| Popis: |
Information and Communication Technologies, or for short ICTs, are growing and advancing remarkably fast and along with this growth, their applications in various areas of human life and activities is being radically extended. Likewise, industrial and productions systems have been no exception in embracing these technologies to provide the organisations with better performance and efficiency and as a result bringing strategic advantages. The most recent contribution of ICTs in manufacturing is aiming at ever increasing convergence of virtual world and the physical world by introducing the concepts of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT) into the manufacturing era, and giving rise to the fourth industrial revolution, which is commonly known as the Industry 4.0. However, despite all the potentials and capabilities, there are still major challenges to address. One of the main challenges here is the dependability and security of these new systems, given their vast exposure to the cyber space and internet, and increased complexity and versatility of their functionality. Accordingly, this study intents to address this issue and make a contribution by proposing a robust mechanism that enables distributed components to fulfil their own dependability and security objectives by constantly and autonomously supervising and controlling their condition and actions with regards to these two aspects (dependability and security). Therefore, first the concept and the model for such mechanism has been modelled by taking into account the features and attributes of the systems on which the mechanism is going to applied. Consequently, the mechanism has been designed in the way that can inherently demonstrate the same properties to assure highest effectiveness and performance. The main properties considered were interoperability, scalability, modularity, autonomy, heterogeneity, and context-awareness. For the next step which was the implementation of the mechanism, Multi-Agent System approach was selected, given all the capabilities of these systems and perfectly matching properties that this toolset enables. As a result, and agent-based mechanism for autonomous and intelligent distributed supervision and control of smart cyber-physical systems’ components has been developed and implemented, and various use cases to test the mechanism were defined. And finally, the results have been demonstrated. |
