Optimization and Reconfiguration of IEC 61499-based Software Architectures

Zusammenfassung

The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) strives for an optimized and flexible production process to reduce configuration costs. To achieve such a production process, first architecture-level decisions (i.e. deployment configuration, scheduling, etc.) are optimized. Following, these optimized architectural configurations are applied to dynamically reconfigure industrial control applications. To calculate software configurations, current research applies Design Space Exploration (DSE) techniques embedded into the IEC 61499 model-based approach. However, this research either applies simple and non-applicable constraints and objectives for real-life problems or considers architectural optimization solely at the design phase. Thus, reconfiguring industrial control applications is still an exhausting and manual task that requires production process' downtime. In this Ph.D. thesis, I handle the automatically optimized reconfiguration of the industrial automation systems. In particular, I propose applying DSE to calculate architectural configurations of IEC 61499-based control applications. To define different configuration problems from real-world situations, I identify domain-specific constraints and objectives. Furthermore, I will tackle the problem of runtime reconfiguration by applying several optimization strategies in various context scenarios and investigating an incremental search for new optimal configurations.