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The development of dynamic data-based Decision Support Systems (DSSs) along with the increasing availability of data in the industry, makes real-time data acquisition and management a challenge. Intelligent automation appears as a holistic combination of automation with analytics and decisions made by artificial intelligence, delivering smart manufacturing and mass customization while improving resource efficiency. However, challenges towards the development of intelligent automation architectures include the lack of interoperability between systems, complex data preparation steps, and the inability to deal with both high-frequency and high-volume data in a timely fashion. This paper contributes to industrial frameworks focused on the development of standardized system architectures for Industry 4.0, closing the gap between generic architectures and physical realizations. It proposes a platform for intelligent automation relying on a gateway or middleware between field devices, enterprise databases, and DSSs in real-time scenarios. This is achieved by providing the middleware interoperability, determinism, and automatic data structuring over an industrial communication infrastructure such as the OPC UA Standard over Time Sensitive Networks (TSN). Cloud services and database warehousing used to address some of the challenges are handled using fog computing and a multi-workload database. This paper presents an implementation of the platform in the pharmaceutical industry, providing interoperability and real-time reaction capability to changes to an industrial prototype using dynamic scheduling algorithms.

Declarative if–then rules have proven very useful in many applications of expert systems. They can be managed in deductive databases and evaluated using the well-known forward-chaining approach. For domain-experts, however, the syntax of rules becomes complicated quickly, and already many different knowledge representation formalisms exist. Expert knowledge is often acquired in story form using interviews. In this paper, we discuss its representation by defining domain-specific languages ( Dsl s) for declarative expert rules. They can be embedded in Prolog systems in internal Dsl s using term expansion and as external Dsl s using definite clause grammars and quasi-quotations – for more sophisticated syntaxes. Based on the declarative rules and the integration with the Prolog -based deductive database system DDbase , multiple rules acquired in practical case studies can be combined, compared, graphically analysed by domain-experts, and evaluated, resulting in an extensible system for expert knowledge. As a result, the actual modeling Dsl becomes executable; the declarative forward-chaining evaluation of deductive databases can be understood by the domain experts. Our Dsl for rules can be further improved by integrating ontologies and rule annotations.

Velocity fields play an important role in surveillance since they describe typical motion behaviors of video objects (e.g., pedestrians) in the scene. This paper presents an algorithm for the alignment of velocity fields acquired by different cameras, at different time intervals, from different viewpoints. Velocity fields are aligned using a warping function which maps corresponding points and vectors in both fields. The warping parameters are estimated by minimizing a non-linear least squares energy. Experimental tests show that the proposed model is able to compensate significant misalignments, including translation, rotation and scaling.