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.

Current global business competition has resulted in significant challenges for manufacturing and production sectors focused on shorter product lifecyc1es, more diverse and customized products as well as cost pressures from competitors and customers. To remain competitive, manufacturers, particularly in automotive industry, require the next generation of manufacturing paradigms supporting flexible and reconfigurable production systems that allow quick system changeovers for various types of products. In addition, closer integration of shop floor and business systems is required as indicated by the research efforts in investigating "Agile and Collaborative Manufacturing Systems" in supporting the production unit throughout the manufacturing lifecycles. The integration of a business enterprise with its shop-floor and lifecycle supply partners is currently only achieved through complex proprietary solutions due to differences in technology, particularly between automation and business systems. The situation is further complicated by the diverse types of automation control devices employed. Recently, the emerging technology of Service Oriented Architecture's (SOA's) and Web Services (WS) has been demonstrated and proved successful in linking business applications. The adoption of this Web Services approach at the automation level, that would enable a seamless integration of business enterprise and a shop-floor system, is an active research topic within the automotive domain. If successful, reconfigurable automation systems formed by a network of collaborative autonomous and open control platform in distributed, loosely coupled manufacturing environment can be realized through a unifying platform of WS interfaces for devices communication. The adoption of SOA- Web Services on embedded automation devices can be achieved employing Device Profile for Web Services (DPWS) protocols which encapsulate device control functionality as provided services (e.g. device I/O operation, device state notification, device discovery) and business application interfaces into physical control components of machining automation. This novel approach supports the possibility of integrating pervasive enterprise applications through unifying Web Services interfaces and neutral Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) message communication between control systems and business applications over standard Ethernet-Local Area Networks (LAN's). In addition, the re-configurability of the automation system is enhanced via the utilisation of Web Services throughout an automated control, build, installation, test, maintenance and reuse system lifecycle via device self-discovery provided by the DPWS protocol.

Esta dissertação aborda o desenvolvimento e a implementação de um laboratório remoto para a disciplina \"SEL0431 - Laboratório de Controle de Processos Industriais\", a qual visa proporcionar aos alunos o contato direto com sistemas de controle e supervisão de processos industriais através de projetos desenvolvidos em uma planta didática industrial. O laboratório foi implementado em 2017 e é constituído por uma planta de escala reduzida, que contém instrumentos de campo, controladores lógicos programáveis, redes de comunicação digitais e um servidor, que conecta a rede local do laboratório à rede da Universidade. Os estudantes acessam este servidor através de aplicações de protocolo remoto RDP sobre VPN com portais online e ferramentas adicionais de suporte para que realizem seus experimentos à distância com a planta. Além de atuar como gateway entre a planta e as máquinas dos alunos, o servidor autentica seus usuários, gerencia acessos simultâneos e permite que os alunos visualizem e obtenham os dados da planta mais facilmente. Ao final de cada projeto, o autor deste trabalho conduziu um questionário para registrar a impressão dos estudantes sobre o uso do laboratório remoto e comparou os resultados apresentados pelos alunos da turma de 2016 e os da turma de 2017 desta disciplina. Esta análise indicou que a adição de um laboratório remoto apresentou um impacto positivo no desempenho acadêmico dos estudantes nesta disciplina: eles atingiram resultados mais completos, exploraram mais a fundo os recursos da planta e avaliaram positivamente o uso da ferramenta. Ademais, esta solução técnica adotada para desenvolver o laboratório remoto é replicável a outras disciplinas e possui a vantagem de permitir o controle total da planta pelos alunos sem abdicar da segurança durante os experimentos. / This thesis addresses the development and implementation of a remote laboratory for the discipline \"SEL0431 – Industrial Processes Control Laboratory\", which aims to provide students with direct contact with control and supervision systems of industrial processes through projects developed in a didactic plant. The laboratory was first implemented in 2017 and consists of a reduced scale plant, which contains field instruments, programmable logic controllers, digital communication networks and a server that connects the laboratory\'s local network to the University Wide Area Network (WAN). Students access the server through RDP applications over VPN and they are supported by online portals and additional tools to perform their remote experiments with the plant. In addition to serving as a gateway between the plant and the students\' machines, the server authenticates its users, manages simultaneous access and enables students to view and obtain plant data more easily. At the end of each project, the author of this paper conducted a survey to record the students\' impression of the use of the remote laboratory and compared the results presented by the students of 2016 classes and those of 2017 classes of this discipline. The analysis revealed the remote laboratory positively impacted on the academic performance of students in this discipline: they achieved more complete results, explored more deeply the plant resources and positively evaluated the use of such tool as a support for teaching industrial processes control and supervision. Furthermore, the technical solution is replicable to other practical courses and presents the advantage of enabling students to totally control the plant without forgoing the security during their experiments.

Esta dissertação aborda o desenvolvimento e a implementação de um laboratório remoto para a disciplina \"SEL0431 - Laboratório de Controle de Processos Industriais\", a qual visa proporcionar aos alunos o contato direto com sistemas de controle e supervisão de processos industriais através de projetos desenvolvidos em uma planta didática industrial. O laboratório foi implementado em 2017 e é constituído por uma planta de escala reduzida, que contém instrumentos de campo, controladores lógicos programáveis, redes de comunicação digitais e um servidor, que conecta a rede local do laboratório à rede da Universidade. Os estudantes acessam este servidor através de aplicações de protocolo remoto RDP sobre VPN com portais online e ferramentas adicionais de suporte para que realizem seus experimentos à distância com a planta. Além de atuar como gateway entre a planta e as máquinas dos alunos, o servidor autentica seus usuários, gerencia acessos simultâneos e permite que os alunos visualizem e obtenham os dados da planta mais facilmente. Ao final de cada projeto, o autor deste trabalho conduziu um questionário para registrar a impressão dos estudantes sobre o uso do laboratório remoto e comparou os resultados apresentados pelos alunos da turma de 2016 e os da turma de 2017 desta disciplina. Esta análise indicou que a adição de um laboratório remoto apresentou um impacto positivo no desempenho acadêmico dos estudantes nesta disciplina: eles atingiram resultados mais completos, exploraram mais a fundo os recursos da planta e avaliaram positivamente o uso da ferramenta. Ademais, esta solução técnica adotada para desenvolver o laboratório remoto é replicável a outras disciplinas e possui a vantagem de permitir o controle total da planta pelos alunos sem abdicar da segurança durante os experimentos. / This thesis addresses the development and implementation of a remote laboratory for the discipline \"SEL0431 – Industrial Processes Control Laboratory\", which aims to provide students with direct contact with control and supervision systems of industrial processes through projects developed in a didactic plant. The laboratory was first implemented in 2017 and consists of a reduced scale plant, which contains field instruments, programmable logic controllers, digital communication networks and a server that connects the laboratory\'s local network to the University Wide Area Network (WAN). Students access the server through RDP applications over VPN and they are supported by online portals and additional tools to perform their remote experiments with the plant. In addition to serving as a gateway between the plant and the students\' machines, the server authenticates its users, manages simultaneous access and enables students to view and obtain plant data more easily. At the end of each project, the author of this paper conducted a survey to record the students\' impression of the use of the remote laboratory and compared the results presented by the students of 2016 classes and those of 2017 classes of this discipline. The analysis revealed the remote laboratory positively impacted on the academic performance of students in this discipline: they achieved more complete results, explored more deeply the plant resources and positively evaluated the use of such tool as a support for teaching industrial processes control and supervision. Furthermore, the technical solution is replicable to other practical courses and presents the advantage of enabling students to totally control the plant without forgoing the security during their experiments.

The SOAP Service Description Language (SSDL) is a SOAP-centric language for describing Web Service contracts. SSDL focuses on message abstraction as the building block for creating service-oriented applications and provides an extensible range of protocol frameworks that can be used to describe and formally model Web Service interactions. SSDL's natural alignment with service-oriented design principles intuitively suggests that it encourages the creation of applications that adhere to this architectural paradigm. Given the lack of tools and empirical data for using SSDL as part of Web Services-based SOAs, we identified the need to investigate its practicability and usefulness through empirical work. To that end we have developed Soya, a programming model and runtime environment for creating and executing SSDL-based Web Services. On the one hand, Soya provides straightforward programming abstractions that foster message-oriented thinking. On the other hand, it leverages contemporary tooling (i.e. Windows Communication Foundation) with SSDL-related runtime functionality and semantics. In this thesis, we describe the design and architecture of Soya and show how it makes it possible to use SSDL as an alternative and powerful metadata language without imposing unrealistic burdens on application developers. In addition, we use Soya and SSDL in a case study which provides a set of initial empirical results with respect to SSDL's strengths and drawbacks. In summary, our work serves as a knowledge framework for better understanding message-oriented Web Service development and demonstrates SSDL's practicability in terms of implementation and usability.

The SOAP Service Description Language (SSDL) is a SOAP-centric language for describing Web Service contracts. SSDL focuses on message abstraction as the building block for creating service-oriented applications and provides an extensible range of protocol frameworks that can be used to describe and formally model Web Service interactions. SSDL's natural alignment with service-oriented design principles intuitively suggests that it encourages the creation of applications that adhere to this architectural paradigm. Given the lack of tools and empirical data for using SSDL as part of Web Services-based SOAs, we identified the need to investigate its practicability and usefulness through empirical work. To that end we have developed Soya, a programming model and runtime environment for creating and executing SSDL-based Web Services. On the one hand, Soya provides straightforward programming abstractions that foster message-oriented thinking. On the other hand, it leverages contemporary tooling (i.e. Windows Communication Foundation) with SSDL-related runtime functionality and semantics. In this thesis, we describe the design and architecture of Soya and show how it makes it possible to use SSDL as an alternative and powerful metadata language without imposing unrealistic burdens on application developers. In addition, we use Soya and SSDL in a case study which provides a set of initial empirical results with respect to SSDL's strengths and drawbacks. In summary, our work serves as a knowledge framework for better understanding message-oriented Web Service development and demonstrates SSDL's practicability in terms of implementation and usability.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science, Department of Computer Science, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

In data-centric environments, for example, in the field of scientific computing, the transmission of large amount of structured data to Web services is required. In service-oriented environments (SOA), the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is commonly used as the main transport protocol. However, the resulting 'by value' data transmission approach is not efficiently applicable in data-centric environments. One challenging bottleneck of SOAP arises from the XML serialization and deserialization when processing large SOAP messages. In this paper, we present an extended Web service framework which explicitly considers the data aspects of functional Web services. Aside from the possibility to integrate specialized data transfer methods in SOA, this framework allows the efficient and scalable data handling and processing within Web services. In this case, we combine the advantages of the functional perspective (SOA) and the data perspective to efficiently support data-centric environments.

In the context of genome research, the method of gene expression analysis has been used for several years. Related microarray experiments are conducted all over the world, and consequently, a vast amount of microarray data sets are produced. Having access to this variety of repositories, researchers would like to incorporate this data in their analyses processes to increase the statistical significance of their results. Such analyses processes are typical examples of data-intensive processes. In general, data-intensive processes are characterized by (i) a sequence of functional operations processing large amount of data and (ii) the transportation and transformation of huge data sets between the functional operations. To support data-intensive processes, an efficient and scalable environment is required, since the performance is a key factor today. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) is beneficial in this area according to process orchestration and execution. However, the current realization of SOA with Web services and BPEL includes some drawbacks with regard to the performance of the data propagation between Web services. Therefore, we present in this paper our data-aware service-oriented approach to efficiently support such data-intensive processes.