In cyber-physical systems, such as modern industrial plants, complex software is an essential part that enables cost-effective and flexible operation. However, this complexity increases the probability of problems that only reveal themselves after the deployment. This is even more important if security aspects are involved. Therefore, providing the possibility for software updates is an important building block in the design of industrial plants. This paper presents a holistic concept for software updates in an industrial plant with thousands of wirelessly connected embedded devices. Using wireless technology imposes additional difficulties in terms of data rate, packet size and reliability that have to be addressed in particular. The contribution also includes an analytical model to estimate the time until a new firmware is distributed. Evaluations carried out on hardware as well as in the OMNeT++ simulator demonstrate the applicability and scalability of the proposed approach.
Rising crude oil prices and worldwide awareness of environmental issues have resulted in increased research and development of energy storage systems. Batteries are one of the most attractive energy storage systems because of their high efficiency and low pollution. Because of their high-energy densities and long lifetimes, lithium-ion batteries are increasingly used not only in electrical vehicles, but also in other applications. A key point in the management of lithium-ion batteries is expanding their energy storage capability and lifetimes. To achieve this, a fundamental embedded system is the battery management system (BMS) needed to ensure optimal, reliable and safe operation of the battery. Modelling and characterization of the single cells and an efficient simulation environment is fundamental for the development of an efficient BMS. This work presents a study of the statistical variations of the characteristic parameters of the single cells on the performances of a battery pack. The Montecarlo method on the SystemC-WMS simulations has been used.
This paper presents a design for a low-cost research robot based on the small size of the Hexbug Spider toy1. Our basic modification replaces the robot head with a 3D-printed adapter, consisting of two parts to provide space for sensors, a larger battery, and a printed circuit board (PCB) with Arduino microcontroller, Wi-Fi module, and motor controller. We address the assembling process of such a robot and the programming using Arduino studio. The presented prototype costs less than 70 Euro, and is suitable for swarm robotic experiments and educational purposes.
The growing market of electronic appliances is nowadays introducing a new kind of problem: the disposal management of a great quantity of broken or simply outdated electric and electronic devices. Sometimes the equipment contain dangerous or precious materials, that must be handled carefully. Furthermore, several good and valuable components on broken equipment could be reused. In this work, we present a Web based system conceived and designed to maintain all those information that can improve the end-of-life management of an electronic appliance. The cloud database can be easily accessed using the RFId technology, allowing the traceability of the equipment and the single components in the manufacturing, use, reuse and end-of-life phases.
Network firewall rules are usually written by administrators or automated intrusion detection systems and often contain inconsistencies. Therefore, it is fundamental to ensure that only an absolutely correct configuration is active. In this paper, we design an open source conflict resolution framework (C application and Linux firewall kernel module on top of netfilter) that can be used as a constant independent system auditor, automatically detecting and resolving conflicts in firewall rules. Preliminary analysis from our implementation on ARM-based embedded systems examines efficiency and scalability of our framework.
