Scientific publications

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.

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.

How to develop adaptive high-tech embedded systems? This question has motivated this book. Adaptivity provides a wider operational envelope of systems and enables new market opportunities. Effective development of such systems requires a systematic approach that enables to include the adaptive capabilities at various system levels.

Context: Large software systems are usually developed by integrating several smaller systems, which may have been developed independently. The integration of such systems often requires the development of a custom adapter (sometimes called mediator or glue logic) for bridging any technical incompatibilities between the systems.

Much, if not most, information needed to assess a crisis situation originates these days from cooperative sources such as the Internet and social networks. Public safety authorities face the challenge to compile this information of uncertain origin and quality in their situation understanding and response planning.

Recently, hybrid Petri nets with a single general one-shot transition (HPnGs) have been introduced together with an algorithm to analyze their underlying state space using a conditioning/deconditioning approach. In this paper we propose a considerably more efficient algorithm for analysing HPnGs. The proposed algorithm maps the underlying state-space onto a plane for all possible ring times of the general transition s and for all possible systems times t.

Due to the increasing scarcity of human operators and the fast development of technology, there is a trend towards higher levels of automation in warehouses. The increased automation level results in a large warehouse complexity and a correspondingly large warehouse design effort. To support the warehouse designer in his effort, Vanderlande Industries and the Embedded Systems Institute started the Falcon project in October 2006.

The paper focuses on maximizing the economic performance (throughput) of industrial printers under changing operating conditions. An interesting problem for these printers is the cold start, when printing components have to be heated up as soon as possible to have minimum delay for the first print. To maximize the throughput of these machines, it is important to determine an optimal heating strategy, as temperature considerably influences the print quality.

In recent years, autonomous mobile robots (AMR) have emerged as a means of transportation system in warehouses. The complexity of the transport tasks requires efficient high-level control, i.e. planning and scheduling of the tasks as well as low-level motion control of the robots. Hence, an efficient coordination between robots is needed to achieve flexibility, robustness and scalability of the transportationsystem.