Valeriy Vyatkin

There has been impressive research effort towards making industrial automation more intelligent. Examples include multi-agent systems with reasoning capabilities and semantic knowledge driven, self-organizing systems in such areas as manufacturing, energy and transportation. However, penetration of these results to industrial world is not great. Practitioners oppose that all technical systems need to implement concrete requirements respecting various constraints, and it is hard to ensure those with “intelligent” automation. Another obstacle is the lack of engineering methods to convert requirements to the intelligent automation solutions. All these trends are observed in many industrial sectors, such as manufacturing, material handling, as well as power systems automation and SmartGrid. IEC 61499 is a new reference architecture for distributed automation systems that promises to fill the gap between automation state of the art and intelligent automation research. It addresses interoperability, configurability and portability, important to achieve flexibility of future automation systems. First application experiences have proven many expectations related to the design benefits. However they confirmed earlier fears related to distributed systems verification & validation: distributed systems are hard to verify by traditional methods, such as testing and code debugging. Our group at Auckland has been investigating the potential of this architecture for improvement of design, verification & validation practices in automation and some of them will be shared in this talk. We used IEC 61499 as a basis for Cyber-Physical Component (CPC) architecture. This architecture addresses several design software and system engineering challenges: right equilibrium between abstract representation and “executability”, round-trip engineering and ability to exhibit emergent behaviour. It offers ability of self-verification thanks to employing the concept of multi-closed-loop modelling. A CPC exhibit such properties as portability, interoperability and configurability thanks to the reliance on open standards. The use of synchronous execution paradigm adds determinism and predictability at the run-time. The CPC architecture has been successfully applied in modelling and implementation of systems in such domains as manufacturing, logistics, power systems and building automation. It is being used as “underlying canvas” for generative programming.

Biography: Valeriy Vyatkin is Chaired Professor of Dependable Computations and Communications at Luleå Tekniska Universitet in Luleå, Sweden.
Previously he worked as Professor and the director of Industrial Informatics research lab at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Prior to Auckland he held permanent academic positions in Germany and Russia and postdoctoral position in Japan.
Research interests of Prof Valeriy Vyatkin are in the area of dependable distributed automation and industrial informatics, including software engineering for industrial informatics systems, distributed architectures and multi-agent systems applied in various industry sectors: SmartGrid, logistics and transportation, material handling, building management systems, reconfigurable manufacturing, etc. Prof Vyatkin is also active in research on dependability provisions for industrial control systems, such as methods of formal verification and validation, and theoretical algorithms for improving their performance.
Prof Vyatkin and his group are involved in joint research projects with companies in the U.S., Canada, Austria, New Zealand and Germany. He has been a Principal Investigator of research projects in the FREEDM program, funded by the National Science Foundation. He is New Zealand delegate to the standardization committees of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) on standards 61131 and 61499.
Prof Vyatkin held visiting professor positions at TU Luleå (Sweden), University of Cambridge (UK), Missouri University od Science and Technology (USA), University of New Brunswick (Canada), University of Paris-Sud (France), Tampere University of Technology (Finland) and Martin-Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (Germany).