In developed countries, public health systems are under pressure due to the increasing percentage of population over 65. In this context, homecare based on ambient intelligence technology seems to be a suitable solution to allow elderly people to continue to enjoy the comforts of home and help optimize medical resources. Thus, current technological developments make it possible to build complex homecare applications that demand, among others, flexibility mechanisms for being able to evolve as context does (adaptability), as well as avoiding service disruptions in the case of node failure (availability). The solution proposed in this paper copes with these flexibility requirements through the whole life-cycle of the target applications: from design phase to runtime. The proposed domain modeling approach allows medical staff to design customized applications, taking into account the adaptability needs. It also guides software developers during system implementation. The application execution is managed by a multi-agent based middleware, making it possible to meet adaptation requirements, assuring at the same time the availability of the system even for stateful applications.
Modern manufacturing systems are expected to be flexible and efficient in order to cope with challenging market demands. Thus, they must be flexible enough as to meet changing requirements such as changes in production, energy efficiency, performance optimization, fault tolerance to process or controller faults, among others. Demanding requirements can be defined as a set of quality of service (QoS) requirements to be met. This paper proposes a generic and customizable multi-agent architecture that, making use of distributed agents, monitors QoS, triggering, if needed, a reconfiguration of the control system to recover QoS. As a proof of concept, the architecture has been implemented to provide availability of the control system understood as service continuity. The prototype has been tested in a case study consisting of an assembly cell where assessment of the approach has been conducted.
Current automation systems demand flexibility enough to meet the challenging requirements of applications in terms of complexity, extensibility or dynamism. From a global perspective the whole automation system must meet quality of service (QoS) requirements which can be, for instance, energy efficiency, load balance or full availability. This paper presents a reconfiguration-based architecture triggered by a higher level supervision that makes use of a component based middleware. The first step of the supervisory architecture is presented aiming at achieving the availability of the control system even in presence of control equipment failures.
The Industrie 4.0 initiative emphasizes the consistent digitalization and linking of all productive units, including the definition of industrial control systems. This work proposes a model-based approach to develop Industrial Process Measurement and Control Systems. It uses modern software technologies but software complexity is wrapped using the notation, syntax and semantics of the field. It is UML modeling tool independent, due to the definition of domain profiles. It is also PLC programming tool independent, as the software architecture is generated following the PLCopen XML standard.
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