Implementation of a holistic digital twin solution for design prototyping and virtual commissioning

Industry 4.0 has ushered in a new era of digital manufacturing and in this context, digital twins are considered as the next wave of simulation technologies. The development and commissioning of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) is taking advantage of these technologies to improve product quality while reducing costs and time to market. However, existing practices of virtual design prototyping and commissioning require the cooperation of domain specific engineering fields. This involves considerable effort as development is mostly carried out in different departments using vendor specific simulation tools. There is still no integrated simulation environment commercially available, in which all engineering disciplines can work collaboratively. This presents a major challenge when interlinking virtual models with their physical counterparts. This paper therefore addresses these challenges by implementing a holistic and vendor agnostic digital twin solution for design prototyping and commissioning practices. The solution was tested in an industrial use case, in which the digital twin effectively prototyped cost-efficient solar assembly lines

Reuse in safety critical systems: educational use case

The last decades, the electromechanical control systems are being replaced by Programmable Electronic Control Systems. The challenge is that these new systems have to be at least as safe as the replaced ones. Any company that want to compete in the Safety Embedded Systems related market and have success in business, have to develop competent systems reducing the time to market and the cost of the development and certification. The reusability of SW components is one of the solutions in this way. It is clear that the industry needs new graduates with this knowledge. In this paper we are going to explain a use case that the University of Mondragon is developing in order to use it in the Master of Embedded Systems with the objective to transfer the knowledge about how to develop safety critical and certifiable systems in an efficient way

Reuse in Safety Critical Systems: Educational Use Case Final Results

The University of Mondragon, has participated in an European ARTEMIS project called SafeCer during 4 years. The main objective of the project has been to research about the "Reuse of safety related embedded systems and components". Mondragon University has defined an Educational Use Case in order to form the future engineers and has also conducted a first experiment with students of the Master of Embedded Systems. In this paper, the results of this experiment are shown

Runtime Contracts Checker: Increasing Robustness of Component-Based Software Systems

Software Systems are becoming increasingly complex leading to new Validation &Verification challenges. Model checking and testing techniques are used at development time while runtime verification aims to verify that a system satisfies a given property at runtime. This second technique complements the first one. This paper presents a runtime contract checker (RCC) which checks a component-based software system's contracts defined at design phase. We address embedded systems whose software components are designed by Unified Modelling Language-State Machines (UML-SM) and their internal information can be observable in terms of model elements at runtime. Our previous research work, CRESCO (C++ REflective State-Machines based observable software COmponents) framework, generates software components that provide this observability. The checker uses software components' internal status information to check system level safety contracts. The checker detects when a system contract is violated and starts a safeStop process to prevent the hazardous scenario. Thus, the robustness of the system is increased

CRESCO Framework and Checker: Automatic Generation of Reflective UML State Machine's C++ Code and Checker

Software Systems are becoming increasingly complex leading to new Validation & Verification challenges. Model checking and testing techniques are used at development time while runtime verification aims to verify that a system satisfies a given property at runtime. This second technique complements the first one. This paper presents a tool that enables the developers to generate automatically reflective UML State Machine controllers and the Runtime Safety Properties Checker (RSPC) which checks a component-based software system's safety properties defined at design phase. We address embedded systems whose software components are designed by Unified Modelling Language-State Machines (UML-SM) and their internal information can be observed in terms of model elements at runtime. RESCO (REflective State Machines-based observable software COmponents) framework, generates software components that provide this runtime observability. The checker uses software components' internal status information to check system level safety properties. The checker detects when a system safety property is violated and starts a safe adaptation process to prevent the hazardous scenario. Thus, as demonstrated in the evaluated experiment but not shown in the paper due to the space limitation, the safety of the system is enhanced

Using Machine Learning to Build Test Oracles: an Industrial Case Study on Elevators Dispatching Algorithms

The software of elevators requires maintenance over several years to deal with new functionality, correction of bugs or legislation changes. To automatically validate this software, test oracles are necessary. A typical approach in industry is to use regression oracles. These oracles have to execute the test input both, in the software version under test and in a previous software version. This practice has several issues when using simulation to test elevators dispatching algorithms at system level. These issues include a long test execution time and the impossibility of re-using test oracles both at different test levels and in operation. To deal with these issues, we propose DARIO, a test oracle that relies on regression learning algorithms to predict the Qualify of Service of the system. The regression learning algorithms of this oracle are trained by using data from previously tested versions. An empirical evaluation with an industrial case study demonstrates the feasibility of using our approach in practice. A total of five regression learning algorithms were validated, showing that the regression tree algorithm performed best. For the regression tree algorithm, the accuracy when predicting verdicts by DARIO ranged between 79 to 87%

Increasing dependability in Safety Critical CPSs using Reflective Statecharts

Dependability is crucial in Safety Critical Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). In spite of the research carried out in recent years, implementation and certification of such systems remain costly and time consuming. In this paper, a framework for Statecharts based SW component development is presented. This framework called CRESC (C++ REflective StateCharts), in addition to assisting in transforming a Statechart model to code, uses reflection to make the model available at Run Time. Thus, the SW components can be monitored at Run Time in terms of model elements. Our framework helps the developer separate monitoring from functionality. Any monitoring strategy needed to increase dependability can be added independently from the functional part. The framework was implemented in C++ because this programming language, together with the Statechart formalism constitute widely used choices for the Safety Critical CPS domain

Advantages of Arrowhead Framework for the Machine Tooling Industry

Immersed in the digital era and fully experiencing the changes introduced by the new industrial revolution of the so-called Industry 4.0, there are still many aspects of industrial digitization to resolve. Interoperability among devices and machines is one of the challenges. Sensors, components and machines from different vendors work as independent silos offering large amounts of heterogeneous data which relational capabilities are not fully exploited. Quick development, deployment and testing of new software solutions that take advantage of those data is another important matter. The requirements in terms of equipment resources and engineering efforts is high when planning new implementations. Platforms that enable the efficient application of those solutions at the right level (machine, edge, plant or cloud) are also necessary.(p)(/p)This paper presents an industrial case study on the application of the Arrowhead framework. The framework is implemented in the Machine Tooling ecosystem and enables the integration of grinding machines with other sensors, components or machines. Different software engineering tools offered with Arrowhead are used to design new solutions in Cyber-Physical System and Internet of Things in Industry 4.0 and make them Arrowhead compliant, for fast deployment of platforms and applications (Dockers) or for testing purposes (Management tool). Finally, the potential of agile construction of new applications is analysed by providing an Human-Machine Interface at machine level and the provision of services for data consumption at cloud level

Collective experience of application of an inverted classroom in the computer science degree program

In the last years, higher education is immersed in the transformation of the teaching experience with the aim of involving students more, as well as motivating them. Nowadays, students are very familiarized with new technologies and media while lecturers have been forced to transform their traditional notes to digital ones. This transformation pace has been accelerated in the last year due to the COVID19 pandemic. One of the main exponents of the said transformation is the adoption of the inverted classroom, a substantially studied teaching methodology where students work on some key concepts before a lecture takes place and face-to-face lecture time is reserved for added value activities. This work presents the results of a case study involving the implementation of the inverted classroom in a computer engineering bachelor’s degree. This experiment involves six different subjects in three courses during the 2020/21 academic year. The paper presents the principal motivation for the study, as well as the preparation process and methodology of the out-of-classroom multimedia materials and training of the faculty. It also covers the methodology used for multimedia content creation. Finally, the evaluation results are presented, gathered from questionnaires directed to students and lecturers