Domain Of Automation Systems Research Articles

Efficient Impact Analysis of Changes in the Requirements of Manufacturing Automation Systems

Various drivers, especially increasing market dynamics, force industrial enterprises to evolve their production facilities ever more frequently. Analyzing the impact of changed requirements on the production facilities early in the engineering process would facilitate the estimation of resulting costs and therefore reduce project risk. In industrial practice, requirements specifications are typically textual lists and only structured by a table of contents; an analysis of the impact of changes within the requirements specification is extensive, as no documented information is available about how the requirements and other elements of the requirements specification depend on each other.To identify impacts of changes in a requirements specification more efficiently, this paper proposes a model-based approach that classifies the elements of a requirements specification according to their contents and based on the classification preselects automatically candidate elements of the requirements specification that are possibly affected by the change. This paper shows the application of the approach on the manufacturing automation systems domain by means of a pick and place unit (PPU) demonstrator. The technical validation demonstrates that in the example of the PPU the impact analysis is more efficient with a content model than on an unstructured list; the effort for impact analysis is reduced further when adapting the content model to the manufacturing automation systems domain.

Constraint-based analysis of concurrent probabilistic hybrid systems: An application to networked automation systems

In previous publications, the authors have introduced the notion of stochastic satisfiability modulo theories (SSMT) and the corresponding SiSAT solving algorithm, which provide a symbolic method for the reachability analysis of probabilistic hybrid systems. SSMT extends satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) with randomized (or stochastic), existential, and universal quantification, as known from stochastic propositional satisfiability. In this paper, we extend the SSMT-based procedures to the symbolic analysis of concurrent probabilistic hybrid systems. After formally introducing the computational model, we provide a mechanized translation scheme to encode probabilistic bounded reachability problems of concurrent probabilistic hybrid automata as linearly sized SSMT formulae, which in turn can be solved by the SiSAT tool. We furthermore propose an algorithmic enhancement which tailors SiSAT to probabilistic bounded reachability problems by caching and reusing solutions obtained on bounded reachability problems of smaller depth. An essential part of this article is devoted to a case study from the networked automation systems domain. We explain in detail the formal model in terms of concurrent probabilistic automata, its encoding into the SiSAT modeling language, and finally the automated quantitative analysis.

Sensor Technologies for Future Automation Systems

Sensor technologies offer new paradigms for computation, control, communication, and collaboration. In this article, we discuss the impact of sensor technologies on automation systems and issues that must be resolved before such technologies can be applied to the domain of automation systems. Over the last decade, intelligent sensors and actuators, which are connected via traditional control networks, have become increasingly important elements of automation systems. The current performance of control networks and emerging trends in general communication networks motivate a consideration of Ethernet and wireless networks as network foundations for future automation systems. Simultaneous with this transition, the automation industry needs to incorporate emerging trends in pervasive devices and new system-level properties such as adaptation, self-organization, and self-healing. The sensor-actuator network for automation described here represents a confluence of emerging trends in device technologies, communications, and system concepts with the mature domain of automation systems. We discuss four critical infrastructure issues central to sensor-actuator networks for automation: operating systems, communications mechanisms, security, and distributed services.