Overview of platooning systems

This paper presents an overview of current projects that deal with vehicle platooning. The platooning concept can be defined as a collection of vehicles that travel close together, actively coordinated in formation. Some expected advantages of platooning include increased fuel and traffic efficiency, safety and driver comfort. There are many variations of the details of the concept such as: the goals of platooning, how it is implemented, mix of vehicles, the requirements on infrastructure, what is automated (longitudinal and lateral control) and to what level. The following projects are presented: SARTRE a European platooning project; PATH a California traffic automation program that includes platooning; GCDC a cooperative driving initiative, and; Energy ITS a Japanese truck platooning project

Autonomous UAS-Based Agriculture Applications: General Overview and Relevant European Case Studies

Emerging precision agriculture techniques rely on the frequent collection of high-quality data which can be acquired efficiently by unmanned aerial systems (UAS). The main obstacle for wider adoption of this technology is related to UAS operational costs. The path forward requires a high degree of autonomy and integration of the UAS and other cyber physical systems on the farm into a common Farm Management System (FMS) to facilitate the use of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for decision support. Such a solution has been implemented in the EU project AFarCloud (Aggregated Farming in the Cloud). The regulation of UAS operations is another important factor that impacts the adoption rate of agricultural UAS. An analysis of the new European UAS regulations relevant for autonomous operation is included. Autonomous UAS operation through the AFarCloud FMS solution has been demonstrated at several test farms in multiple European countries. Novel applications have been developed, such as the retrieval of data from remote field sensors using UAS and in situ measurements using dedicated UAS payloads designed for physical contact with the environment. The main findings include that (1) autonomous UAS operation in the agricultural sector is feasible once the regulations allow this; (2) the UAS should be integrated with the FMS and include autonomous data processing and charging functionality to offer a practical solution; and (3) several applications beyond just asset monitoring are relevant for the UAS and will help to justify the cost of this equipment.publishedVersio

Survey of Membership Agreement Protocols

Research, into the problem of membership agreement, has been going on for approximately the last 30 years, with still much activity. The goal of this paper is to give an overview of some work that has been done in the area in the context of the authors research efforts. Membership agreement is used to achieve a consistent view of a group of entities. The view is whether each entity is functioning or not. Via the membership agreement correct nodes (members of the group) may then adapt themselves to the situation, e.g. use a certain control algorithm mostsuitable for the current situation

Survey of Membership Agreement Protocols

Research, into the problem of membership agreement, has been going on for approximately the last 30 years, with still much activity. The goal of this paper is to give an overview of some work that has been done in the area in the context of the authors research efforts. Membership agreement is used to achieve a consistent view of a group of entities. The view is whether each entity is functioning or not. Via the membership agreement correct nodes (members of the group) may then adapt themselves to the situation, e.g. use a certain control algorithm mostsuitable for the current situation

Fibre-ribbon ring network with inherent support for earliest deadline first message scheduling

This paper presents a network with earliest deadline first (EDF) scheduling on a per slot basis. The network is called CCR-EDF (Control Channel based Ring network with EDF scheduling). The topology is a pipelined unidirectional fibre-ribbon ring that supports several simultaneous transmissions in non-overlapping segments and with dedicated fibres for clock and arbitration. In each slot the node that has highest priority generates the clock. The clock hand over strategy together with the scheduling feature gives the network the functionality for earliest deadline scheduling of periodic messages belonging to logical real-time connections. Logical realtime connections may be added and removed during runtime, through admission control. Guaranteed realtime communication service is supported to the user. Other services include best effort traffic and special services for parallel and distributed processing such as barrier synchronisation and global reduction.Copyright © 2002 IEEE. Reprinted from the IPDPS 2002 proceedings. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of the University of Halmstads's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.</p

†Laboratory for Computing and Communication

A pipelined fiber-ribbon ring network with heterogeneous real-time suppor

A Process Group Membership Service for Active Safety Systems Using TT/ET Communication Scheduling

This paper describes a process group membership protocol for distributed real-time systems, that use a communication network which supports both timetriggered (TT) and event-triggered (ET) communication. The protocol allows a group of cooperating real-time processes to establish a consistent view of each other\u27s operational status, i.e. working correctly or not. The aim is to provide an application independent membership service in systems where several distributed real-time tasks share processing nodes. We assume that each such task consists of several processes executing on different nodes and that each node can execute processes belonging to different tasks. The protocol is applicable to any application domain, but has been developed for automotive active safety systems. Here, typical distributed real-time tasks include anti-lock braking, stability control and collision mitigation. In such systems, a membership service provides invaluable support for implementing fault-tolerance and graceful degradation

Two Protocols with Heterogeneous Real-Time Services for High-Performance Embedded Networks

High-performance embedded networks are found in computer systems that perform applications such as radar signal processing and multimedia rendering. The system can be composed of multiple computer nodes that are interconnected with the network. Properties of the network such as latency and speed affect the performance of the entire system. A node´s access to the network is controlled by a medium access protocol. This protocol decides e.g. real-time properties and services that the network will offer its users, i.e. the nodes. Two such network protocols with heterogeneous real-time services are presented. The protocols offer different communication services and services for parallel and distributed real-time processing. The latter services include barrier synchronisation, global reduction and short message service. A network topology of a unidirectional pipelined optical fibre-ribbon ring is assumed for both presented protocols. In such a network several simultaneous transmissions in non-overlapping segments are possible. Both protocols are aimed for applications that require a high-performance embedded network such as radar signal processing and multimedia. In these applications the system can be organised as multiple interconnected computation nodes that co-operate in parallel to achieve higher performance. The computing performance of the whole system is greatly affected by the choice of network. Computing nodes in a system for radar signal processing should be tightly coupled, i.e., communications cost, such as latency, between nodes should be small. This is possible if a suitable network with an efficient protocol is used. The target applications have heterogeneous real-time requirements for communication in that different classes of data-traffic exist. The traffic can be classified according to its requirements. The proposed protocols partition data-traffic into three classes with distinctly different qualities. These classes are: traffic with hard real-time demands, such as mission critical commands; traffic with soft real-time demands, such as application data (a deadline miss here only leads to decreased performance); and traffic with no real-time constraints at all. The protocols are analysed and performance is tested through simulation with different data-traffic patterns

Analysis problems in a spatial reuse ring network with a simple clocking strategy

This technical report describes the problems associated with analysis of a spatial reuse ring network with a clock strategy also used in previously studied ring networks. The aim for the analysis was to find the worst case deterministic throughput. Some results are achieved and are presented. A worst case bound is found and this can be used for analysing feasibility of message connection sets. However, the bound is pessimistic and does not utilise the bandwidth reuse features of the network. This result does not meet the expectations that where foreseen because the medium access method inherently supports distributed global deadline scheduling. It is concluded that the current clock strategy of the network is the cause of the problems. It is also concluded that the analysis is complicated by the clocking strategy and that by introducing small changes in the network (will be presented in a separate paper), the analysis of the real-time performance will be much simpler. This will lead to a network with less pessimistic assumptions and hence better support for real-time traffic