Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields

This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways

Evolutionary architecting of embedded automotive product lines: An industrial case study

In the automotive industry, embedded systems and software play an increasingly important role in defining the characteristics of the vehicles. Both the vehicles and the embedded systems are designed as product lines, and two distinct architecture processes can be identified. The revolutionary process develops the architecture of a new product line, and focuses on abstract quality attributes and flexibility. The evolutionary process continuously modifies the architecture due to changes, such as additions of new functionality. In this paper, the evolutionary process is investigated through a case study. The study reviews a number of changes to an existing architecture, observing the cause of the change, what quality attributes were considered, and what technical aspects were included. It is also analyzed how the interplay between the two processes can be improved through systematic feedback about what evolution actually takes place. 1

Architectural Allocation Alternatives and Associated Concerns in Cyber-Physical Systems: A Case Study

ABSTRACT Cyber-physical systems is an extension of traditional embedded systems, where communication to the outside world is given more emphasis. This leads to a new design space also for software development, allowing new allocation strategies for functionality. In traditional embedded systems, all functionality was inside the product, but now it becomes possible to partition the software between the embedded systems and IT systems outside the product. This paper investigates, through a case study from the automotive domain, possible new allocation alternatives where computation is offloaded from the embedded system to a server, and what additional architectural concerns this leads to, including performance, resource utilization, robustness, and lifecycle aspects. In addition, the paper addresses new opportunities created by allocating functionality outside the embedded systems, and thus making data available for extended services, as well as the larger concerns that result on the organizational level, including new competency in architecture and DevOps

Experience of violation during the past 3 months, social capital, and self-rated health: A population-based study.

Objective: The objective was to investigate the association between experience of violation during the past 3 months and self-rated health, taking trust (social capital), economic stress, and country of birth and parents' country of birth into account. Design/setting/participants/measurements: The 2008 public health survey in Skåne is a cross-sectional study with 55% response rate. A random sample was approached using a postal questionnaire, and 28,198 persons aged 18-80 responded. Logistic regression models investigated associations between experience of violation during the past 3 months and self-rated health. Results: A 27.4% proportion of the men and 30.0% of the women reported less than good health. Less than good health was significantly higher in older age groups, among persons born outside Sweden, with low education, economic stress, low trust in other people, and experience of violation during the past 3 months. The group with experience of violation at one occasion during the past 3 months had odds ratio 1.76 (95% CI 1.57-1.97) of less than good health among men and odds ratio 1.78 (95% CI 1.62-1.96) among women, while the group with experience of violation two or more times during the past 3 months had odds ratio 4.28 (95% CI 3.36-5.44) among men and 3.54 (95% CI 2.89-4.35) among women in the final multiple analyses. Conclusions: Experience of violation during the past 3 months is significantly associated with less than good health, which is a finding with important policy implications

Proposed protective mechanism of the pancreas in the rat

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Heparan sulphate is known to have various functions in the animal body, including surveillance of tissue integrity. Administered intraperitoneally, it induces a systemic inflammatory response syndrome and when given locally in the pancreas it initiates a protective inflammatory response. The aim of the present study was to investigate the underlying mechanisms behind cell recruitment following intra-ductal infusion of heparan sulphate.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Rats were subjected to intraductal-infusion of heparan sulphate, lipopolysaccharide and phosphate buffered saline into the pancreas. Pancreatic tissue was harvested 1, 3, 6, 9 or 48 hours after infusion and stained immunohistochemically for myeloperoxidase, ED-1, CINC-1 and MCP-1, as well as using eosin hematoxylin staining. Furthermore, MPO activity and MCP-1 and CINC-1 concentrations of tissue homogenates were measured. All differences were analyzed statistically using the Mann-Whitney U-test.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>During HS infusion, a rapid influx of macrophages/monocytes, as visualized as ED-1 positive cells, was seen reaching a maximum at 6 hours. After 48 hours, the same levels of ED-1 positive cells were noted in the pancreatic tissue, but with different location and morphology. Increased neutrophil numbers of heparan sulphate treated animals compared to control could be detected only 9 hours after infusion. The number of neutrophils was lower than the number of ED-1 positive cells. On the contrary, LPS infusion caused increased neutrophil numbers to a larger extent than heparan sulphate. Furthermore, this accumulation of neutrophils preceded the infiltration of ED-1 positive cells. Chemokine expression correlates very well to the cell infiltrate. MCP-1 was evident in the ductal cells of both groups early on. MCP-1 preceded monocyte infiltration in both groups, while the CINC-1 increase was only noticeable in the LPS group.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our data suggest that heparan and LPS both induce host defense reactions, though by using different mechanisms of cell-recruitment. This implies that the etiology of pancreatic inflammation may influence how the subsequent events will develop.</p

Schedulability-Driven Partitioning of Heterogeneous Real-Time Systems

During the development of a real-time system, the main goal is to find an implementation that satisfies the system&apos;s specified worst-case timing constraints. Often, the most cost-effective solution is a heterogeneous implementation, where some parts of the functionality are implemented in software, and the rest in hardware, using application-specific circuits. Hardware/software codesign allows the designer to describe the complete system homogeneously, and thereafter divide it into separate hardware and software parts. This thesis is a contribution to hardware/software partitioning of real-time systems. It proposes an automatic partitioning of a set of real-time tasks in order to meet their deadlines. A key issue when verifying timing constraints is the analysis of the task scheduler. Therefore, an extension of fixed-priority scheduling theory is proposed, which is suitable for heterogeneous implementations. It includes an optimal task priority assignment algorithm. The analysis uses i..