A Component-Based Approach to the Design of Networked Control Systems

Abstract

Abstract-Component-based techniques revolve around composable, reusable software objects that shield the application level software from the details of the hardware and lowlevel software implementation and vice versa. Components provide many benefits that have led to their wide adoption in software and middleware developed for embedded systems: They are well-defined entities that can be replaced without affecting the rest of the systems, they can be developed and tested separately and integrated later, and they are reusable. Clearly such features are important for the design of large-scale complex systems more generally, beyond software architectures. We propose the use of a component approach to address embedded control problems. We outline a general componentbased framework to embedded control and show how it can be instantiated in specific problems that arise in the control over/of sensor networks. Building on the middleware component framework developed under the European project RUNES, we develop a number of control-oriented components necessary for the implementation of control applications and design their integration. The paper provides the overview of the approach, discusses a real life application where the approach has been tested and outlines a number of specific control problems that arise in this application.

A component-based approach to localization and collision avoidance for mobile multi-agent systems

“…The RUNES tunnel scenario and the component model are described in more detail in the introductory paper [1]. This paper describes the localization method and the collision avoidance method used in the demonstrator.…”

An experimental study of exploiting multipath fading for robot communications

“…There are several approaches to doing this, for example by restricting the movement to preserve connectivity [8], preserving a clear line of sight [1] or deploying relaying agents if the link is getting too weak [15,14,10]. A similar idea is to use mobile agents to bridge disconnected groups of networked sensors [2]. Most of the proposed coordination schemes have been developed based on assumptions of very simplified channel models.…”

An Algorithm for Reconnecting Wireless Sensor Network Partitions

“…In fact, as shown in Figure 7, a static ΔT H in the [0. 5,2] range limits the disconnection probability in the [0, 0.3] range. Nevertheless, in this case the communication overhead ranges from 9.9 to 25.2.…”

“…how many good links the mobile node has with safe nodes. The Verify function evaluates the neighbourhood by broadcasting a burst of B Hello messages (lines [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. If a fixed safe node replies with at least B min valid messages, it is considered a neighbour (lines [9][10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…To illustrate the potential of the networked embedded systems, the project selected a disaster relief scenario, in which a fire occurs within a tunnel, much as happened in the Mont Blanc tunnel in 1999 [5]. The RUNES work in general and the disaster relief scenario in particular offer a number of interesting and challenging problems.…”