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The ongoing transition towards electro-mobility requires an increased reactivity and reconfigurability in automotive assembly. However, the traditional line assembly, which is characterized by rigid cycle times and linear product flow, has already been pushed to its flexibility limits. Drivers are the increase of product changes, variants and derivatives within assembly lines. To further increase reactivity and reconfigurability, matrix structured assembly configurations are a possible solution. Several studies highlight the theoretical advantages, but it has not been applied and validated in industrial use-cases, due to the high transformational gap between line and matrix configurations. In contrast, segment-wise line-less structures show a high potential for this.

Volatile market demands, stronger regionalization of markets, ever-shortening product and innovation cycles as well as an ongoing demand for individualized products increase the need for adaptable production systems. More than a century after the start of mass production, alternative production systems are required to go beyond the current state of the art concerning adaptability, flexibility and reconfigurability to market requirements and demands. Fluid Manufacturing Systems (FLMS) describe such new production system concepts. The basic idea is to dynamically adapt and change all logistics and production processes, based on the comprehensive application of cyber-physical production systems (CPPS), thus enabling ongoing change in setup, configuration and product scope. CPPS provide a high degree of changeability, thus allowing for fast adaptions of the system to the changing requirements. Therefore the processes are continuously assessed, benchmarked and reconfigured to match the functional capabilities of production and logistic resources to the actual requirements originating from products and external influencing factors. Within this paper, conventional production systems such as Dedicated Manufacturing Lines (DML), Matrix Manufacturing System (MMS) and Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) are described and characterized using defined criteria. The paper closes with a description of the Fluid Manufacturing System (FLMS), the core hypotheses and the advantages of the presented concept compared to conventional productoion systems.

In an age overrun with information, the ability to process reams of data has become crucial. The demand for data will continue to grow as smart gadgets multiply and become increasingly integrated into our daily lives. Next-generation industries in artificial intelligence services and high-performance computing are so far supported by microelectronic platforms. These data-intensive enterprises rely on continual improvements in hardware. Their prospects are running up against a stark reality: conventional one-size-fits-all solutions offered by digital electronics can no longer satisfy this need, as Moore's law (exponential hardware scaling), interconnection density, and the von Neumann architecture reach their limits. With its superior speed and reconfigurability, analog photonics can provide some relief to these problems; however, complex applications of analog photonics have remained largely unexplored due to the absence of a robust photonic integration industry. Recently, the landscape for commercially-manufacturable photonic chips has been changing rapidly and now promises to achieve economies of scale previously enjoyed solely by microelectronics. The scientific community has set out to build bridges between the domains of photonic device physics and neural networks, giving rise to the field of \emph{neuromorphic photonics}. This article reviews the recent progress in integrated neuromorphic photonics. We provide an overview of neuromorphic computing, discuss the associated technology (microelectronic and photonic) platforms and compare their metric performance. We discuss photonic neural network approaches and challenges for integrated neuromorphic photonic processors while providing an in-depth description of photonic neurons and a candidate interconnection architecture. We conclude with a future outlook of neuro-inspired photonic processing.

Fault-tolerant control aims at a gradual shutdown response in automated systems when faults occur. It satisfies the industrial demand for enhanced availability and safety, in contrast to traditional reactions to faults, which bring about sudden shutdowns and loss of availability. The book presents effective model-based analysis and design methods for fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control. Architectural and structural models are used to analyse the propagation of the fault through the process, to test the fault detectability and to find the redundancies in the process that can be used to ensure fault tolerance. It also introduces design methods suitable for diagnostic systems and fault-tolerant controllers for continuous processes that are described by analytical models of discrete-event systems represented by automata. The book is suitable for engineering students, engineers in industry and researchers who wish to get an overview of the variety of approaches to process diagnosis and fault-tolerant control. The authors have extensive teaching experience with graduate and PhD students, as well as with industrial experts. Parts of this book have been used in courses for this audience. The authors give a comprehensive introduction to the main ideas of diagnosis and fault-tolerant control and present some of their most recent research achievements obtained together with their research groups in a close cooperatio n with European research projects. The third edition resulted from a major re-structuring and re-writing of the former edition, which has been used for a decade by numerous research groups. New material includes distributed diagnosis of continuous and discrete-event systems, methods for reconfigurability analysis, and extensions of the structural methods towards fault-tolerant control. The bibliographical notes at the end of all chapters have been up-dated. The chapters end with exercises to be used in lectures.

We put forward the concept of a reconfigurable cryptosystem. Intuitively, a reconfigurable cryptosystem allows to increase the security of the system at runtime, by changing a single central parameter we call common reference string CRS. In particular, e.g., a cryptanalytic advance does not necessarily entail a full update of a large public-key infrastructure; only the CRS needs to be updated. In this paper we focus on the reconfigurability of encryption and signature schemes, but we believe that this concept and the developed techniques can also be applied to other kind of cryptosystems. Besides a security definition, we offer two reconfigurable encryption schemes, and one reconfigurable signature scheme. Our first reconfigurable encryption scheme uses indistinguishability obfuscation however only in the CRS to adaptively derive short-term keys from long-term keys. The security of long-term keys can be based on a one-way function, and the security of both the indistinguishability obfuscation and the actual encryption scheme can be increased on-the-fly, by changing the CRS. We stress that our scheme remains secure even if previous short-term secret keys are leaked. Our second reconfigurable encryption scheme has a similar structure and similar security properties, but relies on a pairing-friendly group instead of obfuscation. Its security is based on the recently introduced hierarchy of $$k$$-SCasc assumptions. Similar to the $$k$$-Linear assumption, it is known that $$k$$-SCasc implies $$k+1$$-SCasc, and that this implication is proper in the generic group model. Our system allows to increase $$k$$ on-the-fly, just by changing the CRS. In that sense, security can be increased without changing any long-term keys. We also offer a reconfigurable signature scheme based on the same hierarchy of assumptions.

The reconfigurability of satellite control systems is a fundamental index to the capability of spacecraft stability after the faults occur in the process of satellite operating in-orbit. This paper addresses the problem of reconfigurability evaluation for faulty control systems. Firstly, The reconfiguration indicator based on system stability is presented by regarding the faults that occur in the system as model uncertainties. And then the method for normalized coprime factorization is introduced to describe the maximal reconfigurability boundary, which causes the control system instability when the fault exceeds the allowable range of the given controller and model. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed method is tested through an numerical simulation on the Hubble telescope.

Mobile manipulators have been extensively studied because of their reconfigurability and adaptability [265, 306] while multiple mobile manipulators in cooperation can perform a task which is impossible by a single robot.

Our discussion up until now has sufficiently clarified the need for production enterprises to adjust to the plethora of external and internal challenges that arise depending on the situation. Production enterprises have to adjust to the plethora of external and internal challenges by changeability. Changeability is defined here as an umbrella term for five classes of adaptability, namely: change-over ability, flexibility, reconfigurability, transformability and agility. In order to enable the factory objects to change, changeability enablers are necessary which are: universality, mobility, scalability, modularity and compatibility. In this chapter all terms are defined and it is exploited how to evaluate the changability of a factory. The chapter closes with a vision of the changeable factory.

Due to constant globalisation new trends on the market are coming up. One of the trends is the customisation of products for the customer and shorter product life cycles. To overcome the trends industries identified as key element self-reconfigurable production systems. A change to a running system means loss of time, money and manpower. A reconfigurable production system can automatically adapt to changes in terms of changing a machine or a product. The methodology behind is adapted from the office world and is called plug and produce. However, a production system has different requirements which need to be met. Due to a lack of homogeneity of industrial controllers in terms of communication and reconfigurability, as well as the interaction with the end user, the multi-agent technology was identified as a superior communicator. We present a new multilayered multi-agent architecture where the necessary agent types are introduced to fulfil the requirements for plug and produce. One scenario is shown where the architecture is employed to enable plug and produce capabilities and allow the system to adapt itself.

We present designs of reversible Peres logic gate and Feynman-Double logic gate based on all-optical switching by two-photon absorption induced free-carrier injection in silicon add-drop microring resonators. The logic gates have been theoretically analyzed using time-domain coupled-mode theory and all-optical switching has been optimized for low-power (25 mW) ultrafast (25 ps) operation with high modulation depth (85 %) to enable logic operations at 40 Gb/s. The advantages of high Q-factor, tunability, compactness, cascadibility, reversibility and reconfigurability make the designs favorable for practical applications.

We propose a real-time, Realizable, Responsive, Unobtrusive Unit (rt-R2U2) to meet the emerging needs for System Health Management (SHM) of new safety-critical embedded systems like automated vehicles, Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), or small satellites. SHM for these systems must be able to handle unexpected situations and adapt specifications quickly during flight testing between closely-timed consecutive missions, not mid-mission, necessitating fast reconfiguration. They must enable more advanced probabilistic reasoning for diagnostics and prognostics while running aboard limited hardware without affecting the certified on-board software. We define and prove correct translations of two real-time projections of Linear Temporal Logic to two types of efficient observer algorithms to continuously assess the status of the system. A synchronous observer yields an instant abstraction of the satisfaction check, whereas an asynchronous observer concretizes this abstraction at a later, a priori known, time. By feeding the system’s real-time status into a statistical reasoning unit, e.g., based on Bayesian networks, we enable advanced health estimation and diagnosis. We experimentally demonstrate our novel framework on real flight data from NASA’s Swift UAS. By on-boarding rt-R2U2 aboard an existing FPGA already built into the standard UAS design and seamlessly intercepting sensor values through read-only observations of the system bus, we avoid system integration problems of software instrumentation or added hardware. The flexibility of our approach with regard to changes in the monitored specification is not due to the reconfigurability offered by FPGAs; it is a benefit of the modularity of our observers and would also be available on non-reconfigurable hardware platforms such as ASICs.

Articulated Wheeled Robot (AWR) locomotion systems consist of a chassis connected to sets of wheels through articulated linkages. Such articulated “legwheel systems” facilitate reconfigurability that has significant applications in many arenas, but also engender constraints that make the design, analysis and control difficult. In this paper we study this class of systems in the context of design, analysis and control of a novel planar reconfigurable omnidirectional wheeled mobile robot. This AWR distinguishes itself from existing wheeled mobile robots by having the capability to change the location of its wheels relative to the chassis.We first extend a twist-based modeling approach to systematically construct the symbolic kinematic model for a general class of AWR before specializing it to our planar AWR example. We then develop a kinematic redundancy resolution scheme to coordinate the motion of the articulated legs and wheels. Two generations of physical prototypes were developed, refined and tested using simulation/virtual prototyping and realtime/ hardware in the loop methodologies. Representative results from both sets of approaches are presented to illustrate combined locomotion and reconfiguration.

Digital microfluidic Biochips (DMFB) have been developed as a promising platform for Lab-on-chip systems that manipulate individual droplets of chemicals on a 2D planar array of electrodes. Such systems can perform rapid automated biochemical analysis that can be applied to a wide variety of applications including on-chip immunoassays, environmental toxicity monitoring, high-throughput DNA sequencing, point-of-care diagnostics, and biochemical sensing. Design of DMFBs involves system level synthesis -that starts from a given bioassay protocol with a specified biochip architecture and determines the resource allocation, scheduling of individual operations followed by placement of modules and the nets (both in terms of source, targets and mixers) for the said application. In this paper we have proposed a new technique of droplet based route aware synthesis followed by placement to generate a layout that greatly minimizes the utilization of resources in the form of hard blockages termed as modules as well as enhances the routing process in terms of overall completion time for execution of multiple bioassay protocols simultaneously. Using the inherent nature of reconfigurability and scalability of DMFBs the utilization of resources in terms of fixed modules has been greatly reduced and corresponding results tested on three PCRs are found to be encouraging in relation to contemporary works.

A new perspective on a control architecture, capable to increase the overall performance of the manufacturing equipment by endowing it with distributed intelligence, thus providing short ramp-up times, plug-and-play capability, great integrability and scalability, together with cost reduction, is presented in this paper. The architecture concept, based on the outcome of applying specific problem solving methods, shows an intelligent axis equipped with a network of smart sensors and units controlled and supervised by a master control unit. The proposed solution is based on both electronic and software designs in order to expand equipment performances and take a step forward in supporting manufacturing systems towards reconfigurability. An experimental testing bench has been constructed around a mechanical axis for exploring control architecture performances and intelligent axis concept feasibility. Results have shown that the proposed control architecture is functional, highly reconfigurable, cost effective, and the concept of intelligent axis is feasible.

The innovation of the reconfigurable components depends on not only materials but also the circuitry concepts. The reconfigurability of frontends roots in the tunable devices which ground on the fundamental components like varactors and resonators. In this chapter, the multilayer thin-film technology is extended to accommodate novel layers.When a 20 nm thin conductive layer is introduced in the middle of two BST thin-film layers, and antipolarized electric fields are applied to the two layers, the unavoidable generation of acoustic resonance due to the electrostriction can be considerably suppressed.

This paper presents a heterogeneous reconfigurable system for real-time applications applying particle filters. The system consists of an FPGA and a multi-threaded CPU. We propose a method to adapt the number of particles dynamically and utilise the run-time reconfigurability of the FPGA for reduced power and energy consumption. An application is developed which involves simultaneous mobile robot localisation and people tracking. It shows that the proposed adaptive particle filter can reduce up to 99% of computation time. Using run-time reconfiguration, we achieve 34% reduction in idle power and save 26-34% of system energy. Our proposed system is up to 7.39 times faster and 3.65 times more energy efficient than the Intel Xeon X5650 CPU with 12 threads, and 1.3 times faster and 2.13 times more energy efficient than an NVIDIA Tesla C2070 GPU.

We present designs of all-optical ultrafast simultaneous NOR logic gate/Half-Adder/Subtractor, Full-Adder/Subtractor and Multiplexer/De-Multiplexer circuits using add-drop silicon microring resonators. The proposed circuits require less number of switches and inputs for realization of the desired logic compared to earlier reported designs. Multiplexer/De-Multiplexer operations can be realized from the same circuit by simply interchanging the inputs and outputs. Lower energy consumption and delays along with reconfigurability and compactness make them attractive for practical applications.

A Reconfigurable Manufacturing System RMS has the ability to adapt itself for new requirements and to handle accidental damages. This reconfiguration makes the system more efficient, thus, enhances its productivity. However, the development process of these systems and their reliability remain a big challenge. Formal methods are considered as one issue for designing theses systems and analysing their properties. The objective of this paper is to apply Petri Nets based methods in the modelling and simulation of RMS. In particular, RONs Reconfigurable Object Nets are used as a high level Petri Nets to catch the reconfigurability aspect in RMSs. This exploitation allows the developer to simulate, and verify formally the correctness and reliability of the RMSs.

This paper describes an operating system (OS) and supporting development tools for Petri nets-specified dynamically reconfigurable embedded control systems construction. We use nets-within-nets paradigm formalized by Reference Nets. This formalism allows for layered architecture that enables the dynamic reconfigurability of the modeled system. Our specific contribution is the idea of code generation for a virtual machine (VM), which is able to interpret a model composed of a set of Petri nets. This VM is part of the OS for the target microcontroller. The proposed OS and application architecture then enables incremental changes within the system specification and implementation during its life-time.

The Box-joint tooling, which can rapidly adapt to the variant products and the modified structures, is a new type of flexible tooling with high reconfigurability. In this paper the reconfigurability of the Box-joint assembly tooling are analyzed in detail, and the configuration and analysis system is developed in the CATIA software. Subsequently the structure and functions of the system are presented, then each module of the system is described in detail. Finally the floor-beams of a certain fuselage are taken as an example to validate the functions of the system. The results indicate that by using this system, workload of tooling designers can be largely reduced, and the design efficiency is siginificantly increased.

Content-based publish-subscribe is emerging as a communication paradigm able to cope with the needs of scalability, flexibility, and reconfigurability typical of highly dynamic distributed applications. However very few efforts concentrates on application development and cost analysis for content based publish subscribe model in real time mobile environment. In this paper we illustrate the application developed for content based publish subscribe in wired and wireless network. Also we present the result of cost analysis performed using cost model in real time mobile environment. The result of the experiment which is carried out using mobile devices show accordance with cost analysis, which verifies the correctness and usefulness of cost model.

MBE solutions, including their corresponding MDA frameworks, cover many parts of industrial application development processes. Although model based development methodologies are in abundance, fully integrated, domain specific methodologies still find their niche in specialized application scenarios. In this paper, such an alternative methodology will be presented that targets reconfigurable networked systems executing on top of interconnected heterogeneous hardware nodes. The methodology covers the whole development cycle; it even utilizes a configuration model for component reconfigurability, and also involves a first-order logic based structural modeling language, Alloy, in the analysis of component deployment and reconfiguration. The methodology is supported by both a metamodel based tooling environment within GME and a robust distributed middleware platform over Erlang/OTP. Due to its special applicability, the methodology is limited in scope and scaling, though core parts have been successfully showcased in a sensor network demonstrator of the IST project RUNES.

The latest commercial field programmable gate array (FPGA) like a Virtex-6 can perform partial reconfiguration (PR). PR can take full advantage of FPGA's reconfigurability. However, PR bitstream (PRB) which created by authorized design flow cannot be relocated to other partially reconfigurable regions (PRRs). This indicates that the preparation of many PRBs are needed to perform a flexible partial reconfiguration. This paper presents a uniforming design technique for PRRs in order to relocate their PRB. Additionally, our design technique enables to implement large partial module by combining neighboring PRRs. To make relocatable, our technique only restricts the placement of reconfigurable resource and the route of interconnection. Therefore, our design can be achieved only using Xilinx EDA tools. Through verification, the correct operation of the relocated PRBs is confirmed.

Today, competitive pressures require companies to be very fast in introducing new products, to have short production lead times to manufacture and deliver products to customers and to be permanently aligned with the market. Product life-cycles tend to shorten. Even the dynamically reconfigurable global networked structures corresponding to the recent approach of the Agile/ Virtual Enterprise (A/VE) organizational model tend to last a shorter time while becoming more dynamic in their structural reconfiguration. The ability of fast reconfigurability is a requirement that the enterprises corresponding to this A/VE model must satisfy to assure a permanent alignment of the network with the market as highlighted in the paper. The paper defines and discusses the main concepts and features concerning a proposed platform for A/VE synthesis, based on reconfiguration dynamics to help quantify, analyze and manage A/VE, within the context of Ubiquitous Manufacturing System., The authors wish to acknowledge the support of: 1) The Foundation for Science and Technology – FCT, under the scope of the financed Project on ‘Ubiquitous oriented embedded systems for globally distributed factories of manufacturing enterprises’ PTDC/EMEGIN/102143/2008, and 2) EUREKA, by the Project E!4177-Pro-Factory UES.

In this paper a Photonic microwave filters are photonics sub system design with aim of carrying equivalent tasks to those an supplementary advantage inherent to photonics such as low lass, high band width, immunity to electromagnetic inference (EMI), tunability, reconfigurability, reduced size and weight, and low and constant electrical loss. Many photonic microwave filter architectures have been proposed over the last years using a variety of fiber-optic devices. Some of them are based on using multiple optical carriers wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM)] and dispersive media to obtain a set of time-delayed samples of the RF input signal. In this paper, the statistical analysis of the performance of photonic microwave filter is based on multiple optical carriers (WDM) and a dispersive medium, with random errors in amplitude and wavelength spacing between optical carriers is presented.

Efficiency in aircraft production can be increased by using reconfigurable handling systems for assembling large components. The development of such a handling system can be simplified by using existing control functions like trajectory generation and transformations, e.g. from a robot simulation tool. Also self-optimizing functions, like the integration of production metrology for error compensation, can be implemented through this approach. In order to use the simulation functions and data for online controlling of the real robots, a fast and reliable data transfer between the simulation tool and the real controllers is required. Reconfigurability is achieved by a consistent modular design, from a virtual model in a simulation tool to the mechatronic design of a real robot.

This paper focuses on the actual state of machine tool changeability as a basis for implementing a changeability strategy as a competitive advance. The recent crisis shows a lack of scalability and reconfigurability in order to handle changes in production volumes or switches to the production of other products. Due to this circumstance the strategy of implementing agile production systems is gaining more and more importance. The question dealt with in this paper is how nowadays machine tools can support this vision of a changeable and agile production strategy.

This paper presents a flexible and reconfigurable assembly cell designed using the Holonic Manufacturing System paradigm. The function of the cell is to assemble damped machining tools. The automation is challenging due to the size and frequency of changes in the product spectrum. The current version of the cell is composed of an assembly robot, a pallet transport system, the feeding equipment including a custom elevator, and sensors including stereo vision systems. The Holonic Manufacturing System paradigm has been used both for the architecture of the real-time control system and for the mechanical design of the cell. Therefore, when appropriate, the holons do not communicate through software or signal but through the realization of their tasks and the use of sensors to update the view of their environment. The system demonstrates the advantages of the Holonic Manufacturing System paradigm to achieve the required reliability, flexibility and reconfigurability of smaller manufacturing cells.

State-transition systems communicating by shared variables have been the underlying model of choice for applications of model checking. Such formalisms, however, have difficulty with modeling process creation or death and communication reconfigurability. Here, we introduce "dynamic reactive modules" (DRM), a state-transition modeling formalism that supports dynamic reconfiguration and creation/death of processes. The resulting formalism supports two types of variables, data variables and reference variables. Reference variables enable changing the connectivity between processes and referring to instances of processes. We show how this new formalism supports parallel composition and refinement through trace containment. DRM provide a natural language for modeling (and ultimately reasoning about) biological systems and multiple threads communicating through shared variables.