Control Architecture Concepts and Properties of an Ontology Devoted to Exchanges in Mobile Robotics

National audienceA specific ontology is proposed in the scope of the development of a platform devoted to exchanges between academics and industrials of the robotic domain. This paper presents the tools used for knowledge elicitation, the concepts and properties linked with control architecture, the use of the resulting ontology for description of some scenarios and the tracks for the development of a domain specific language grounded on the ontology. Knowledge elicitation is performed in web ontology language thanks to Protégé ontology editor. The ontology is structured as a set of modules organized around a kernel. Modules addressing systems, information, robot and mission include concepts and properties for control architecture description. The expressivity of the ontology is demonstrated describing architectures for a set of scenarios; urban robotic scenario, air-ground scenario, landmark search scenario and military unmanned aerial vehicles scenario. Finally some tracks for the use of the ontology for developing a domain specific language are given

AAS Capability-Based Operation and Engineering of Flexible Production Lines

International audienceLot-size-one systems as well as plug and produce concepts imply (1) producing increased variety of products in a highly flexible and timely manner, and (2) making commissioning and maintenance more flexible. The speed with which manufacturers, in particular SMEs, can reconfigure the production to a new run and thus respond to clients and avoid costly machine downtime is critical to maintaining commercial success and profit margins. The manufacturing systems of tomorrow must offer a high degree of autonomy, be quickly re-planned to other operations, and cope with a wide variety of unforeseen situations, in a secure and safe manner. In this context, the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is an emergent standard that leverages the digital twin approach and provides concepts for describing capabilities and skills of I4.0 components in order to automate the reconfiguration process. This article proposes a capability-based operation and engineering approach to tackle the syntactic and semantic interoperability problems in flexible production lines. We demonstrate the implementation of the AAS standard in the open source model-driven workbench Papyrus; then we assess its usability for modeling a production cell use case in order to implement a capability-based reconfiguration approach for flexible production lines

A unified method to design bridges for OPC UA PubSub networks in the industrial IoT

International audienceSpecification part 14 of the Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) standard provides five different profiles to implement the publish-subscribe messaging pattern. The specification is also called OPC UA PubSub, and its profiles are called PubSub profiles. Two devices deployed with the same PubSub profile can exchange and collaborate; however, two devices deployed with two different PubSub profiles are unable to communicate. It is a limit for the Industry Internet of Things, a complex environment where there would be heterogeneous devices and networks. One approach to overcoming this issue is to use a bridge for the devices deployed with different PubSub profiles. In this sense, this paper provides a unified method to design bridges for OPC UA PubSub networks. The proof-ofconcept experiment, also presented in this paper, is a use case of bridging PubSub broker-less and broker-based networks

Bridging the Gap between SysML and OPC UA Information Models for Industry 4.0

International audienceSysML is a UML profile used for multi-disciplinary systems engineering. The rise of Industry 4.0 modernizes industrial systems with new technologies and consequently demands the SysML language to be extended to cover new specific concepts. Among these new technologies, Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is a highly recommended standard for the interoperability of industrial systems. OPC UA offers a data modeling mechanism that can represent an industrial system's resources in the form of an OPC UA information model. Technically, the OPC UA information model is the combination of the basic information model proposed by the OPC Foundation and other companion specifications' information models related to the system's specific domains. When refining a SysML design for such an OPC UA-based system, it can be challenging to enrich the design model and integrate all the information from a companion specification. This paper aims to bridge the gap between SysML engineering environments and OPC UA information models with two contributions. First, we propose to extend SysML with a new UML profile corresponding to the OPC UA Robotics companion specification released by the joint working group between the OPC Foundation and the Mechanical Engineering Industry Association. Second, we share our approach to automatically generating OPC UA information models from high-level SysML design models. The two use cases in our robotic cell, also presented in this paper, show the importance of this research in practice

Studio4Education : environnement de modélisation et programmation graphique d'IoT

International audienceStudio4Education : environnement de modélisation et programmation graphique d'Io

Model-driven architectural framework towards safe and secure nuclear power reactors

International audienceSensor-based digital systems for Instrumentation and Control (I&C) of nuclear reactors are quite complex in terms of architecture and functionalities. A high-level framework is highly required to pre-evaluate the system’s performance, check the consistency between different levels of abstraction and address the concerns of various stakeholders. In this work, we integrate the development process of I&C systems and the involvement of stakeholders within a model-driven methodology. The proposed approach introduces a new architectural framework that defines various concepts, allowing system implementations and encompassing different development phases, all actors, and system concerns. In addition, we define a new I&C Modeling Language (ICML) and a set of methodological rules needed to build different architectural framework views. To illustrate this methodology, we extend the specific use of an open-source system engineering tool, named Eclipse Papyrus, to carry out many automation and verification steps at different levels of abstraction. The architectural framework modeling capabilities will be validated using a realistic use case system for the protection of nuclear reactors. The proposed framework is able to reduce the overall system development cost by improving links between different specification tasks and providing a high abstraction level of system components

Model-Driven Safety Assessment of Robotic Systems

International audienceRobotic systems (RSs) are often used for performing critical tasks with little or no human intervention. Such RSs must satisfy certain dependability requirements including reliability, availability, security and safety. In this paper, we focus on the safety aspect and propose a methodology and associated framework for safety assessment of RSs in the early phases of development. The methodology relies upon model-driven engineering approach and describes a preliminary safety assessment of safety-critical RSs using fault tree (FT) analysis (FTA). The framework supports a domain specific language for RSs called RobotML and includes facilities (i) to automatically generate or manually construct FTs and perform both qualitative and quantitative FTA, (ii) to make semantic connections with formal verification and FTA tools, (iii) to represent FTA results in the RobotML modeling environment. In the case study, we illustrate the proposed methodology and framework by considering a mobile robot developed in the scope of the Proteus project

Novel Model-Based approach for instrumentation and control of nuclear reactors

Technological platforms dedicated for digital instrumentation and control of nuclear reactors are quite complex in terms of functionalities and devices. Hence, the design of these platforms requires high-level abstraction layers able to reduce the complexity, to rise the automation and to check the consistency between different development stages. The development of such systems is a challenging task that requires modeling of various components at different levels of abstraction and viewpoints, notably functional, hardware and software levels. In this paper, a new system engineering methodology is proposed to provide high-level models of different components and inter/intra-communication between them. These models are used for system specification, architecture design, performance evaluation or verification and validation. This approach focuses on the internal behavior of different components at different levels of abstraction in order to enable the interoperability of these components and to enhance cooperation between different stakeholders of the development process. An experimental setup has been carried out to validate this approach by customizing an open source model based engineering tool, Eclipse Papyrus, towards a significant reduction of system development cost in terms of engineering resources and equipment devices

Semantic Interoperability of Digital Twins: Ontology-based Capability Checking in AAS Modeling Framework

International audienceIndustry 4.0 currently prepares a major shift towards extreme flexibility into production lines management. Digital Twins are one of the key enabling technologies for Industry 4.0. However, the interoperability gap among digital representation of Industry 4.0 assets is still one of the obstacles to the development and adoption of digital twins. If the Asset Administration Shell (AAS), the standard proposed to represent the I4.0 components, caters for syntactic interoperability, a more semantic kind of interoperability is deeply needed to develop flexible and adaptable production lines. In our work, we overcome the limitation of current syntactic-only resource matching algorithms by implementing semantic interoperability based on ontologies i.e., by transforming AAS-based plant models into MaRCO (Manufacturing Resource Capability Ontology) instances and then query the expanded ontology to find the needed resources. This article presents this ontology-based approach as the first step towards the design and implementation of an automated I4.0 flexible plant supervision and control system based on model-driven engineering (MDE) within the Papyrus for Manufacturing toolset. We show how an MDE approach can aggregate around digital twin modeling tools from the Papyrus platform both I4.0 technologies and AI (Knowledge Representation and Reasoning) tools. Our platform aligns modeling and ontological elements to get the best of both worlds. This method has two main advantages: (1) to provide semantic descriptions for digital twin models, (2) to complement model-driven engineering tools with automated reasoning. This paper showcases this approach through a robotic cell use case

Modelling and estimating the energy consumption of embedded applications and operating systems

International audienceThis paper presents a multi-layer power and energy estimation approach for embedded applications and operating systems. The multi-layer methodology is an incremental approach where we consider that energy can be summed over the hyper period of the real-time system. At the first layer, we start by estimating energy and power consumption of standalone tasks. At the following layers, we add energy overheads of embedded operating system services such as timer interrupt, inter process communications (IPC)) and peripheral devices accesses.\\ We illustrate our Multi-layer approach by estimating the energy consumption of an M-JPEG encoder running on linux 2.6 and deployed on a XUP Virtex-II pro development board