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                   B O S T O N   U N I V E R S I T Y
                      Computer Science Department
                          C O L L O Q U I U M
                      Wednesday, February 6, 3:00 PM 
                       (Coffee served at 2:45PM)
                         Seminar Room / MCS 135


          Open control systems: architecture, problems and solutions

                              Peter Wurmsdobler
                           Open Control Laboratory
                                Control.com

                                  Abstract

Automation and industrial control systems are currently dominated by
proprietary and monolithic solutions. This is also true for all their
elements like human machine interfaces (HMIs), programmable logic
controllers (PLCs), discrete or distributed control systems (DCSes) and
protocols associated with theses elements. On the other hand, desktop
computer systems are modular; they are built from off-the-shelf-components
(COTS) that are cheap and comply to standards (e.g., PCI for hardware,
POSIX for operating systems, and TCP/IP for network protocols). It is
therefore appropriate to consider the use of modular, commodity systems in
control environments.

The control industry has been struggling to develop open control systems
for about 15 years. These systems include multi-vendor control systems
having components that comply to open, non-proprietary standards, for both
hardware and software. They often utilize commodity operating system
support, but this leads to problems, including: predictability, latency
analysis, real-time performance, interoperability between components,
compliance to standards, and definitions of interfaces. This talk will
address some of these problems and focuses on the requirements of control
applications for operating systems using PLCs as an example.


Bio

Peter Wurmsdobler obtained his MS in mechanical engineering and his PhD in
control engineering from the Vienna University of Technology. Being a
PostDoc in France, he developed a torque measurement system employing
RTLinux as the real-time operating system. This lead him to the
organization of the annual real-time linux workshops and to computer
science in general. Currently, Peter Wurmsdobler is Lab Director of the
open control laboratory at control.com.
			

Host: Richard West
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