Automotive Telematics Scenario
In the automotive and avionics industry, embedded systems provide the capability of reaching new levels of safety and sustainability that otherwise would not be feasible, while adding functionality, improving comfort, and increasing efficiency. Examples of this include improved manufacturing techniques, driver-assistance systems in cars that help prevent accidents, and advanced power-train management concepts that reduce fuel consumption and emissions.
In Western Europe, the “100 percent safe” car is envisioned. It will have sensors, actuators, and smart embedded software, ensuring that neither the driver nor the vehicle is the cause of any accident. This concept extends to all aspects of the driving experience: in-car entertainment, information services, and car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication.
For example, the car would know who is allowed to drive it and who is driving it; where it is; where it is going and the best route to its destination; and it would be able to exchange information with vehicles around it and with the highway. It would monitor its own state (fuel levels, tires, oil pressure, passenger compartment temperature and humidity, component malfunction, need for maintenance) and the state of the driver (fatigue, intoxication, anger). The car would first advise and then override the driver in safety-critical situations, use intelligent systems to minimize fuel consumption and emissions, and contain an advanced on-board entertainment system.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) smart tags within the major car components would communicate with other components during manufacture to optimize the process, communicate with in-car systems during the car’s working life to optimize maintenance cycles, and enable environmentally friendly disposal of the car and its components at the end of its life.
Challenges and Issues
To enable this scenario, components would need to be embedded in long-lived physical structures (such as bridges, traffic lights, individual cars, and perhaps even the paint on the roads). Some components will be permanently connected to a network, but many would be resource constrained (for example, in terms of power) while computing data and thus communicating it wirelessly only when necessary. The many pieces of such a system will of necessity be heterogeneous, not only in form but also in function. There may be subsystems that communicate to consumers in private vehicles, others that relay information from emergency vehicles to synchronize traffic lights, still others that provide traffic data and analysis to highway engineers, and perhaps some that communicate to law enforcement.
How information will be communicated to those interacting with the system is of great importance in such an environment. Safety is a critical concern, and issues of privacy and security arise as well, along with concerns about reliability.
Precision Agriculture Scenario
Incorporating DES technology into agriculture is a logical development of the advances in crop management over the last few decades. Despite deep understanding and knowledge on the part of farmers about how to adjust fertilizers, water supplies, and pesticides, and so on, to best manage crops and increase yields, a multitude of variations still exist in soil, land elevation, light exposure, and microclimates that make general solutions less than optimal, especially for highly sensitive crops like wine grapes and citrus fruit.
The latest developments in precision agriculture deploy fine-grained sensing and automated actuation to keep water, fertilizer, and pesticides to a minimum for a particular local area, resulting in better yields, lower costs, and less pollution-causing runoff and emissions. Furthermore, the data collected can be analyzed and incorporated as feedback control to adjust irrigation flow rate and duration tuned to local soil conditions and temperature. Sensors that can monitor the crop itself (for example, sugar levels in grapes) to provide location-specific data could prove very effective.
In the future, DES might be used to deploy sensors for the early detection of bacterial development in crops or viral contamination in livestock, or monitor flows of contaminants from neighboring areas and send alerts when necessary. In livestock management, feed and vitamins for individual animals will be adjusted by analyzing data from networks of ingestible sensors that monitor amounts of food eaten, activity and exercise, and health information about individual animals and the state of the herd as a whole.
Challenges and Issues
In this scenario, embedded components must be adaptive, multimodal, and able to learn over time. They will need to work under a wide range of unpredictable environmental conditions, as well as to interact with fixed and mobile infrastructure and new elements of the system as they are added and removed at varying rates of change.
Aviation and Avionics Scenario
The European Commission has set goals for the aviation industry of reducing fuel consumption by 30 percent by 2021 through the use of embedded systems. This may be a high goal to be achieved solely through the use of technology. But in this industry, the goals appear to very ambitious across the board.
The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for use in surveillance and in hazardous situations such as fire fighting promises to be cheaper, safer, and more energy efficient to operate than conventional aircraft. There are apparently many different kinds of UAVs under development: some with long-duration operational cycles and extensive sensor suites; some with military defense and attack capability; others that are small enough to be carried and deployed by individuals; and, in the future, tiny, insect-like, UAVs providing a flying sensor network.
The aircraft of the future will have advanced networks for on-board communication, mission control, and distributed coordination between aircraft. These networks will support advanced diagnosis, predictive maintenance, and in-flight communications for passengers. For external communication, future aircraft will communicate with each other in spontaneous, specific-for the-purpose ways similar to peer-to-peer networks.
Challenges and Issues
The aviation and avionics industry has specific needs in terms of security, dependability, fault tolerance and timeliness, stretching the limits of distributed embedded-systems design and implementation. The whole system, if not each of its embedded components, needs to be high precision, predictable, and robust for 100 percent operational availability and reliability. It must enable high bandwidth, secure, seamless connectivity of the aircraft with its in-flight and on-ground environment. It should support advanced diagnosis and predictive maintenance to ensure a 20- to 30-year operational life span.
DES design environments and tools will need to provide significant improvements in product development cycles, ongoing customizations, and upgrades beyond those achievable with current distributed-systems development tools. Design advances in fast prototyping, constructive system composition, and verification and validation strategies will be required to manage this complexity.
Manufacturing and Process-Automation Scenario
Embedded systems are important to manufacturing in terms of safety, efficiency, and productivity. They will precisely control process parameters, thus reducing the total cost of manufacture. Potential benefits from integrating embedded control and monitoring systems into the production line include: better product quality and less waste through close process control and real-time quality assurance; more flexible, quickly configured production lines as a result of programmable subsystems; system health monitoring, which leads to more-effective, preventive and lower-cost maintenance; safer working environments due to better monitoring and control; and better component assembly techniques, such as through the use of smart RFID tags.
Challenges and Issues
There are many implications of this industry scenario for DES. One is a need for better man-machine interactions in what is fundamentally a real-time, man-plus-machine control loop. Providing better interactions will improve quality and productivity by ensuring that there are no operator errors, as well as by reducing accidents. Availability, reliability, and continuous quality of service are essential requirements for industrial systems achieved through advanced control, redundancy, intelligent alarming, self-diagnosis, and repair. Other important issues are the need for robustness and testing, coherent system-design methodology, finding a balance between openness and security, integrating old and new hardware with heterogeneous systems, and managing obsolescence.
Medical and Health-Care Scenario
Society is facing the challenge of delivering good-quality, cost-effective health care to all citizens. Medical care for an aging population, the cost of managing chronic diseases, and the increasing demand for best-quality health care are major factors in explaining why health-care expenditures in Europe are already significant (8.5 percent of GDP) and rising faster than overall economic growth. Medical diagnosis and treatment systems already rely heavily on advances in embedded systems. New solutions that mix embedded intelligence and body-sensing techniques are currently being developed [3], and current advances in this area address patient-care issues such as biomedical imaging, remote monitoring, automatic drug dispensing, and automated support for diagnosis and surgical intervention.
Challenges and Issues
The medical domain represents a complex and diverse arena for extraordinary developments that deploy a wide range of embedded systems. Implanted devices such as pacemakers and drug dispensers are commonplace, but need to become more sophisticated, miniaturized, and connected to networks of information systems. Wearable devices for monitoring and managing cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, and heart rate must be remotely connected to the laboratory and to the operating room in a secure and reliable manner from beginning to end. Robotic devices are being used today to guide and perform invasive surgery requiring high-integrity engineering practices not even imagined in a typical “mission-critical” enterprise application.
Mobility Scenario
Combining mobile communications with mobile computing is allowing people to talk to others and access information and entertainment anywhere at any time. This requires ubiquitous, secure, instant, wireless connectivity, convergence of functions, global and short-range sensor networks and light, convenient, high-functionality terminals with sophisticated energy management techniques. Such environments will enable new forms of working with increased productivity by making information instantly available, when needed in the home, cars, trains, airplanes and wider-area networks. Imagine a hand-held or wearable device giving easy access to a range of services able to connect via a range of technologies including GSM, GPS, wireless, Bluetooth and via direct connection to a range of fixed infrastructure terminals. Potential applications and services include: Entertainment, education, internet, local information, payments, telephony, news alerts, VPNs, interfaces to medical sensors and medical services, travel passes and many more.
Challenges and Issues
Devices would need to reconfigure themselves autonomously depending on patterns of use and the available supporting capabilities in environment or infrastructure and be able to download new services as they became available. To develop such infrastructure, the gap between large, enterprise systems and embedded components would need to be bridged. Significant developments are required in technology for low-power and high performance computing, networked operating systems, development and programming environments, energy management, networking and security.
Issues that need to be resolved in the infrastructure to support these kinds of scenarios include the provision of end-to-end ubiquitous, interoperable, secure, instant, wireless connectivity to services. Simultaneously the infrastructure must allow unhindered convergence of functions and of sensor networks. Addressing the constraints imposed by power management (energy storage, utilization and generation) at the level of the infrastructure and mobile device poses a major challenge.
Home-Automation and Smart Personal Spaces Scenario
By deploying DES in the home, an autonomous, integrated, home environment that is highly customizable to the requirements of individuals can be foreseen. Typical applications and services available today include intruder detection, security, and environmental control. But in the future, applications and services to support the young, elderly, and infirm will be developed, and these may have the ability to recognize individuals and adapt to their evolving requirements, thereby enhancing their safety, security, and comfort. By tying in with applications and services described in the medical/health-care and mobility scenarios, smart personal spaces could be developed.
Challenges and Issues
Multidisciplinary, multiobjective design techniques that offer appropriate price and performance, power consumption, and control will have to be used if we are to realize the potential of embedded systems for home entertainment, monitoring, energy efficiency, security, and control. Such systems will require significant computational, communication, and data-storage capabilities. The mix of physical monitoring and data-based decision support by some form of distributed intelligence will rely on the existence of seamlessly connected embedded systems and the integration of sensors and actuators into intelligent environments. These systems will be characterized by ubiquitous sensors and actuators and a high-bandwidth connection to the rest of the world. Technologies will need to be developed that support sensing, tracking, ergonomics, ease-of-use, security, comfort, and multimodal interaction.
Key to achieving this result will be developing wireless and wired communications and techniques for managing sensor information, including data fusion and sensor overloading. The challenges are to make such systems intelligent, trustworthy, self-installing, self-maintaining, self-repairing, and affordable, and to manage the complexity of system behavior in the context of a large number of interoperable, connected, heterogeneous devices. These systems will need to operate for years without service, be able to recover from failure, and be able to supervise themselves.
Managing these embedded systems will require support of all aspects of the life cycle of the application and service infrastructures, including ownership, long-term storage, logging of system data, maintenance, alarms, and actions by the provider (emergency, medical, or security) services, authorization of access and usage, and charging and billing under a range of different conditions of use.
