteed throughput (GT) and best effort (BE). For both NoCs estimates of power consumption are presented. The NI synchronizes data transfers, configures and starts/stops the tile processor. For dynamically mapping applications onto the tiled architecture, we introduce a run-time mapping tool

Load balancing issues in automotives

Electronic Control Units (ECUs) are widely used to improve the comfort and reliability of vehicles. It has become the fundamental building block of any automotive subsystem and is interfaced with electro mechanics counterpart. To meet the system wide requirements, these ECUs are interconnected using the communication infrastructure. Although the communication infrastructure in terms of, predominantly, the CAN based vehicle network took its birth to enable ECUs to work in a coordinated manner in order to support system wide requirements, during the past decade, this infrastructure was also viewed as a potential means to incorporate extensibility in terms of addition of newer ECUs which are built for implementing additional requirements. With this paradigm, the number of ECUs started growing in a steep manner, uncontrolled and as a result, today, it is not hard to see a high segment automotive housing ECUs as large as 75–80. Hence, load balancing mechanisms are needed to ease ECU integration and for efficient utilization of CPU power in ECUs. In this paper, we explain the concept of load balancing on the basis of CPU utilization across ECUs

Increase the adoption of Agent-based Cyber-Physical Production Systems through the Design of Minimally Invasive Solutions

During the last few years, many approaches were proposed to offer companies the ability to have dynamic and flexible production systems. One of the conventional ap-proaches to solving this problem is the implementation of cyber-physical production sys-tems using multi-agent distributed systems. Although these systems can deal with several challenges faced by companies in this area, they have not been accepted and used in real cases. In this way, the primary objective of the proposed work is to understand the chal-lenges usually found in the adoption of these solutions and to develop a strategy to in-crease their acceptance and implementation. Thus, the document focuses on the design and development of cyber-physical produc-tion systems based on agent approaches, requiring minimal changes in the existing pro-duction systems. This approach aims of reducing the impact and the alterations needed to adopt those new cyber-physical production systems. Clarifying the subject, the author presents a definition of a minimal invasive agent-based cyber-physical production system and, the functional requirements that the designers and developers must respect to imple-ment the new software. From these functional requirements derived a list of design princi-ples that must be fulfilled to design and develop a system with these characteristics. Subsequently, to evaluate solutions that aim to be minimally invasive, an evaluation model based on a fuzzy inference system is proposed, which rank the approaches accord-ing to each of the design principles and globally. In this way, the proposed work presents the functional requirements, design principles and evaluation model of minimally invasive cyber-physical production systems, to increase the adoption of such systems

Automated routing and control of silicon photonic switch fabrics

Automatic reconfiguration and feedback controlled routing is demonstrated in an 8×8 silicon photonic switch fabric based on Mach-Zehnder interferometers. The use of non-invasive Contactless Integrated Photonic Probes (CLIPPs) enables real-time monitoring of the state of each switching element individually. Local monitoring provides direct information on the routing path, allowing an easy sequential tuning and feedback controlled stabilization of the individual switching elements, thus making the switch fabric robust against thermal crosstalk, even in the absence of a cooling system for the silicon chip. Up to 24 CLIPPs are interrogated by a multichannel integrated ASIC wire-bonded to the photonic chip. Optical routing is demonstrated on simultaneous WDM input signals that are labelled directly on-chip by suitable pilot tones without affecting the quality of the signals. Neither preliminary circuit calibration nor lookup tables are required, being the proposed control scheme inherently insensible to channels power fluctuations