In recent years, the automotive industry has been significantly affected by a number of challenges driven by globalisation, economic fluctuations, environmental awareness and rapid technological developments. As a consequence, product lifecycles are shortening and customer demands are becoming more diverse. To survive in such a business environment, manufacturers are striving to find a costeffective solution for fast and efficient development and reconfiguration of manufacturing systems to satisfy the needs of changing markets without losses in production. Production systems within automotive industry are vastly automated and heavily rely on PLC-based control systems. It has been established that one of the major obstacles in realising reconfigurable manufacturing systems is the fragmented engineering approach to implement control systems. Control engineering starts at a very late stage in the overall system engineering process and remains highly isolated from the mechanical design and build of the system. During this stage, control code is typically written manually in vendor-specific tools in a combination of IEC 61131-3 languages. Writing control code is a complex, time consuming and error-prone process.

Increasing market demands for highly customised products with shorter time-to-market and at lower prices are forcing manufacturing systems to be built and operated in a more efficient ways. In order to overcome some of the limitations in traditional methods of automation system engineering, this thesis focuses on the creation of a new approach to Virtual Commissioning (VC). In current VC approaches, virtual models are driven by pre-programmed PLC control software. These approaches are still time-consuming and heavily control expertise-reliant as the required programming and debugging activities are mainly performed by control engineers. Another current limitation is that virtual models validated during VC are difficult to reuse due to a lack of tool-independent data models. Therefore, in order to maximise the potential of VC, there is a need for new VC approaches and tools to address these limitations. The main contributions of this research are: (1) to develop a new approach and the related engineering tool functionality for directly deploying PLC control software based on component-based VC models and reusable components; and (2) to build tool-independent common data models for describing component-based virtual automation systems in order to enable data reusability.

<p>Embedded systems are microprocessor-based systems that cover a large range of computer systems from ultra small computer-based devices to large systems monitoring and controlling complex processes. The particular constraints that must be met by embedded systems, such as timeliness, resource-use efficiency, short time-to-market and low cost, coupled with the increasing complexity of embedded system software, demand technologies and processes that will tackle these issues. An attractive approach to manage the software complexity, increase productivity, reduce time to market and decrease development costs, lies in the adoption of the component based software engineering (CBSE) paradigm. The specific characteristics of embedded systems lead to important design issues that need to be addressed by a component model. Consequently, a component model for development of embedded systems needs to systematically address extra-functional system properties. The component model should support predictable system development and as such guarantee absence or presence of certain properties. Formal methods can be a suitable solution to guarantee the correctness and reliability of software systems.</p><p> </p><p>Following the CBSE spirit, in this thesis we introduce the ProCom component model for development of distributed embedded systems. ProCom is structured in two layers, in order to support both a high-level view of loosely coupled subsystems encapsulating complex functionality, and a low-level view of control loops with restricted functionality. These layers differ from each other in terms of execution model, communication style, synchronization etc., but also in kind of analysis which are suitable. To describe the internal behavior of a component, in a structured way, in this thesis we propose REsource Model for Embedded Systems (REMES) that describes both functional and extra-functional behavior of interacting embedded components. We also formalize the resource-wise properties of interest and show how to analyze such behavioral models against them.</p> / PROGRESS

Progress

<p>The impact of computer programs in safety-critical systems has increased in the past decades and computer-based systems can now be found in a wide range of applications. </p><p>A new approach for developing dependable systems is documenting all design rationale that affects safety using Intent Specifications. A recent approach for developing complex systems efficiently and in an upgradeable manner is Component-Based System Engineering. In this thesis, these approaches are combined in the development and upgrade of a Remote Robot Control Unit by using the tool SpecTRM. </p><p>The case study showed that Intent Specifications and CBSE could successfully be combined. The tool SpecTRM was also studied during this work. It showed that traceability is of great importance during system upgrades. Since SpecTRM does not support formal verification of safety properties in design models, the SpecTRM-RL models were translated to Esterel code. Further analysis showed that functional verification can be efficient and useful when using the automatic model-checking tool available in Esterel Studio. This work also proposes a practical guideline for system upgrades in component-based systems, presented as the Sigma model. </p><p>The work also showed some shortcomings. First of all, the tool SpecTRM is at an early development stage and not yet mature for industrial use. Secondly, neither of the two languages SpecTRM-RL and Esterel was expressive enough for some of the numerical computations and data-exchange structures needed for navigation in the system. Finally, the verifier was not able to prove any data properties since valued signals are abstracted into pure signals during verification in Esterel Studio.</p>

<p>Component-based software development has emerged as a promising approach for developing complex software systems by composing smaller independently developed components into larger component assemblies. This approach offers means to increase software reuse, achieve higher flexibility and shorter time-to-market by the use of off-the-shelf components (COTS). However, the use of COTS in safety-critical system is highly unexplored.</p><p>This thesis addresses the problems appearing in component-based development of safety-critical systems. We aim at efficient reasoning about safety at system level while adding or replacing components. For safety-related reasoning it does not suffice to consider functioning components in their intended environments but also the behaviour of components in presence of single or multiple faults. Our contribution is a formal component model that includes the notion of a safety interface. It describes how the component behaves with respect to violation of a given system-level property in presence of faults in its environment. This approach also provides a link between formal analysis of components in safety-critical systems and the traditional engineering processes supported by model-based development.</p><p>We also present an algorithm for deriving safety interfaces given a particular safety property and fault modes for the component. The safety interface is then used in a method proposed for compositional reasoning about component assemblies. Instead of reasoning about the effect of faults on the composed system, we suggest analysis of fault tolerance through pair wise analysis based on safety interfaces.</p><p>The framework is demonstrated as a proof-of-concept in two case studies; a hydraulic system from the aerospace industry and an adaptive cruise controller from the automotive industry. The case studies have shown that a more efficient system-level safety analysis can be performed using the safety interfaces.</p>

The goal of this thesis is to develop an easily modifiable sensor system. To achieve this goal SensorML (an XML based sensor language) is combined with Java Beans (a component model language). An important part of SensorML is its process model. Each sensor in the real world is depicted in SensorML by a process model, whereas the connections between the sensors are shown by a process chain. This thesis presents a translator that reads these documents and converts them to Java Beans. Through testing the Translator is proved more efficient than the convenient Object Oriented approach. / UOIT

<p>The major problem of robotics research today is that there is a barrier to entry into robotics research. Robot system software is complex and a researcher that wishes to concentrate on one particular problem often needs to learn about details, dependencies and intricacies of the complete system. This is because a robot system needs several different modules that need to communicate and execute in parallel.</p><p>Today there is not much controlled comparisons of algorithms and solutions for a given task, which is the standard scientific method of other sciences. There is also very little sharing between groups and projects, requiring code to be written from scratch over and over again.</p><p>This thesis proposes a general framework for robotics. By examining successful systems and architectures of past and present, yields a number of key properties. Some of these are ease of use, modularity, portability and efficiency. Even though there is much consensus on that the hybrid deliberate/reactive is the best architectural model that the community has produced so far, a framework should not stipulate a specific architecture. Instead the framework should enable the building of different architectures. Such a scheme implies that the modules are seen as common peers and not divided into clients and servers or forced into a set layering.</p><p>Using a standardized middleware such as CORBA, efficient communication can be carried out between different platforms and languages. Middleware also provides network transparency which is valuable in distributed systems. Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE) is an approach that could solve many of the aforementioned problems. It enforces modularity which helps to manage complexity. Components can be developed in isolation, since algorithms are encapsulated in components where only the interfaces need to be known by other users. A complete system can be created by assembling components from different sources.</p><p>Comparisons and sharing can greatly benefit from CBSE. A component-based framework called ORCA has been implemented with the following characteristics. All communication is carried out be either of three communication patterns, query, send and push. Communication is done using CORBA, although most of the CORBA code is hidden for the developer and can in the future be replaced by other mechanisms. Objects are transported between components in the form of the CORBA valuetype.</p><p>A component model is specified that among other things include support for a state-machine. This also handles initialization and sets up communication. Configuration is achieved by the presence of an XML-file per component. A hardware abstraction scheme is specified that basically route the communication patterns right down to the hardware level.</p><p>The framework has been verified by the implementation of a number of working systems. </p>

In dem Beitrag wird zunächst kurz die Funktionalität des Forschungsprototyps cofis.net, einem Informationssystem für Virtuelle Finanzdienstleister, vorgestellt und ein Einblick in seine Entwicklungsgeschichte gewährt. Anschließend wird ein Überblick über die Fachkomponenten des Informationssystems geben. Die Fachkomponenten von cofis.net wurden auf Basis des Memorandums zur Vereinheitlichung der Spezifikation von Fachkomponenten des Arbeitskreises 5.10.3: Komponentenorientierte betriebliche Anwendungssysteme der Gesellschaft für Informatik spezifiziert. Auszüge aus der erstellten Spezifikation werden vorgestellt. Darüber hinaus werden Erfahrungen, die bei der Spezifikation gemacht worden sind, sowie dabei identifizierte Problembe-reiche dargelegt. Abgerundet wird die Fallstudie durch Empfehlungen, die Hinweise zur Weiter-entwicklung des Memorandums beschreiben.

Kuriant informacines sistemas, tenka kurti tuos pačius sistemos komponentus, o sistemą realizuojant komponentinio modeliavimo principu, galima panaudoti jau sukurtus komponentus juos papildant, susiaurinant bei pagal poreikius koreguojant. Pagrindinis darbo tikslas - integruoti veiklos modelį ir detalų IS projekto modelį, panaudojant komponentinį sistemos projektavimo metodą. Darbe išanalizuotos Magic Draw UML 12.5 galimybės, sukurtas profailas, skirtas nubraižyti komponentinį IS modelį. Realizuota komponentinio modelio transformacijos į klasių modelį programinė įranga, sukurta MS Visual Studio .NET 2005, kuri sugeba atlikti komponentinio IS modelio transformavimą į UML klasių modelį. Atliktas eksperimentas, palygintas sukurta programine įranga sugeneruotų komponentų programinis kodas su „Magic Draw UML 12.5“ programine įranga generuotais klasių aprašais. / Presented work covers an approach to applications development based on the principles of the model-driven architecture and using the component-based system model (CBSM). The CBSM helps to refine main components and interfaces of the application at the design stage. The information system’s architecture is structured considering a business system as a set of different domains (Business, Data, Information process) with definite types of components, and with interfaces between the components of different types. Presented work is topical, when creates the same information system’s components. These components can be used and they can be modified or changed. Component - based model transformation system is created and tested with special project.