Scientific publications

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.

Warehouse management and control systems are responsible for the operations in a warehouse. These systems are usually very complex due to the delivery requirements of the warehouse customers. These delivery requirements are often very specific for a group of customers, which makes it hard to reuse warehouse management and control functionality for other warehouses.

We consider the problem of constructing critical paths from incomplete information. In general, a directed acyclic graph of tasks with their execution times (i.e., a task graph) is necessary to extract critical paths. We assume, however, that only the set of tasks, and their start and end times are known, e.

Wireless sensor networks are typically operating in a dynamic context where events, such as moving sensor nodes and changing external interference, constantly impact the qualityof-service of the network. We present a distributed feedback control mechanism that actively balances multiple conflicting network-wide quality metrics, such as power consumption and end-to-end packet latency, for a heterogeneous wireless sensor network operating in a dynamic context.

Scenario-aware dataflow graphs (SADFs) efficiently model dynamic applications. The throughput of an application is an important metric to determine the performance of the system. For example, the number of frames per second output by a video decoder should always stay above a threshold that determines the quality of the system.