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Federated learning is a branch of machine learning where a shared model is created in a decentralized and privacy-preserving fashion, but existing approaches using blockchain are limited by tailored models. We consider the possibility to extend a set of supported models by introducing the oracle service and exploring the usability of blockchain-based architecture. The investigated architecture combines an oracle service with a Hyperledger Fabric chaincode. We compared two logistic regression implementations in Go language&mdash, a pure chaincode and an oracle service&mdash, at various data (2&ndash, 32 k instances) and network (3&ndash, 13 peers) sizes. Experiments were run to assess the performance of blockchain-based model inference using 2D synthetic and EEG eye state datasets for a supervised machine learning detection task. The benchmarking results showed that the impact on performance is acceptable with the median overhead of oracle service reaching 2&ndash, 4%, depending on the dimensionality of the dataset. The overhead tends to diminish at large dataset sizes with the runtime depending on the network size linearly, where additional peers increased the runtime by 6.3 and 6.6 s for 2D and EEG datasets, respectively. Demonstrated negligible difference between implementations justifies the flexible choice of model in the blockchain-based federated learning and other machine learning applications.

We present the OpenFlexure Microscope software stack which provides computer control of our open source motorised microscope. Our diverse community of users needs both graphical and script-based interfaces. We split the control code into client and server applications interfaced via a web API conforming to the W3C Web of Things standard. A graphical interface is viewed either in a web browser or in our cross-platform Electron application, and gives basic interactive control including common operations such as Z stack acquisition and tiled scanning. Automated control is possible from Python and M atlab , or any language that supports HTTP requests. Network control makes the software stack more robust, allows multiple microscopes to be controlled by one computer, and facilitates sharing of equipment. Graphical and script-based clients can run simultaneously, making it easier to monitor ongoing experiments. We have included an extension mechanism to add functionality, for example controlling additional hardware components or adding automation routines. Using a Web of Things approach has resulted in a user-friendly and extremely versatile software control solution for the OpenFlexure Microscope, and we believe this approach could be generalized in the future to make automated experiments involving several instruments much easier to implement.

International audience; Photovoltaic water pumping systems (PVWPS) are a promising solution to improve domestic water access in low-income rural areas. It is challenging, however, to make them more affordable for the local communities. We develop here a comparative methodology to assess relevant features of both widely employed PVWPS architecture with water tank storage, and hardly used PVWPS architecture with a battery bank instead of tank storage. The quantitative comparison is carried out through techno-economic optimization, with the goal of minimizing the life cycle cost of PVWPS with constraints on the satisfaction of the water demand of local inhabitants and on the groundwater resource sustainability. It is aimed to support decision-makers in selecting most appropriate storage for domestic water supply projects. We applied the methodology in the rural village of Gogma, Burkina Faso. Results indicate that the life-cycle cost of an optimized PVWPS with batteries is $24.1k while it is $31.1k if a tank is used instead. Moreover, reduced impact on groundwater resources and greater modularity to adapt to evolving water demand is noted if using batteries. However, as batteries must be replaced regularly and recycled adequately, PVWPS’ financial accessibility could increase only if sustainable and efficient operation, maintenance, and recycling facilities for batteries were present or developed locally. View Full-Text

Almost every research project that focuses on the cooperation of autonomous robots for underwater operations designs their own architectures. As a result, most of these architectures are tightly coupled with the available robots/vehicles for their respective developments, and therefore the mission plan and management is done using an ad-hoc solution. Typically, this solution is tightly coupled to just one underwater autonomous vehicle (AUV), or a restricted set of them selected for the specific project. However, as the use of AUVs for underwater operations increases, there is the need to identify some commonalities and weaknesses of these architectures, specifically in relation to mission planning and management. In this paper, we review a selected number of architectures and frameworks that in one way or another make use of different approaches to mission planning and management. Most of the selected works were developed for underwater operations. Still, we have included some other architectures and frameworks from other domains that can be of interest for the survey. The explored works have been assessed using selected features related to mission planning and management, considering that underwater operations are performed in an uncertain and unreliable environment, and where unexpected events are not strange. Furthermore, we have identified and highlighted some potential challenges for the design and implementation of mission managers. This provides a reference point for the development of a mission manager component to be integrated in architectures for cooperative robotics in underwater operations, and it can serve for the same purposes in other domains of application.

Modern robots often use more than one processing unit to solve the requirements in robotics. Robots are frequently designed in a modular manner to fulfill the possibility to be extended for future tasks. The use of multiple processing units leads to a distributed system within one single robot. Therefore, the system architecture is even more important than in single-computer robots. The presented concept of a modular and distributed system architecture was designed for robotic systems. The architecture is based on the Operator&ndash, Controller Module (OCM). This article describes the adaption of the distributed OCM for mobile robots considering the requirements on such robots, including, for example, real-time and safety constraints. The presented architecture splits the system hierarchically into a three-layer structure of controllers and operators. The controllers interact directly with all sensors and actuators within the system. For that reason, hard real-time constraints need to comply. The reflective operator, however, processes the information of the controllers, which can be done by model-based principles using state machines. The cognitive operator is used to optimize the system. The article also shows the exemplary design of the DAEbot, a self-developed robot, and discusses the experience of applying these concepts on this robot.

Dynamic directional modulation (DDM) has already proven to be an efficient technique to achieve physical layer security in wireless communications. System architectures based on vector modulators provide a flexible framework to implement synthesis methods that allow us to obtain increased security and/or independent multichannel transmissions. However, the implementation of DDM with vector modulators requires an accurate calibration (amplitude and phase) of every component in the RF path. In this contribution, we study the sensitivity of the response of a DDM system based on commercial vector modulators showing how to correct the nonideal behavior of all the components thanks to the flexibility provided by the vector modulator.

Truck platooning for which multiple trucks follow at a short distance is considered a near-Term truck automation opportunity, with the potential to reduce fuel consumption. Short following distances and increasing automation make it hard for a driver to be the backup if the system fails. The EcoTwin consortium successfully demonstrated a two truck platooning system with trucks following at 20 meters distance at the public road, in which the driver is the backup. The ambition of the consortium is to increase the truck automation and to reduce the following distance, which requires a new fail-operational truck platooning architecture. This paper presents a level 2+ platooning system architecture, which is fail-operational for a single failure, and the corresponding process to obtain it. First insights in the existing two truck platooning system are obtained by analyzing its key aspects, being utilization, latency, reliability, and safety. Using these insights, candidate level 2+ platooning system architectures are defined from which the most suitable truck platooning architecture is selected. Future work is the design and implementation of a prototype, based on the presented level 2+ platooning system architecture.

Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS) enable flexible and reconfigurable realization of automation system architectures, utilizing distributed control architectures with non-hierarchical modules linked together through different communication systems. Several control system architectures have been developed and validated in the past years by research groups. However, there is still a lack of implementation in industry. The intention of this work is to provide a summary of current alternative control system architectures that could be applied in industrial automation domain as well as a review of their commonalities. The aim is to point out the differences between the traditional centralized and hierarchical architectures to discussed ones, which rely on decentralized decision-making and control. Challenges and impacts that industries and engineers face in the process of adopting decentralized control architectures are discussed, analysing the obstacles for industrial acceptance and the new necessary interdisciplinary engineering skills. Finally, an outlook of possible mitigation and migration actions required to implement the decentralized control architectures is addressed. The authors would like to thank the European Commission for the support, and the partners of the EU Horizon 2020 project PERFoRM (2016b) for the fruitful discussions. The PERFoRM project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 680435. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

International audience; Socio-technical systems are increasingly becoming software-intensive. The challenge now is to design the architecture of such software-intensive systems for guaranteeing not only its correctness, but also the correctness of its implementation. In social-technical systems, the architecture (including software and physical elements) is described in terms of Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&ID). The design of these P&ID is still considered an art for which no rigorous design support exists. In order to detect and eliminate architectural design flaws, this paper proposes a formal-based automated approach for the verification of the essential architecture “total correctness” properties, i.e. compatibility, completeness, consistency, and correctness. This approach is based on the definition of an architectural style for P&ID design in Alloy. We use MDE to automatically generate Alloy models from a P&ID and check their compatibility with the style and its completeness, consistency, and correctness properties. Our approach is presented through an industrial case study: the system of storage and production of freshwater for a ship.

Conference of 21st IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation, ETFA 2016 ; Conference Date: 6 September 2016 Through 9 September 2016; Conference Code:124646; International audience; Automated manufacturing systems are becoming increasingly flexible in order to support a growing number of different products and product variations, as well as shortening lot sizes and product life cycles. Many manufacturing resource are already multi-purpose. But they are integrated in an automation infrastructure that may require significant effort to adapt. In this contribution, we present a system architecture for the deployment of software functionality to manufacturing resources safely at runtime. The architecture integrates software model verification to ensure the integrity of new functionality, software-defined networking (SDN) to establish new communication pathways for collaboration, and the close interaction between a flexible runtime execution environment and its safety-critical counterpart.

Software-defined radio (SDR) clouds combine SDR concepts with cloud computing technology for designing and managing future base stations. They provide a scalable solution for the evolution of wireless communications. The authors focus on the resource management implications and propose a hierarchical approach for dynamically managing the real-time computing constraints of wireless communications systems that run on the SDR cloud.

The main objective of this research work is the development of an actuation control concept for a new morphing actuation mechanism made of smart materials, which is built from a shape memory alloy (SMA). Two lines of smart actuators were incorporated to a rectangular wing to modify the upper wing surface, made of a flexible skin, with the intention to move the laminar-to-turbulent transition point closer to the wing trailing edge. After a brief introduction of the morphing wing system architecture and requirements, the actuation lines' design and instrumentation are presented. The integrated controller controls the SMA actuators via an electrical current supply, so that the transducer position can be used to eliminate the deviation between the required values for vertical displacements (corresponding to the optimized airfoils) and their physical values. The final configuration of the integrated controller is a combination of a bi-positional (on–off) controller and a PI (proportional–integral) controller, due to the two heating and cooling phases of the SMA wires' interconnection. This controller must behave like a switch between the cooling and the heating phases, situations where the output current is 0 A, or is controlled by a PI type law. The PI controller for the heating phase is optimally tuned using integral and surface minimum error criteria (Ziegler–Nichols). The controller is numerically tested on the linear identified system in terms of time response, Bode diagram, amplitude and phase stability margins, and root-locus.

Although the benefits of service orientation are prevalent in literature, a review, analysis, and evaluation of the 30 existing service analysis approaches presented in this paper have shown that a comprehensive approach to the identification and analysis of both business and supporting software services is missing. Based on this evaluation of existing approaches and additional sources, we close this gap by proposing an integrated, consolidated approach to business and software service analysis that combines and extends the strengths of the examined methodologies.

In this paper we discuss the beginnings of an attempt to define and analyze the stability of an entire modular robotic system architecture - one which includes a three-tier (3T) layer breakdown of capabilities, with symbolic, deterministic planning at the highest level. We approach the problem from the standpoint of a control theory outlook, and try to formalize the issues that result from trying to quantitatively characterize the overall performance of a well-defined system without a need for exhaustive testing. We start by discussing the concept of bounded-input bounded-output stability, giving examples where the technique might not be sufficient to guarantee what we term “total system stability” due to complications associated with the levels of abstraction between the modules and components that are being chained together in the architecture. We then go on to discuss necessary conditions that may fall out of this naturally as a result. We further try to better-define the input and output constraints needed to guarantee total system stability, using an assumption-guarantee-like contractual framework that sits alongside the architecture; the requirements then may have influence across multiple modules, in order to keep consistency. We also discuss how the structure of the architectural modules may help or hinder the process of capability characterization and performance analysis of each module and a given architecture configuration as a whole. We then discuss two overlapping methods that, combined, should allow us to analyze the effectiveness of the architecture, and help towards verification and validation of both the components and the system as a whole. Demonstrative examples are given using a specific architectural implementation called the Resilient Spacecraft Executive. In future work, we hope to define both necessary and sufficient conditions for total system stability across such a system architecture for robotics use. Not duplicate with DiVA 1502066QC 20170216

The Finnish 5G test network (5GTN) is built to support development and analysis of 5G technologies and new services on top of them. 5GTN includes a holistic monitoring and test generation architecture, enabling generation and collection of diverse test and datasets, analyzing the results and using these as basis for developing new technologies, algorithms, services, and optimizations. Both the combined network and service parameters space, as well as data volume, provide us with several big data problems. In this paper, we describe the overall system architecture, the types of data we collect, the initial analysis we have performed on the data, and what we have learned so far. The network is constantly evolving with new services integrated and tested, and new big data analytics being applied as we learn from our tests. As such, these are preliminary results for ongoing work.

Vehicles with hybrid drive systems are characterized by their driving dynamics, their energy efficiency and their environment-friendliness especially. Dependent on the electrical power and the drive train structure these hybrid drives are grouped into different classes. Designations such as micro-hybrid, mild- hybrid, full-hybrid, serial-hybrid, serial/parallel-hybrid or power-split-hybrid reflect the large variance of these different drive train possibilities. In hybrid drive systems electronically controlled converters take an important role. With such a converter also the energy exchange between electrical power system and electrical machine is regulated. The reduction of the vehicle fuel consumption here is of special interest. Today's hybrid vehicles use for the control mainly information from the present driving conditions, taking into account the actual electrical power system-charge as well as the power demand of the driver. With such a control already considerable fuel reductions are reached. But additionally superimposed control and information systems promise substantial potential for more fuel reduction. With these systems an outstanding energy-saving and anticipatory way of driving could be realized. The aim is to find the best operating point in each case for the combustion engine and to adapt the charge state of the electrical power system to the respective driving situation.

The increase in the average age of the world's population over the coming decades will impact several aspects of our lives. In particular, it will increase the demand and challenges of delivering care and assistance to elderly or fragile people. This article describes an ambient assisted living system, called Bridge (behaviour drift compensation for autonomous and independent living), that's based on a set of home services that include a wireless sensor-actuator network for detection of inhabitants' behaviors and a rich, flexible communication system between the inhabitants and a social environment aimed at reassuring both inhabitants and their families. All Bridge solutions have been derived from real needs with the help of a social mediator and tested by users in their living environments.

Recent developments in robotics and the associated fields of computer vision and sensors pave the floor for automated robotic solutions, exploitable in the wider field of inspection of civil infrastructures and particularly transportation tunnels, the latter ageing urgently requiring inspection and assessment. Currently, tunnel inspections are performed via visually by human operators. This can result into slow, labour expensive and subjective process often requiring lane shutdown during the inspection, parameters that need to be lowered while having safety requirements and tunnel uptimes increasing. ROBINSPECT is an EC research project (FP7 - ICT - 611145) driven by the tunnel inspection industry, that adapts and integrates recent research results in intelligent control in robotics, computer vision and active continuous learning and sensing, in an innovative, integrated, robotic system that automatically scans the intrados of tunnels for potential defects on the surface while at the same time inspects and measures radial deformation in the cross-section, distance between parallel cracks, cracks and open joints that impact tunnel stability, with mm accuracies. Intelligent control systems and robotics are integrated to set an automatic robotic arm manipulation and autonomous vehicle navigation so as to minimize humans' interaction during tunnel inspection. This way, the structural condition and safety of a tunnel is assessed automatically, reliably and speedily. The robotic system will be evaluated at the research infrastructure of tunnels of VSH, at three road tunnels of the Egnatia Motorway and the rail tunnel of London Underground. This paper will focus on the ROBISPECT EC project first year activities starting from the requirements, specifications and system architecture as well as the technologies that will be integrated and overall technological solution. Also it will provide the current status of implementations and following steps as well as its expected European and International impact.

Passive tags based on backscattered signals yield low energy consumption for large-scale applications of RFIDs. In this paper, system architectures and protocol enhancements for fast identifications in ISO/IEC 18000-6C systems that integrate UWB technology are investigated. The anti-collision protocol is studied by considering various tag populations. A novel algorithm is proposed to adapt the UHF air interface parameters with the use of UWB ranging information. The results show that the proposed algorithm yields up to 25% potential performance improvement compared to the ISO/IEC 18000-6C standard. QS 20140619

Conference of 2013 8th International Conference on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing, 3PGCIC 2013 ; Conference Date: 28 October 2013 Through 30 October 2013; Conference Code:102403; International audience; This paper presents a full system architecture allowing the authentication and secured execution of binary files using hardware-assisted on-the-fly memory encryption/decryption. In a context of general blurring of the physical relationship between a user and the computer which which it eventually interacts, this architecture has been thought so as to achieve a certain degree of robustness against corruptions in a cloud computing IaaS software stack, including when the corruptions may come from the lowest hypervision layer.

Architectures for situation awareness systems originate from two main concerns: a functional view on the information processing that stems from domain experts’ understanding of their tasks and resources, and a system architect’s view on non-functional aspects of the operations that form such functionality within a system-of-systems realization. In this chapter, we describe how these concerns require the use of three architectural concepts: (a) information flows that transport information between systems together with metadata addressing system concerns, (b) a flexible combination of transport methods that steer these information flows, and (c) a multi-stage timing that offers short-term memory to sensibly combine and transform information and long-term memory to store higher-order knowledge. Together, these concepts address, or enable solutions for, many challenges faced by systems-of-systems for situation awareness, like configuration dynamics, handling of uncertainty, system and information health, and information protection and access control.

Cooperative behavior realization is an important aspect of Multi-Agent Systems, and it has been widely addressed by the robotics community. However, the interaction among multiple robots and a human operator still requires a non-negligible effort to be effective. The availability of modern input devices can ease the behavior composition process, allowing a user to train Multi-Agent Systems by using alternative methods. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to integrate Tangible User Interfaces within a reconfigurable software architecture, for cooperative Multi-Robot Systems. To address a real test case, we implemented a strategy training system for a humanoid RoboCup soccer team. Such a system allows a human coach to train several robotic players by using multiple input interfaces, directly onto the application field.

Evolvability, the ability to respond effectively to change, represents a major challenge to today's high-end embedded systems, such as those developed in the medical domain by Philips Healthcare. These systems are typically developed by multi-disciplinary teams, located around the world, and are in constant need of upgrading to provide new advanced features, to deal with obsolescence, and to exploit emerging enabling technologies. Despite the importance of evolvability for these types of systems, the field has received scant attention from the scientific and engineering communities. Views on Evolvability of Embedded Systems focuses on the topic of evolvability of embedded systems from an applied scientific perspective. In particular, the book describes results from the Darwin project that researched evolvability in the context of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) systems. This project applied the Industry-as-Laboratory paradigm, in which industry and academia join forces to ensure continuous knowledge and technology transfer during the projects lifetime. The Darwin project was a collaboration between the Embedded Systems Institute, the MRI business unit of Philips Healthcare, Philips Research, and five Dutch universities. Evolvability was addressed from a system engineering perspective by a number of researchers from different disciplines such as software-, electrical- and mechanical engineering, with a clear focus on economic decision making. The research focused on four areas: data mining, reference architectures, mechanisms and patterns for evolvability, in particular visualization & modelling, and economic decision making. Views on Evolvability of Embedded Systems is targeted at both researchers and practitioners; they will not only find a state-of-the-art overview on evolvability research, but also guidelines to make systems more evolvable and new industrially-validated techniques to improve the evolvability of embedded systems.

The DASiPM2 project is funded by INFN and is aimed at the development of a demonstrator of a PET system based on SiPM photo-detectors. In this framework an FPGA based DAQ system has been designed and developed at INFN-Pisa to read and characterize 4x4 SiPM matrices. The system architecture, the first test and characterization results and the planned future development activities are here described.

Cooperative intelligent vehicle systems constitute a promising way to improving traffic throughput, safety and comfort. The state-of-the-art intelligent-vehicle applications usually can be described as a collection of interacting, highly autonomous, complex dynamical systems (the individual vehicles). The vehicles implement onboard a wide spectrum of (possibly cooperative) functionalities (applications). In order for an application ldquoto do the right thingrdquo it should have a formal representation and understanding of the relevant surrounding world to implement the proper (e.g. efficient, safe) behavior. In the proposed approach, developed for the SAFESPOT Integrated Project, the Local Dynamic Map (LDM) forms a key element of the onboard system responsible for representing and maintaining a real-time world model. From the applicationspsila point of view, the LDM is the model of the world as known by the vehicle: it contains objects characterized by attributes, uncertainties and relevant relationships between objects. The world model in the LDM is created based on high resolution digital maps, sensory inputs and communication. The LDM implements an abstraction layer between the data interpretation and the higher level behavioral functions. The paper describes the motivation behind the LDM based system decomposition approach, introduces the basic concepts of the world modeling dedicated to cooperative vehicle systems and summarizes the main features of a prototype implementation. The consequences of the LDM based system architecture on application development and testing are also presented.

The present paper describes the design of a hybrid actuation control concept, a fuzzy logic proportional-integral-derivative plus a conventional on-off controller, for a new morphing mechanism using smart materials as actuators, which were made from shape memory alloys (SMA). The research work described here was developed for the open loop phase of a morphing wing system, whose primary goal was to reduce the wing drag by delaying the transition (from laminar to fully turbulent flows) position toward the wing trailing edge. The designed controller drives the actuation system equipped with SMA actuators to modify the flexible upper wing skin surface. The designed controller was also included, as an internal loop, in the closed loop architecture of the morphing wing system, based on the pressure information received from the flexible skin mounted pressure sensors and on the estimation of the transition location.The controller’s purposes were established following a comprehensive presentation of the morphing wing system architecture and requirements. The strong nonlinearities of the SMA actuators’ characteristics and the system requirements led to the choice of a hybrid controller architecture as a combination of a bi-positional on-off controller and a fuzzy logic controller (FLC). In the chosen architecture, the controller would behave as a switch between the SMA cooling and heating phases, situations where the output current is 0A or is controlled by the FLC.In the design phase, a proportional-integral-derivative scheme was chosen for the FLC. The input-output mapping of the fuzzy model was designed, taking account of the system’s error and its change in error, and a final architecture for the hybrid controller was obtained. The shapes chosen for the inputs’ membership functions were s -function, π-function, and z -function, and product fuzzy inference and the center average defuzzifier were applied (Sugeno).