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Project

Concurrent design of control, embedded hardware and software for mechatronic and cyber-physical systems (CSE_codesign_ICON).

General objective: The main goal of this project is to develop a design approach and the necessary computational tools that enable the concurrent design of application software, embedded software and hardware platforms, ensuring the targeted closed-loop performance of cyber physical systems. This with the aim to increase the efficiency of the design process and yet reducethe costs of the associated embedded software and hardware platforms. Concrete goals: More specifically, the innovation goals of this project are to: 1. Develop a methodology and software tools to support the concurrent design of application software and embedded platform for individual cyber-physical product variants:  - enabling both control engineers and embedded platform engineers to perform a trade-off analysis between various design choices on application and platform level in an agile manner, i.e. without long iteration loops, thereby reducing the typical development time of an embedded control application with at least 25%. - improving the cost-effectiveness of embedded platforms by at least 10%, by considering stochastic delays instead of using 'worst case' response times and bus delays, without sacrificing the stability, performance and robustness of the closed-loop behaviour. 2. Investigate the feasibility of extending the above approach with design space exploration techniques that automatically select the most optimal design alternative in terms of application/platform design choices in the large space of possible solution alternatives.  3. Develop an approach and software tools to support trade-off analysis and design space exploration for the embedded platform selection and design in the case of complete mechatronic/cyber-physical controller product lines. Building further on these methods and tools, the company partners in this project aim to realize the following targets: Atlas Copco's main goal is to create an approach, a software framework and the accompanying development tools that support their designers responsible for implementing the compressor room control to select the most appropriate software and hardware platform deployment and configuration, guaranteeing the required compressor room performance under all circumstances. Picanol wants to increase the performance and quality of its weaving machines by improving the co-design between the control software and embedded platform engineers. More specifically, Picanol wants to deploy this co-design approach to the yarn insertion subsystem of all machine variants, thereby increasing the production capacity of these variants with 2% or reducing the air consumption with the same amount. Tenneco's main goal is to select a set of embedded and power electronics hardware platforms that cost-optimally cover their complete product line of electro-magnetic shock absorbers from low-end to high-end vehicles. The approach and tools that allows to select this set of platforms should also be applicable to other Tenneco product lines. Michel Van de Wiele (MVDW) wants to select a new, durable and modular embedded hardware and software platformthat is capable of controlling today's and tomorrow's weaving machinery. Specifically, for the same loom requirements a reduction of the hardware cost by at least 10 % is targeted or with the same hardware cost, the target is to realize an increase in machine speed of 10 to 50 % or being able to deal with at least 10 % more sensors / actuators. Next to this, MVDW also aims to update their design approach and tools such that designers can easily predict a priori if the embedded controller for a particular variant
Date:1 Jan 2018 →  31 Dec 2020
Keywords:COMPUTER SCIENCE, MECHATRONICS, SOFTWARE
Disciplines:Automation and control systems, Embedded systems
Project type:Collaboration project