Ambra Calà

Engineering of Next Generation Cyber-Physical Automation System Architectures

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.

Systems Engineering and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

This handbook is mainly aimed at describing the activities related to the ALM, applied to the industrial product coming from a material processing. Nevertheless, a suitable integration of tools and processes with the PLM is obviously required, as is herein briefly described. A Configuration Control Management is strictly required to track the changes applied to the developed product along the lifecycle. This needs to build up a platform which includes the tools to be interoperated. Exploring how this might be done is herein proposed.

The Systems Engineering

Many definitions of the Systems Engineering are proposed, and analyzing some differences between them help to highlight contents and open issues, as they are described in this chapter. Nevertheless, a short historical outline could be helpful in appreciating some characteristics of this methodology, which are even more detailed by a wide literature, herein briefly described. Furthermore, an overview of technical standards dealing with the Systems Engineering is added, to define a roadmap for a deeper education in this field.

The Methodology of Systems Engineering

It is well known that the amount of contents related to the Systems Engineering often makes confused the users about their suitable exploitation in a linear product development process. Therefore, in this first technical chapter, some basic concepts are defined and some typical models of product development are shown. They are compared and distinguished from some architecture frameworks currently applied to define the system capabilities and some crucial views. A sketch of the main steps of the Systems Engineering implementation is finally drawn, together with a list of some proprietary approaches proposed by societies, companies and software vendors for its straight deployment. Tools and languages are even described, together with some engineering methods and the SysML language is used as a relevant example to describe the main diagrams applied in functional modeling.

System Verification and Validation (V&V)

A preliminary overview on the connection between Application Lifecycle Management and Product Lifecycle Management is proposed, by introducing the contents and the strategies of the Verification and Validation activities. The chapter should allow the Reader distinguishing the two activities and even the tools and the goals related. A comparison between the typical approaches applied in Software and Hardware Engineering, respectively, is briefly deployed. A preliminary relation with the RAMS analysis, dealing with Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety, is discussed, especially in the two test cases.

Systems, Customer Needs and Requirements

A preliminary and relevant step of the whole process includes a complete collection of customer needs and a suitable elicitation of requirements. This activity is never trivial and requires to be suitably formalized. This is done by resorting to the test cases of this handbook. In the meanwhile, the role of stakeholders is even investigated and defined. Requirements are then defined, classified and categorized for a better implementation of the MBSE. A direct implementation of requirements analysis is performed for the two examples.