Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In the last years, several manufacturing control architectures using emergent paradigms and technologies, such as multi-agent and holonic manufacturing systems, have been proposed to address the challenge of developing control systems capable of handling certain types of disturbances at the factory level. One of these holonic architectures is ADACOR, which integrates a set of paradigms and technologies for distributed manufacturing systems complemented by formal modelling techniques, to achieve a flexible and adaptive holonic/collaborative control architecture. The results obtained in the first experiments using the ADACOR architecture are presented in this paper, and also compared to the results produced by other control architectures. For this purpose a set of quantitative and qualitative parameters were measured, to evaluate static and dynamic performance of the control architectures.

In this paper we propose a hybrid physical/simulation environment for benchmarking real-time distributed control systems. This environment uses Arena® Real Time for simulation and the Java-based TINI platform for real-time control. The paper focuses on the development of a software design pattern for client-server communication.

An approach to combine information access and control operations in a process automation system extended with multi-agent system technology is presented in this paper. According to this approach a multi-agent system supervises an ordinary process automation system by performing higher-level information access and control operations. The information access operations are aimed for actively combining information from different sources depending on the monitoring tasks of the users. The control operations of the multi-agent system are supervisory control tasks performed either in sequential or iterative fashion. The expected benefit of the multi-agent system is enhanced adaptability of the automation system and increased situation awareness of its users. The architecture of the multi-agent system is based on the BDI agent model and utilization of so-called ontologies. An approach for engineering applications for this kind of a multi-agent system is also discussed. The approach is demonstrated with results from experiments performed with industrial test data and a laboratory test process.

This paper focuses on the recent work on the Automation Object repository (AORepository) for the pen,bject-riented kowledge conomy for ntelligent inustrial utomation (OOONEIDA). The AORepository is currently based on the University of Calgary’s CAREO (Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects) architecture and is supported by the CANARIE CA-NET4 network. In this paper, we describe the general architecture of the AORepository and provide examples of its use in the OOONEIDA initiative.

Adaptive Manufacturing is identified by the European High-Level Group (Manufuture2004) as one of four major drivers of industrial technologies in “Manufacturing 2020”. New technologies for efficient engineering of safe, fault-tolerant and downtimeless systems and their adaptations are preconditions for this vision of future manufacturing. Without such solutions, engineering adaptations of the Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS) will by far exceed the costs of engineering the initial system and the reuse of equipment becomes inefficient.

In this work a new approach for model driven, component based development of safe, downtimeless, distributed real–time control and for fault–tolerant, controlled evolution of IACS during their adaptation is proposed. This new method significantly increase engineering efficiency and reuse in component-based IACS.

The radio frequency identification (RFID) is a technology for automatic identification and localization of items, particularly in supply chain. Unlike bar code technology that detects the optical signals reflected from bar code labels, RFID uses radio waves to transmit the information from an RFID tag placed on the physical object to the RFID reader. A vast amount of raw data coming from RFID readers needs to be collected, filtered and preprocessed prior to providing it to high-level applications and information systems. Current architectures (like ’Savant’, ’edge servers’ and similar) for collection and filtering are most likely of centralized nature. It obviously does not conform to the distributed nature of agent-based solutions for the RFID-enabled manufacturing control systems. In this paper, we present an agent-based solution where specialized agents collect and filter the RFID data obtained directly from RFID readers and provide the data to other agents via standard agent communication mechanisms.

We consider the scheduling issues for The London Underground (LU), which spans the entire city, and is a vast network of inter-related railway lines. By its very nature, it is a dynamic, complex and unpredictable environment; operating or being maintained 24 hours-a-day. This paper reports on an investigation into how a Multi-Agent System (MAS) may be used for resolving scheduling issues for LU. It is a previously unexplored domain. A prototype system MASLU is developed through the use of MAS technology, in an innovative and unique manner, with a view to resolving the London Undergrounds scheduling issues in real time.

Early and consistent detection of abnormal conditions is important to the safe and efficient operation of complex industrial processes. Our research focuses on enabling the operators and engineers who control and maintain such systems to describe process conditions to software agents, deploy such agents to continuously monitor live process data, and receive appropriate notification from their personal agents concerning the process state. The resulting dynamic population of monitoring agents is managed by our agile computing framework according to policies that define computing and networking resource restrictions as well as user notification requirements and preferences.

Within this paper we describe a simulation environment for the underwater surveillance and propose architecture of control part of autonomous robot capable of efficient operation in such environment. Besides this the algorithms for decentralized coordination within a group of such robots and video stream transmission path planning are discussed. Development of these algorithms was necessary due to the nature of environment, where individual robots can become temporarily inaccessible.

IT systems are getting more connected, more network-like and hence more complex. The question arises, how such systems with steadily increasing complexity could be managed? Therefore new innovative approaches like Arthur Koestler’s Holon approach are needed. This method arose in the 60’s of the past century as a philosophical work based upon a collection of parables, but not much tested and used yet. This paper describes how this approach is deployed for the Supply Chain domain as a reference model for Supply Chain Networks. It can be shown, that based on better methods for the complexity management better efficiency as well as effectiveness can be achieved.