Significant pieces of our nation's critical infrastructures depend on automation systems that operate under tight safety and timing constraints. Critical infrastructure security, bottling and packaging, material and container handling, automated manufacturing, on-board ship systems, locomotion systems, airport baggage handling, and amusement park rides are a few examples of such systems. With over a trillion dollars of installed base in North America, and over $90 Billion dollars forecasted revenues for year 2008, these systems represent an important class of embedded real-time systems. However, there are serious design and operational problems in existing automation systems. Rigid architectures and proprietary/inflexible implementations have resulted in systems that are difficult to operate and maintain. This project addresses research issues that are critical for incorporating advances in networked embedded computing into automation systems with flexible topologies. Technology support for atomic and coordinated actions enables cooperative operation in complex, coupled automation systems. A real-time middleware framework for sensor-actuator systems is being developed, providing services for node-level execution, scheduling, synchronization, mode-management, and fault management. By incorporating these advances, it is possible to reduce costs, achieve fine-grained control, improve safety, and design automation systems with flexible topologies for a variety of applications such as automotive assembly lines, chemical process industries, warehouses, airport baggage carousels, amusement park rides and package distribution centers. By focusing on the specific domain of automation systems, this project seeks to drive several innovations that include: targeted integration of sensors and actuators in low-cost nodes, dynamic re-configurability of wireless sensor networks driven by exception conditions, exploitation of redundancy to mask individual node or sensor failures, a scalable infrastructure, monitoring of large-scale operations, performance under constrained conditions, specialized algorithms and communication protocols that address real-life automation requirements, and inter-operability with current automation systems.
