Description:
In the late 90s and the beginning of this century an international generic standard for safety was developed, called IEC61508. It pertains to all technical systems which may endanger persons and material goods. Since modern control systems are based on communication protocols, Input / Output processing and many electronic components the safety norm IEC61508 pertains to the entire network, e.g. when hazardous situations like fire, gas leakages or earth quakes are to be considered. Such events must be detected with an extremely high probability in order to initiate a predefined safe state or a safe scenario.

Unfortunately, standard communication protocols are orders of magnitude away from the desired “residual probability of failure” recognition. Therefore SafetyLon had to be developed as “a protocol within a protocol” together with the associated hardware and software in order to attain the IEC61508 Safety Integrity Level 3 (SIL 3).

The experts and developers of the SafetyLon consortium will give you an insight into Safety standard IEC61508 and the intrinsics of the SafetyLon concept. They will explain, how the project is organized and partitioned, and how the safe hardware and software modules were specified, designed, tested and deployed. Finally, you will learn how the new technology will be translated into safe prototypes and products.

Date: 23.7.2007, 9:30 - 12:30

Presenters:
Dr. Jürgen Hertel, Consortium Manger of SafetyLon Project (Tutorial Coordinator)
Dr. Peter Wratil, Managing Director of Innotec GmbH (Hamburg)
Dr. Dietmar Loy, Engineering Manager, Loytec GmbH, Vienna
Grzegorz Hayduk, Software Engineer, AGH-UST University, Krakow
Martin Mentzel, Technical Project Coordinator, Fachhochschule Dortmund
Chris Brönnimann, Managing Director of Ingenieurbüro Brönninmann, Thun (CH)

Location: Techgate

Description:
Within this tutorial the modeling of distributed control systems based on IEC 61499 will be presented. The tool chain (runtime environment and engineering tool) is provided by the open source initiative "Open Distributed Embedded Control Environment - ODECE". Therefore the first part of the tutorial deals with the application centered engineering approach provided by IEC 61499 and the specification/ configuration of the embedded hardware. In the second part the execution aspects of distributed control applications will be analyzed. The implementation of applications into the ODECE runtime environment will be discussed. This includes the generation of IEC 61499 function block types and resource types.

This tutorial includes hands on training, therefore an own computer is required by the attendees.

Date: 23.7.2007, 9:30 – 17:30

Presenter:
Dr. Thomas Strasser, Profactor Produktionsforschungs GmbH, Steyr
Alois Zoitl, ACIN, Vienna University of Technology

Location: Techgate

Description:
The basic principles and lessons of software, knowledge, and distributed systems engineering, as well as the same scientific rigour pervading these research areas, have to be applied to the development and deployment of multiagent systems. At present, the majority of existing agent applications are developed in an ad-hoc fashion: little or no rigorous design methodology, limited specification of the requirements, ad-hoc design of agents and of multi-agent system as a whole, and little attention to non-functional requirements such as mobility, scalability, performance issues, standards. This is indeed a limitation for the widespread appliance of any new software technology. And, of course, it can be a strong limitation for agent-based computing too.
Moreover, outside the agent community, there is still no widespread acceptance of agent-based computing as a new paradigm. Many people - both from academia and from industry - still think that agents are nothing but grown-up objects, renewed with a nice, publication-appealing, name. Although the raising of some scepticism is intrinsic with the introduction of any new technology, perhaps this problem is actually exacerbated within the agent community by the lack of a clear and unambiguous terminology, of a clean set of abstractions, and, even more important, of a full understanding of the commonalties and differences between the agent paradigm and more traditional (i.e., object-based and component-based) paradigms for software development, and of the associated advantages and drawbacks. Clarifying what makes agent-based approach to the development of complex software systems different from traditional component-based and object-based approaches, and developing a discipline of agent-oriented software development accordingly, are thus necessary goals to be achieved for making agents accepted outside the agent community.

Date: 23.7.2007, 13:30-17:30

Presenters:
Massimo Cossentino, ICAR-CNR

Location: Techgate