Denis Genon-Catalot

Wireless Network Architecture for Diagnosis and Monitoring Applications

This paper describes a distributed wireless network architecture for remote diagnosis and monitoring. A windmill farm is considered as a target application, which is further grouped into small clusters of windmills communicating with each other for the purpose of distributed diagnosis. Wireless links are commonly used for long-range communication in SCADA systems. In order to extend wireless networks for remote diagnosis applications, strict requirements on availability, robustness, reliability and performance have to be satisfied in order to meet industrial standards. This paper is intended to present a wireless network architecture for tele-operation of large industrial applications.

Energy optimisation using analytics and coordination, the example of lifts

This paper focuses on energy optimisation in the context of lifts. Modern lifts embed batteries that are so far used only in emergency. We propose a multi-level optimisation strategy to reduce the electricity bill by combining harvesting, the grid and energy stored in batteries. The strategy combines several analytic components (forecaster, optimisers), modelled/measured variables, and is used by the control system. A coordination middleware enables the cooperation between the components embedded in the lift or located in the cloud, thus requiring communication through firewalls of different companies. Early results are presented. They illustrate new features for improving energy efficiency and they demonstrate our capacity to build such an optimisation architecture in a real environment. Part of the results are simulated to extrapolate the reachable energy gain.

Optimal reactive control of hybrid architectures: A case study on complex water transportation systems (ETFA'2014)

Joining the European Arrowhead Project, which looks forward to a modern collaborative automation, we will present in this positioning paper the irrigation network control problems and corresponding multi-layer approach. The first layer is the hydraulic network, itself represented by a complex model obtained in coupling Shallow Water Equations for free surface flows and Lattice Boltzmann Method to get a tractable model for optimization and supervision purposes. The second layer is the heterogeneous communication network using hybrid architectures and 6LoWPAN, a unified protocol for wired and wireless sensor networks. The third layer is the optimal reactive control system, itself developed using methods from decentralized artificial intelligent systems (namely multi-agent systems). Detailed discussions of each layer with some analytical results will be described in this paper. We will outline the potential interest of the multi-layer approach, more precisely its efficiency and reliability for supervision, energy optimization and hydraulic control of complex water transportation systems.

Data window aggregation techniques for energy saving in Wireless Sensor Networks

Redundant data transmissions are likely to happen repeatedly inWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). According to the literature survey, energy-efficiency predominately relies on data aggregation rather than routing or duty-cycling approaches. As data redundancy dominates the power usage in communication costs, in order to identify and reduce the redundant data transmissions by individual nodes, we propose a hybrid data aggregative window function (DAWF) algorithm for exploiting both spatial and temporal data redundancies in WSNs. Furthermore, the proposed novel approach aims to process the hybrid filtration using both compressive and prediction-based techniques in sensor nodes (SN) as well as in cluster-head (CH) nodes. In this regard, the experimental study case of this work show that the DAWF mechanism can suppress a huge amount of temporal redundant data transmissions in sensor nodes while providing reliable data messages towards the base station (BS). Moreover, DAWF CH can also suppress a large amount of spatial redundancies by utilizing the optimum DAWF parameters of the CH node.

An energy-based control model for autonomous lifts

In this paper are presented some preliminary results on an autonomous lift subsystem made with the interconnection of a DC/AC controlled converter, a salient permanent magnet synchronous motor (SPMSM), the charge and counterweight and the mechanical transmission system. These results are firstly the derivation of a Bond Graph and a related Port-Controlled Hamiltonian (PCH) models and, secondly, the analysis of two identification methods to estimate online the SPMSM parameters.

A quality assessment methodology for EIE resources available through the internet

E-learning has become widely available and accepted by learners either as the main or supplemental facility in their learning activities. A wide range of electronic resources and virtual learning environments are now available over the Internet for use by learners and educators alike. Recent standardisation work has defined learning/sharable content objects at a more fundamental asset level. Further, a number of metadata standards have been developed to help in content aggregation of objects into courseware. This paper presents a quality assessment methodology developed within the EU Socrates EIE-Surveyor Project for evaluating online e-learning resources. The proposed methodology is applied to resources available in the field of Electrical and Information Engineering and some early results are presented. The proposed quality assessment methodology has two main parts: an electronic catalogue (e-Cat) and an evaluation survey (e-Surv) for users of the linked e-resource. The e-Cat serves the purpose of cataloguing e-resources available in the field of Electrical and Information Engineering over the European Internet area and making them available to learners across Europe and beyond. The e-Surv is an e-Cat resource hyperlinked questionnaire comprising evaluation in four main sections: type of users, quality of contents, technical aspects of the resource, overall user satisfaction. E-Surv is designed to allow continuous assessment of the quality of e-resources available within the e- Cat through user surveys.

Asynchronous information consensus in distributed control of irrigation canals

In distributed model predictive control, accounting for the interactions of subsystems requires exchanging information between controllers. However, challenges arise when controllers may lose the synchronization and when shared information may encounter the divergence due to the switching topology and the imperfection in communication. Managing divergent (or outdated) information is considered in this paper as a consensus problem and solved by an asynchronous consensus protocol. This approach based on multi-agent system paradigm to distributed control requires each controller to agree on some data values needed during action computation with its neighbors. Under certain assumptions, the convergence of consensus protocol is analytically obtained with various communication patterns (for example, directed and delayed communication). As a result, the performance of control system is improved in comparison with the decentralized strategy, and approached to the distributed strategy with sequential timing. Some simulation examples are given to illustrate the efficiency of this approach for the control of irrigation canals modeled by the Lattice Boltzmann method.

Interference evaluation of WiFi devices over wake-up radio in wireless sensor networks

While Wake-up Radio (WuR) systems greatly improve the energy efficiency of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), their resilience to interference is often neglected in previous works. This might be an issue due to the proliferation of wireless devices and the growing field of internet of things. In this paper, an evaluation of in-band interferences from WiFi devices over a WuR system is performed. The approach proves that WuR systems are still performing well when coexisting with external wireless networks, even if the energy-efficiency is slightly reduced.

New lift safety architecture to meet PESSRAL requirements

Industrial control and automation systems are evolving towards infrastructures more connected. Its components interconnection makes them more dependent on the networks and communication protocols used. On the one hand, high performance, low costs and real-time capabilities are generally required to cope with more and more demanding application requirements; while on the other hand, security solutions are often needed in an increasing number of communication attack scenarios. As part of new lift control generation, we will analyze a transition case from an electrical/electro technical component to network of communicating electronic components as part of the safety displacement system. This paper will describe the analysis of dependability requirements for the next electronic lift control.

A composite metric for dynamic routing in networked control systems (INDIN'2016)

In a nutshell, this paper presents a dynamic routing design for control applications using a hybrid network architecture. For application-specific routing requirements, we propose a weighted composition of few primary metrics in such a way that the routing protocol using the resulting composite metric achieves convergence, loop-free and path-optimal properties. From this composition method, we point out the relation between combined routing metrics and network performance criteria. Thereafter, the composite metric can be adapted in order to satisfy requirements of control systems in terms of communication. Our approach is then demonstrated by applying composite metrics with the Routing Protocol for Low-power and lossy network (RPL), specified by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). By combining some primary metrics quantified in their standard definitions, different network performance criteria are evaluated and compared through extensive computer simulation scenarios.