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Several news items and short movies have appeared online recently, announcing that the AmmoniaDrive Consortium was awarded a prestigious NWO Perspectief grant. But what is the AmmoniaDrive research project? How does it contribute to combatting shipping-induced climate change? Who are in the consortium and why? And finally, what research activities will take place?

A myriad of downstream communities and industries rely on streams fed by both groundwater discharge and glacier meltwater draining the Cordillera Blanca, Northern Peruvian Andes, which contains the highest density of glaciers in the tropics. During the dry season, approximately half the discharge in the region's proglacial streams comes from groundwater. However, because of the remote and difficult access to the region, there are few field methods that are effective at the reach scale to identify the spatial distribution of groundwater discharge. An energy balance model, Rhodamine WT dye tracing, and high-definition kite-borne imagery were used to determine gross and net groundwater inputs to a 4-km reach of the Quilcay River in Huascaran National Park, Peru. The HFLUX computer programme () was used to simulate the Quilcay River's energy balance using stream temperature observations, meteorological measurements, and kite-borne areal photography. Inference from the model indicates 29% of stream discharge at the reach outlet was contributed by groundwater discharge over the study section. Rhodamine WT dye tracing results, coupled with the energy balance, show that approximately 49% of stream water is exchanged (no net gain) with the subsurface as gross gains and losses. The results suggest that gross gains from groundwater are largest in a moraine subreach but because of large gross losses, net gains are larger in the meadow subreaches. These insights into pathways of groundwater-surface water interaction can be applied to improve hydrological modelling in proglacial catchments throughout South America.

Performance is a key aspect of many embedded systems, embedded data processing systems in particular. System performance can typically only be measured in the later stages of system development. To avoid expensive re-work in the final stages of development, it is essential to have accurate performance estimations in the early stages. For this purpose, we present a model-based approach to performance engineering that is integrated with the well-known V-model for system development. Our approach emphasizes model accuracy and is demonstrated using five embedded data-processing cases from the digital printing domain. We show how lightweight models can be used in the early stages of system development to estimate the influence of design changes on system performance. cop. Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

A Large Scale Printer (LSP) is a Cyber Physical System (CPS) printing thousands of sheets per day with high quality. The print requests arrive at run-time requiring online scheduling. We capture the LSP scheduling problem as online scheduling of re-entrant flowshops with sequence dependent setup times and relative due dates with makespan minimization as the scheduling criterion. Exhaustive approaches like Mixed Integer Programming can be used, but they are compute intensive and not suited for online use. We present a novel heuristic for scheduling of LSPs that on average requires 0.3 seconds per sheet to find schedules for industrial test cases. We compare the schedules to lower bounds, to schedules generated by the current scheduler and schedules generated by a modified version of the classical NEH (MNEH) heuristic [1], [2]. On average, the proposed heuristic generates schedules that are 40% shorter than the current scheduler, have an average difference of 25% compared to the estimated lower bounds and generates schedules with less than 67% of the makespan of schedules generated by the MNEH heuristic.

There is a constant pressure on developers of embedded systems to simultaneously increase system functionality and to decrease development costs. Aviable way to obtain a better system performance with the same physical hardware is adaptivity: a system should be able to adapt itself to dynamically changing circumstances. The development of adaptive embedded systems has been the topic of the Octopus project, an industry-as-laboratory project of the Embedded Systems Institute, with the professional printer domain of Océ-Technologies B.V.as an industrial carrier. The project has resulted in techniques and tools for model-based development of adaptive embedded systems including component-level and system-level control strategies, system architecting tools, and automatic generation of system software. This introductory chapter presents the Octopus project and provides a reading guide for this book, which presents the results of the Octopus project.

Adaptive systems engineering comprises two individual themes, adaptive systems and systems engineering, and their interaction. In the Octopus project, some challenges that arise from these themes have been addressed in the realm of professional printers. This chapter serves to place these challenges in a common context, which is done along the BAPO structuring principle (Business, Architecture, Process, Organisation). The main research challenges addressed in the project appear in the architecture and process parts of BAPO. For architecture, patterns for behaviour and self-reflection about behaviour are the most relevant elements in the context of adaptive systems. For the architecting process, support through models in a model-based paradigm brings advantages in specification, options exploration and analysis, and synthesis of adaptive systems

Embedded systems and their design trajectories are becoming increasingly complex, and there is a growing demand for performance, reliability, energy efficiency and low cost. To cope with these challenges, decision making early in the development trajectory needs to be supported by appropriate modeling and analysis. To achieve this support, we need to find the modeling abstractions that allow extensive design-space exploration, tune these modeling abstractions towards the users, and integrate support for different types of modeling and analysis.

High-speed imaging and thermodynamical characterization are applied to an optically accessible, heavy-duty diesel engine in order to compare soot incandescence and NO emission behaviour of four bioderived fuels: rapeseed-methylester, Jatropha oil (pure), Jatropha-methylester and a 50/50 blend of cyclohexanone with a Fischer-Tropsch synthetic fuel. Regular diesel fuel is used as a reference. Soot incandescence is observed at 0.3° crank angle resolution (200 images/cycle). The heat release rate and exhaust NO concentrations are used as indicators of average and peak temperatures, respectively, which are combined with soot incandescence signal to get a relative measure for a fuel's sooting propensity.

Contains fulltext : 70243.pdf (Author’s version postprint ) (Open Access) 6th International Conference, FORMATS 2008, Saint Malo, France, September 15-17, 2008, 15 september 2008

Pattern detection methods discover recurring solutions in a system’s implementation, for example design patterns in object-oriented source code. Usually this is done with a pattern library. This has the disadvantage that the precise implementation of the patterns must be known in advance. The method used in our case study does not have this disadvantage. It uses a mathematical technique called Formal Concept Analysis and is applied to find structural patterns in two subsystems of a printer controller. The case study shows that it is possible to detect frequently used structural design constructs without upfront knowledge. However, even the detection of relatively simple patterns in relatively small pieces of software takes a lot of computing time. Since this is due to the complexity of the applied algorithms, applying the method to large software systems like the complete controller is not practical. They can be applied to its subsystems though, which are about five to ten percent of its size.