Adaptive self-learning controllers with disturbance compensation for automatic track guidance of industrial trucks

This paper presents an extended control concept for automatic track guidance of industrial trucks in intralogistic systems. It is based on Reinforcement Learning (RL), a method of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The presented approach is able to adapt itself to different industrial truck variants and to the associated specific vehicle parameters. In order to avoid starting the whole training of the controller for each truck variant from scratch, the training process is divided into two steps. In the first step, the controller is trained on a simplified linear model using parameters of a nominal vehicle variant. Based on this, the control parameters are only fine-tuned in the second step using a more complex nonlinear model, representing the real industrial truck. In this way, the controller is adapted to the actual truck variant and the corresponding parameter values. By using the nonlinear model, it can be ensured that the forklift's dynamic is approximated within the entire operating range, even at high steering angles. Moreover, the influence of the disturbance variable of the system (path curvature) is compensated by considering this a priori knowledge within the control design. Therefore, the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) of the RL controller and the observation vector are suitably adjusted. In this way, the occurring path curvatures can be considered in both training steps and the control parameters can be optimized accordingly. Thus, the influence of the disturbance variable can be compensated, which significantly improves the control quality. In order to demonstrate this, the new approach is compared to an RL control concept, which is not considering the disturbance variable and to a classical two-degrees-of-freedom (2DoF) control approach

Secure Usage of Asset Administration Shells - An Overview and Analysis of Best Practises

The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is a core element for Industrie 4.0. In addition, the security of industrial systems is a permanent topic that could be improved by the AAS and should have a high priority for future developments and implementations of the AAS. This paper evaluates the current threat landscape for Industrial Control Systems (ICS) communicating to the AAS, as well as for IT systems hosting the AAS. The relevance of these threats is evaluated for the AAS and the threats with the highest relevance, namely BasicWeb Application Attacks and Malware Infections, are analysed in detail. The recommended countermeasures for these threats are compared with the state of the art of AAS security concepts and result in missing countermeasures and research gaps for an overall security of the AAS