Scientific publications

The pre-build development of warehouse systems leads from a specific customer request to a specific customer quotation. This involves a process of configuring a warehouse system using a sequence of steps that contain increasingly more details. Simulation is a helpful tool in analyzing warehouse design alternatives, but setting up a detailed simulation is too expensive early in the development process.

This book presents and discusses various challenges and solutions for developing systems-of-systems for attaining situation awareness, with applications in the domain of maritime safety and security. This chapter introduces the book, describes the Dutch research project Poseidon from which it resulted, provides an overview of the chapters it contains, and introduces the core topics: situation awareness, systems-of-systems, and maritime safety and security.

Architectures for situation awareness systems originate from two main concerns: a functional view on the information processing that stems from domain experts’ understanding of their tasks and resources, and a system architect’s view on non-functional aspects of the operations that form such functionality within a system-of-systems realization.

In this chapter, we discuss the Poseidon demonstrator: a demonstrator that integrates the individual research results of all partners of the Poseidon project. After describing how the Poseidon demonstrator was built, deployed, and operated, we will not only show many results obtained from the demonstrator in action, but also present our lessons-learned during the creation and usage of the Poseidon demonstrator.

In this chapter we compare two application domains in which the tracking of objects and the analysis of their movements are core activities, viz. animal tracking and vessel tracking. More specifically, we investigate whether EthoVision XT, a research tool for video tracking and analysis of the behavior, movement, and activities of animals in a laboratory setting, can be adapted and applied to the tracking and analysis of vessels in the maritime domain.

In the maritime domain, electronic sensors such as AIS receivers and radars collect large amounts of data about the vessels in a certain geographical area. We investigate the use of process mining techniques for analyzing the behavior of the vessels based on these data. In the context of maritime safety and security, the goal is to support operators in identifying suspicious behavior that may indicate accidents or undesired activities such as smuggling and piracy.

Large systems-of-systems are developed by integrating several smaller systems that have been developed independently. System integration often requires adaptation mechanisms for bridging any technical incompatibilities between the systems. In order to develop adapters in a faster way, we study ways to generate adapters from a model-based specification.

There is a constant pressure on developers of embedded systems to simultaneously increase system functionality and to decrease development costs. Aviable way to obtain a better system performance with the same physical hardware is adaptivity: a system should be able to adapt itself to dynamically changing circumstances.

Adaptive systems engineering comprises two individual themes, adaptive systems and systems engineering, and their interaction. In the Octopus project, some challenges that arise from these themes have been addressed in the realm of professional printers. This chapter serves to place these challenges in a common context, which is done along the BAPO structuring principle (Business, Architecture, Process, Organisation).

Full flexible use of inkjet printhead units in printing systems requires consistent generation of drops with any given volume and velocity at any moment and place desired. True drop-on-demand is currently hampered by physical phenomena in the printhead. These are residual vibrations and crosstalk resulting from conventional jets.