Scientific publications

Self re-entrant flowshops consist of machines which process jobs several times. They are found in applications like TFT-LCD assembly, LED manufacturing and industrial printing. The structure of a self re-entrant flowshop influences its performance. To get better performance while reducing costs a fast performance estimation method can be used to explore the trade-offs between the structure and the performance during the design process.

Today’s embedded and cyber-physical systems are getting more connected and complex. One main challenge during development is the often loose coupling between engineering tools, which could lead to inconsistencies and errors due to the manual transfer and duplication of data. Open formats and specifications raise expectations for seamlessly integrated tool chains for systems engineering combining best-of-breed technologies and tools of different tool vendors.

The problem of online face tracking from unconstrained videos is still unresolved. Challenges range from coping with severe online appearance variations to coping with occlusion. We propose RFTD (Robust Face Tracking-by-Detection), a system which combines tracking and detection into a single framework to robustly track a face from unconstrained videos.

Blended education, the combination of traditional face-To-face education with online possibilities, is seen as the way for the future in education. Challenge for course providers is to learn how to offer blended education and to make the transition toward blended education. In this paper, we evaluate a first version of a blended course.

Internet of Things (IoT) is triggering changes in lighting industry from the traditional closed and propriety systems to flexible, interoperable and service oriented systems. To address the challenges of this transition and catering the specific requirements of lighting networks, an Open Architecture for Intelligent Solid State Lighting Systems has been proposed.

We present a three-step binding algorithm for applications in the form of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks with deadlines, that need to be bound to a shared memory multiprocessor platform. The aim of the algorithm is to obtain a good binding that results in low makespans of the schedules of the DAGs.

Image-based control systems are becoming common in domains such as robotics, healthcare and industrial automation. Coping with a long sample period because of the latency of the image processing algorithm is an open challenge. Modern multi-core platforms allow to address this challenge by pipelining the sensing algorithm.

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are tightly coupled with the environment, and therefore it is important that interactions with the surroundings like Human-Computer-Interactions are performed very responsive. Since CPS are often embedded without traditional input devices, like in medical or automotive contexts, gesture recognition approaches are emerging.

The design and analysis of smart system behavior needs to bridge between worlds – both with regard to engineering methods and to the technologies central to adaptivity and thus acore functionality of smart systems-of-systems. We illustrate this in our domain, smart buildings, where AI technologies like rule based or probabilistic reasoning set the strategies that define the building’s adaptive behavior, but control loops firmly set in control engineering implement it.

This paper proposes methods for verification of (m, k)-firmness properties of control applications running on a shared TDMA-scheduled processor. We particularly consider dropped samples arising from processor sharing. Based on the available processor budget for any sample that is ready for execution, the Finite-Point (FP) method is proposed for quantification of the maximum number of dropped samples.