The Digital Twin approach has increased in interest in recent years. Without well defined specifications, it is common for different researchers to use different approaches. Digital Twin concept emerged to support Industry 4.0, so it is of utmost importance to specify a best methodology, and tools, for its implementation for industrial use cases. This work proposes a Digital Twin architecture that follows manufacturing-centric standards of an industrial prototype testing station, for a new car infotainment system. Testing is performed by low-cost Software-Defined Radio equipment that aims to replace expensive metrological equipment. Moreover, an environment sensing device is also used to monitor the physical environment around prototype. We present the development of a solution that allows manage hardware processing, real-time monitoring of machine states in the virtual environment, and control of the overall system through a logical sequence supported by its Digital Twin. With the implementation of a standard like ISO23247, helps in the identified problem of having various Digital Twins and improves an interaction with test equipment. All steps made for the development of our architecture approach, as well as some results, are shown and explained for our use case.

In this study three different bioradars were tested inside a vehicle to verify if they are able to measure respiratory rate and heart rate in an automotive environment. Raw data recordings and vital sign measurements were obtained, and after using low-complexity methods to extract the vital sign measurements from the raw data, these were compared to a ground truth. The best performance in respiratory rate measurement was achieved by an Impulse-Response Ultra Wide Band radar, with an average of 7.18 % mean relative error when the vehicle is stationary, and the best performance in heart rate measurement was achieved by a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave radar, with an average mean relative error of 3.27 % when the vehicle is stationary.

Simulators have been used for decades in many different areas. Military and aerospace were the first areas where simulators appeared to train people and more. More recently, we have assisted to the emergence of a multitude of simulators in many other contexts. One of them is automobiles and motorcycles.External devices, such as touch-screen displays, are often part of these simulator environments to make them more realistic and test new concepts and ideas. Usually, to expand its functionalities, simulators allow the integration of external devices, requiring those devices to be coupled to the simulators’ extension mechanisms and behaviour. This is often a difficult task as it requires to learn about the extension mechanisms, and when moving the devices to other simulators, part of the code must be rewritten.This paper shows how ROS2, a well-known and accepted middleware for robotic as well as automotive applications, can also play a role in these contexts acting as a universal interface between external devices and a simulator, thereby significantly improving portability and reusability of external devices as well as opening the simulator to the vast possibilities offered by the ROS2 ecosystem.

Despite the Industry 4.0, most of the production lines today are what is sometimes called "legacy", and cannot be replaced overnight by Industry 4.0 versions and thus still have to be maintained for quite some time. In this paper, we describe the architecture and implementation of a logical connector that enables the migration (also known as °to retrofit") of legacy production lines into an Industry 4.0 ecosystem, with the production lines remaining almost unchanged. To do that, four main challenges had to be addressed, namely: the data accessibility challenge, the data interoperability challenge, the machine variability challenge, and the resource usage challenge. In the end, the logical connector presented in this paper has shown to enable the migration of legacy production lines into an Industry 4.0 ecosystem and thus to reap some of the benefits promised by Industry 4.0.

Most hypervisors today rely either on (1) full virtualization on high-end hardware (i.e., hardware with virtualization extensions), (2) paravirtualization, or (3) both. These, however, do not fulfill embedded systems' requirements, or require legacy software to be modified. Full virtualization on low-end hardware (i.e., hardware without virtualization extensions), on the other end, has none of those disadvantages. However, it is often claimed that it is not feasible due to an unacceptably high virtualization overhead. We were, nevertheless, unable to find real-world quantitative results supporting those claims.

Due to the scientific and technological advances of the last decades, embedded systems have become central to modern life, which has led to a new reality in which the embedded systems market has been growing with a monthly or even weekly emergence of new products with different applications across several domains. Focus on embedded systems design is driven by: (1) high and fast penetration in products and services due to the integration of networks, operating systems and database capabilities, (2) the economically strategic nature of the field, and (3) its status as a new, and relatively undefined, subject in academic environment. We'll present the development of the educational context for the new technologies, and show how our Integrated Master Curriculum in Industrial Electronics and Computer Engineering has been adapted to satisfy the needs of the industry and meet all the above mentioned challenges.

The development and maintenance of hardware/software Systems with a high level of variability is a complex task. At IVV Automacão, LDA the video surveillance system is implemented as a software product line that exploit the common component features that compose the video surveillance system family of products. In order to manage the system variability at code level, the IVV developers use C++ template metaprogramming (TMP). Although, TMP presents advantages in variability code management at compile time, the syntax and idioms of TMP are esoteric compared to conventional C++ programming, and TMP can be difficult to understand. In this paper we propose a novel approach to implement and maintain TMP code using a model-driven tool, that employs Template Markup Language with a XSLT transformer to automatic generate and maintain TMP code.

The proliferation of highly-configurable FPGA technology has allowed the implementation of dedicated systems of diverse configurations and fueled the software to hardware migration paradigm. This work demonstrates how the hardware implementation of virtualization technology affects the system reliability at several levels of abstraction. By correlating faults between the physical and virtual, the reliability impact of hardware-assisted virtualization is shown, as well as how runtime faults are capable of breaching virtualization. ISA profiling is used to assess reliability at early design stages and how its use can serve as a robustness guideline for hardware and software designers is explained.

This paper presents a novel hypervisor engineered for aerospace applications using an object oriented approach embodying time and space partitioning (TSP) on a PowerPC core embedded in a FPGA, for the NetworkCentric core avionics [1] - an architecture of cooperating components and managed by a real-time operating system to implement dependable computing and targeting simplicity. To support partitioned IMA [2]software architectures our hypervisor adapted to the aerospace application domain the Popek and Goldberg's [3] fidelity, efficiency and resource control virtualization requirements by extending them with additional ones like timing determinism, reactivity and improved dependability. A distinctive feature of the hypervisor is its I/O device virtualization approach that guarantees real-time performance and small trusted computing base.

This paper presents a novel segmentation approach for object detection in aquatic outdoor scenes such as swimming pools and its surroundings. This process is part of a video-based early drowning detection system for private swimming pools. Aquatic outdoor scenes are continuously changing due to reflections and refractions caused by water oscillation, severely affecting the results obtained by traditional segmentation schemes because water oscillation is perceived as motion detection of objects in the aquatic area. The novel segmentation technique is based in the separation of the special water environment and the rest of the scene, by means of an off-line automatically generated pool mask. The two areas are segmented with different algorithms, one for the aquatic scene and another for the surrounding area. Further, a two-step approach segmentation algorithm for the aquatic area was developed: the first segmentation step is based on the HSV invariant color model space; the second one consists in re-segmenting each region inside an expanded bounding box resulting from the first step. The second step increases segmentation quality up to 20%, as it captures parts of objects not detected before. The information extracted from the water surrounding area is also very important for object tracking and behaviour analysis purposes.