Radu F. Babiceanu

Big Data and virtualization for manufacturing cyber-physical systems

Sensor-packed manufacturing systems will become ubiquitous.Cybersecurity aspects are gaining importance within the manufacturing domain.Manufacturing cyber-physical systems are expected to follow the trend set by other domains that benefited from the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, and Big Data.Outcomes of the implementation of manufacturing cyber-physical systems could be transformative to the extent that predictive manufacturing systems can become a reality. The recent advances in sensor and communication technologies can provide the foundations for linking the physical manufacturing facility and machine world to the cyber world of Internet applications. The coupled manufacturing cyber-physical system is envisioned to handle the actual operations in the physical world while simultaneously monitor them in the cyber world with the help of advanced data processing and simulation models at both the manufacturing process and system operational levels. Moreover, a sensor-packed manufacturing system in which each process or piece of equipment makes available event and status information, coupled with market research for true advanced Big Data analytics, seem to be the right ingredients for event response selection and operation virtualization. As a drawback, the resulting manufacturing cyber-physical system will be vulnerable to the inevitable cyber-attacks, unfortunately, so common for the software and Internet-based systems. This reality makes cybersecurity penetration within the manufacturing domain a need that goes uncontested across researchers and practitioners. This work provides a review of the current status of virtualization and cloud-based services for manufacturing systems and of the use of Big Data analytics for planning and control of manufacturing operations. Building on already developed cloud business solutions, cloud manufacturing is expected to offer improved enterprise manufacturing and business decision support. Based on the current state-of-the-art cloud manufacturing solutions and Big Data applications, this work also proposes a framework for the development of predictive manufacturing cyber-physical systems that include capabilities for attaching to the Internet of Things, and capabilities for complex event processing and Big Data algorithmic analytics.

Performance evaluation of agent-based material handling systems using simulation techniques

The increasing influence of global economy is changing the conventional approach to managing manufacturing companies. Real-time reaction to changes in shop-floor operations, quick and quality response in satisfying customer requests, and reconfigurability in both hardware equipment and software modules, are already viewed as essential characteristics for next generation manufacturing systems. Part of a larger research that employs agent-based modeling techniques in manufacturing planning and control, this work proposes an agent-based material handling system and contrasts the centralized and decentralized scheduling approaches for allocation of material handling operations to the available resources in the system. To justify the use of the decentralized agent-based approach and assess its performance compared to conventional scheduling systems, a series of validation tests and a simulation study are carried out. As illustrated by the preliminary results obtained in the simulation study the decentralized agent-based approach can give good feasible solutions in a short amount of time.

UAS security: Encryption key negotiation for partitioned data

Unmanned aerial systems, often referred as drones, are becoming largely popular among general public and businesses. The system includes the actual unmanned aerial system (UAS), the ground station and the communication link between them. The data transmitted between the ground station and the UAS in both directions, as well as the data stored on the UAS memory chips in the case of a crash or an illegitimate access to it, should not be easily available to a third party. This paper proposes an encryption key negotiation method for partitioned data stored and exchanged in UAS applications. The proposed approach, aimed at providing authentication and security through key negotiation, includes a modified cryptographic protocol that uses a combination of off-the-record and pretty good privacy to encrypt the data stored on UAS and the data transmitted through the communication link between the ground station and the UAS. The encryption solutions were tested using a Java environment and are proposed to be implemented on FPGA development boards to be installed on prototype UAS. Depending on the encryption method used AES/RSA and the computational requirements, the cost of an actual implementation may increase due to the need of faster FPGA chips.

An onboard UAS visual privacy guard system

The application areas of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) are vast. The ever-increasing deployment of UAS is pushed further by advancements and cost effectiveness. It is not uncommon to come across makeshift UAS composed of off-the-shelf components that can be purchased from electronics stores. These components/systems are so easy to obtain and assemble to make homemade UAS, which then can be used by anyone for any purpose seen fit. This paper introduces the first of a set of privacy preserving measures and techniques for UAS applications. The system conceptual design will have a few versions, which the authors will apply in different setting in the subsequent research activities. For the sake of presenting the UAS Visual Privacy Guard system, the authors will use news reporting as an application.

Resilience modeling and analysis of interdependent infrastructure systems

The infrastructures on which our society depends are interconnected and interdependent on multiple levels. The failure of one infrastructure can result in the disruption of other infrastructures, which can lead to severe economic disruption and loss of life or failure of services. Today, within the cyber-physical engineering and social world, all acting infrastructure systems are certain to be subjected to changes in their environment given by changing inputs, constraints, mechanisms, or interfaces. Moreover, when the infrastructures are interconnected the changes may impact not only the output of individual infrastructures, but also the output of the resulting coordinated operations. This work addresses the concept of resilience of interdependent infrastructures systems and compares the resultant system level resilience with component infrastructure systems resilience.

The use of rfid sensor tags for perishable products monitoring in logistics operations

Transportation of perishable products increased in volume in the last decades and imposes new challenges to todays logistics operations. Because of the spoilage risk of the transported items, certain conditions (e.g., temperature, humidity, vibration, etc.) must be maintained during the transportation phase. Failure to maintain the required conditions may lead to product spoilage and delivery disturbances. This work considers a multi-echelon supply chain model composed of one producer and multiple customers and contrasts the performance of the logistics operations when RFID and sensing technologies are employed and when they are not. The simulation models of the two scenarios result in as much as nine different outcomes, which are presented in the form of good practice recommendations.

Cold supply chain logistics: System optimization for real-time rerouting transportation solutions

Abstract Transportation of perishable products is critical and imposes a series of challenges to the cold supply chain and logistics operations. The specific challenge to be addressed is the strict monitoring of transportation conditions. This paper provides insights in the logistics decision models associated with the cold supply chain of perishable products. The decision-making is performed in the cloud by temporary virtual machines (VMs) associated with every shipment or series of shipments. The VMs make operational decisions based on evaluating actual transportation conditions and location of shipped products against requirements and initial route and terminal market geographical location. The physical part of the logistics cyber-physical monitoring and control system is represented by integrated RFID-WSN sensor devices traveling with the product and reader checkpoints distributed along the transportation routes. Two types of decisions are considered in the proposed models: stopping transportation and/or rerouting the shipments to a closer location. The implementation of the optimization models for an actual case study, which considers shipments of fresh produce across the continental United States, shows significant savings that could be obtained if producers or third party logistics companies adopt the methodology.

Physical‐layer intrusion detection system for smart jamming attacks

In modern electronic warfare, physical-layer security threats have evolved from traditional jammers to smart jammers. Smart jammers, due to their stealthy nature, make wireless communication systems vulnerable. They can easily deceive a detection system. In this paper, a physical-layer intrusion detection system (PLIDS) for direct-sequence spread-spectrum systems is developed against smart jammers, which is efficient due to its high detection rates, usability, and accuracy. Smart jamming noise is modeled as wide-sense stationary, additive, and colored. This random process is decomposed into a series expansion of independent and uncorrelated random variables. The decomposition helps in designing a signal processing algorithm for PLIDS. The algorithm is easily implemented via correlators. PLIDS is evaluated using a simulated electronic warfare environment, and its performance is measured in terms of detection capability, precision, and accuracy. It performs error-free detection by adjusting its tuning parameter. Moreover, different performance tradeoffs are observed for different values of the tuning parameter. Finally, comparisons of PLIDS are done with competitive intrusion detection systems.

Ascertain privacy conservation and data security protection onboard small UAS

The potential application areas for small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) are massive. This paper takes into account the unstoppable trend toward the widespread use of sUAS for a large number of applications and reports on the needed privacy preserving measures and techniques. Specifically, this work researches the prospect of implementing object detection and blurring techniques on the actual sUAS hardware, such that the privacy of sensitive objects captured by the sUAS camera is preserved. The solution approach is to embed FPGA development boards with connected image sensors onboard the sUAS and implement MATLAB image processing algorithms into VHDL/Verilog code. Given the fact that the sUAS may run out of battery or crash during flight, and thus be captured by unauthorized persons, data encryption on the FPGA development boards needs also be studied for security purposes.

UAV as a service: Enabling on-demand access and on-the-fly re-tasking of multi-tenant UAVs using cloud services

As commercial roles for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become clearer and demand for services provided by them increases, UAVs rely more on new cloud computing services and cooperative coordination to provide mission planning, control, tracking and data processing. This article presents the UAV as a Service (UAVaaS) framework, which ports features commonly found in traditional cloud services, such as Infrastructure, Platform, and Software as a Service, to the domain of UAVs. This work aims to conceptualize and design UAVaaS for commercial applications. Specifically, a cloud-provided orchestration framework that allows multi-tenant UAVs to easily serve multiple, heterogeneous clients at once and automatically re-task them to users with higher priority, mid-flight, if needed. The outcome of this research aims to provide an introductory overview of UAVaaS, explain core protocols and network topologies, and identify key system components and requirements.