The modularization and reuse of source code controlling traditional manufacturing systems is hindered by a tight coupling of these systems with their environment. Increasing uncertainty about production volume and demand fluctuations mandate new approaches, such as reconfigurable manufacturing systems, to address these issues. One key component for adaptable manufacturing systems is software reconfiguration. This paper shows how service oriented principles, along with schedule based service choreographies, can be applied in practice to achieve a flexible and reconfigurable software architecture that provides deterministic real-time guarantees which are required in many areas of automation. In addition to an abstract description of this approach, we implemented a real-world demonstrator and show how it can be reconfigured nearly instantly with a graphical user interface that triggers a heuristics based choreography and planning process.

Today's manufacturing industries are undertaking efforts to further increase the flexibility of their facilities. One way to achieve this goal is the development of distributed, service-oriented architectures (SOA). A challenge for SOAs is the continued support of the real-time requirements imposed by industrial control tasks. This paper presents an approach for executing service choreographies with strong real-time guarantees without a central point of control. Engineers can design the automation workflow as a graph of communicating tasks which are then assigned to devices in the network. Our method generates a cyclic, non-preemptive schedule for each device to achieve global cooperation between them. Using an approach that combines several heuristics, a valid solution for over 99% of the 1.2 million test cases was found. On average, this method was over two orders of magnitude faster than an approach based on MIP-solvers.

Today's manufacturing industry is under pressure to increase the flexibility of its factory lines. One approach to achieve this goal is the shift from centralized control systems towards distributed, service-oriented architectures (SOA). To fully leverage the benefit of this new paradigm, the SOA should extend down to the device level and even include resource-constrained devices, such as smart sensors and actuators. In this paper, we present our approach for a lightweight distributed service choreography without a central point of control. It is based on network-aware precalculation of a static, non-preemptive schedule for each device and is thus suitable even for constrained devices. In contrast to previous work, our focus lies on the planning components required for achieving a service choreography. Since scheduling is a central part of our architecture, and we expect it to be executed many times during the planning process, we evaluate different heuristics for this task.

Car rides are often perceived as dull by the passengers, especially children. Therefore, we aim to introduce a system fostering a collaborative and communicative experience in this environment. This paper presents the design for a game played together by all car-occupants, including the driver, according to their abilities and capacities. A fully implemented prototype of our system called nICE: nice In-Car Experience is evaluated under real world conditions in a user study with five families using a qualitative approach.

Usecases for wireless sensor networks, such as building automation or patient care, often collect and transmit sensitive information. Yet, many deployments currently do not protect this data through suitable security schemes. We propose an end-to-end security scheme build upon existing internet standards, specifically the Datagram Transport Layer Security protocol (DTLS). By relying on an established standard existing implementations, engineering techniques and security infrastructure can be reused which enables easy security uptake. We present a system architecture for this scheme and show its feasibility through the evaluation of our implementation.

During the last years the application areas and corresponding requirements for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) raised due to limited resources of devices and requirements of the application. The scenarios (e.g. home networks) call for an integration of a WSN into an existing IP-based infrastructure which is realized by 6LoW-PAN. To save resources and to ensure a long life time of the WSN resource consuming tasks such as transmissions must be reduced. Therefore, we present a Compressed IPFIX protocol. It optimizes the transmission by reducing the packet size and the transmission amount by separation between meta information and data. Additional tasks can be performed on top of IPFIX to optimize the efficient usage of the limited resources.