Plenary Talk I (Sponsored by JEMIMA )

A part of Special Programs related to Smart Manufacturing in SICE2017
Title: Future Control System Architecture Enabling I4.0/Smart Manufacturing
  - Service-oriented (Machine) Control Architecture in the context of Smart
   Manufacturing-
Speaker: Dr. Alois Zoitl
Affiliation: fortiss GmbH

Abstract: Future machines and plants more adaptable flexible changeable to accommodate shorter product life cycles and fluctuating markets. New automation and control architectures are need for this. Key aspects of such architectures is a much higher modularization of production facilities and a strong decoupling of the involved entities. Service-oriented architectures have shown in classical IT systems that they can achieve such properties. Especially they were successful in combining legacy systems with new systems and bringing flexibility to both. Furthermore, these systems require much more software in the machines and plants. In this talk, we investigate these demands and present according architectures for implementing them and show which standards can already help and what new standards are needed on order to achieve the vision of smart manufacturing.

Biography: Alois Zoitl holds a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering with focus on dynamic reconfiguration of real-time constrained control applications and a Master degree in Electrical Engineering with the focus on distributed industrial automation systems from Vienna University of Technology. Currently he is the leading the competence field Industrie 4.0 at the research institute fortiss in Munich, Germany. Before that he was the head of the research field Distributed Intelligent Automation Systems (Odo Struger Laboratory) at the Automation and Control Institute (ACIN), Vienna University of Technology. He is co-author of more than 150 publications (including 3 books, 6 book chapters, 19 journal articles) and the co-inventor of four patents in the mentioned areas. Alois Zoitl conducted and lead several industry funded R&D projects as well as coordinated and participated in several public funded (national as well as European) R&D projects. He is a founding member of the open source initiatives 4DIAC (www.fordiac.org), providing a complete IEC 61499 solution, and OpENer. Furthermore, he is a member of the IEEE, the PLCopen user organization, and GMA. Since 2009 he is an active member of the IEC SC65B/WG15 for the distributed automation standard IEC 61499. He was named convenor of the group in May 2015.

Plenary Talk II

Title: Don't bother being optimal, just be greedy
Speaker: Professor Edwin K. P. Chong
Affiliation:Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Dept. of Mathematics, Colorado State University

Abstract: We discuss optimization problems where the objective function is submodular, which roughly means that it has the property of diminishing returns. In such problems, we can provably bound the performance of the greedy solution relative to the optimal solution. We present a variety of recent results related to such optimization problems, including bounds for "string-submodular" problems, bounds related to k-batch greedy strategies, improved bounds involving notions of curvature, and bounds on Nash equilibria in submodular games. We illustrate these results in the context of various application problems arising in task scheduling.

Biography: Edwin K. P. Chong received the B.E. degree with First Class Honors from the University of Adelaide, South Australia, in 1987; and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in 1989 and 1991, respectively, both from Princeton University, where he held an IBM Fellowship. He joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University in 1991, where he was named a University Faculty Scholar in 1999. Since August 2001, he has been a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Mathematics at Colorado State University. He coauthored the best-selling book, An Introduction to Optimization (4th Edition, Wiley-Interscience, 2013). He received the NSF CAREER Award in 1995 and the ASEE Frederick Emmons Terman Award in 1998. He was a co-recipient of the 2004 Best Paper Award for a paper in the journal Computer Networks. In 2010, he received the IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Member Award. Prof. Chong is a Fellow of IEEE. He was the founding chairman of the IEEE Control Systems Society Technical Committee on Discrete Event Systems, and served as an IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer. He was a Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control until 2016, and has also served on the editorial boards of Computer Networks, Journal of Control Science and Engineering, and IEEE Expert Now. He was the General Chair for the 2011 Joint 50th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference. He has served as a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society Board of Governors and as Vice President for Financial Activities until 2014. He serves as its President in 2017.

Plenary Talk III

Title:How autonomous vehicles perceive environment and make decisions
   - First public road testing by a Japanese University -
Speaker:Associate professor Naoki Suganuma
Affiliation:Institute for Frontier Science Initiative, Kanazawa University, Future Society Creation Research Core, automatic driving unit

Abstract: In recent years, autonomous vehicles have received more attentions in order to improve human life quality and safety. It is expected to bring various changings of living in the future by solving many problems related to mobility and time consuming. In Japan, Kanazawa University has started the first public road testing among Japanese universities. After that, the public road testing of autonomous vehicle has been gradually conducted as similar as other countries . In order to develop such autonomous vehicles, the question of “what kind of technologies that are necessary for autonomous vehicles?” must be answered. Therefore, in this talk, I will explain how our autonomous vehicle perceives the environment and makes the decisions. Moreover, the achievements on public road testing of our lab will be briefly provided and finally some critical faced issues will be highlighted.

Biography: Naoki Suganuma is with Kanazawa University, Ishikawa, Japan scince 2002 and has received his BE, ME and PhD degrees from this university in 1998, 2000 and 2002. Since 2015, he started the first public road experiment of Self-driving vehicle on City Street among Japanese Universities. Currently, he is Associate Professor and the leader of Autonomous Vehicle research unit, Institute for Frontier Science Initiative, Kanazawa University.