My paper on the application PLC Factory, of which I wrote at the European Spallation Source in Lund, Sweden, in 2016, got accepted to ICALEPCS 2017. This year’s ICALEPCS conference will take place in Barcelona, Spain, from 8 October to 13 October 2017. The abstract is below. The final revision of the paper is available on my Gitlab repository.

PLC FACTORY: AUTOMATING ROUTINE TASKS IN LARGE-SCALE PLC SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Authors:
G. Ulm, F. Bellorini, D. Brodrick, R. Fernandes, N. Levchenko, D. Piso Fernandez

Abstract:
At the European Spallation Source in Lund, Sweden, the entire facility including all its instruments will be controlled by a large number of programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Programming PLCs, however, entails a significant amount of repetition. It is thus an error-prone and time-consuming task. Given that PLCs interface with hardware, this involves economic aspects as well, due to the fact that programming errors may cause damage to equipment. With PLC Factory, we managed to automate repetitive tasks associated with PLC programming and interfacing PLCs from EPICS. This tool is being adopted at ESS, and has shown potential for a large increase in productivity compared to the status quo. We describe PLC Factory as well as its embedded domain-specific programming language PLCF#, which it is built upon.

The Systems and Data Analysis department at the Fraunhofer-Chalmers Centre for Industrial Mathematics intends to hire two students for a summer internship. The starting date is flexible; the salary is competitive for Sweden. However, note that there is no relocation assistance. You would be working under my supervision and assist in the further development of a prototype of a distributed system, which I built from scratch.

Here is the job ad:


Become a Summer Intern at the Fraunhofer-Chalmers Centre for Industrial Mathematics!

The Fraunhofer-Chalmers Research Centre for Industrial Mathematics (FCC) offers Software, Services and Contract Research for a broad range of industrial applications. Modelling, Simulation and Optimization of products and processes can boost technical development, improve efficiency and cut costs of both large and small businesses. Since 2001, our highly skilled team of mathematicians and engineers has successfully solved problems for more than 170 clients. We combine consultancy services with innovative research and development based on a wide spectrum of competences.

We are looking for two ambitious students with backgrounds in computer science or related fields to assist in an ongoing applied research project in the Systems and Data Analysis department. You will contribute to the further development of a distributed system in an Internet of Things context. There are several areas you could get involved in. Ideally, you have gained experience in two of the following:

- C programming
- Erlang programming; alternatively experience in any other programming language that supports the actor model
- design and implementation of embedded domain-specific languages
- front-end development (HTML5)

Your ideal profile:
- Chalmers student at the Master's level, preferably in the penultimate year
- Pursuing a degree in Computer Science or a similar field
- Previous work experience in the software industry or as a student research assistant
- Ability to work independently, based on supervision on a weekly basis

If you maintain a private code repository (Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket etc.), then please highlight this in your application. If you have other samples of work to show, such as a portfolio of projects on a blog or private website, we would be keen to have a look.

This internship is a full-time fixed-term position for six weeks. The starting date is flexible.

Contact persons:

Mats Jirstrand, Head of Department
[email protected], 031-772 42 50

Emil Gustavsson, Applied Researcher/Data Scientist
[email protected], 031-772 42 92

Gregor Ulm, Research and Development Engineer
[email protected], 031-772 42 71

Please send your application, marked "Summer Intern SYS", consisting of a cover letter, CV, and a current academic transcript, to [email protected].

Interviews will be held continually. Please apply as soon as possible.

www.fcc.chalmers.se


Earlier this year I finished my Computer Science Master’s thesis project at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, which has the title “Latency and Throughput in Center versus Edge Stream Processing: A Case Study in the Transportation Domain”. The project report as well as most of the code are available on my Gitlab repository msc-thesis-streamprocessing.

Abstract:

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) enables novel solutions. In this thesis report, we turn our attention to the problem of providing targeted accident notifications in near real-time. We use traffic data generated by Linear Road, a popular benchmark for stream processing engines, and simulate a possible real-world scenario in which connected cars continuously send position updates. We analyze this stream of position updates with the goal of identifying accidents, so that targeted accident notifications can be issued. This means that only cars within a certain distance of a known accident site will be notified.

In a real-world scenario, the required data analysis could be performed in different ways. We consider two possibilities. First, position reports are aggregated by road side units (RSUs) and forwarded to a central server. Afterwards, the results are sent back to the cars, again involving RSUs for transmission. We refer to this as center stream processing. Second, all data analysis is performed on RSUs. An RSU is less powerful than a server. However, RSUs are located much closer to the cars than a central server. We refer to this case as edge stream processing. Performing computations directly on RSUs has the benefit that the cost of the roundtrip time for data transmission from RSUs to the server and back will be avoided. We use a contemporary stream processing engine for data analysis, and compare latency and throughput of an implementation of our solution to the accident notification problem in both cases.

I spent this summer working at the European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, Sweden. My contribution was the creation of PLC Factory, a tool that automates development for programmable logic controllers (PLCs). A paper on this project is forthcoming.

The code of PLC Factory is available on the Bitbucket account of ESS. PLC Factory was developed as FOSS. Thus, I can make the code I wrote available on my private GitLab account as well.

The draft of the PLC Factory paper is likewise available on GitLab. Here is the full title information including the abstract:

PLC FACTORY: AUTOMATING ROUTINE TASKS IN LARGE-SCALE PLC SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Authors:
G. Ulm, D. Brodrick, N. Levchenko, F. Bellorini

Abstract:
At the European Spallation Source in Lund, Sweden, the entire facility including all its instruments will be controlled by a large number of programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Programming PLCs, however, entails a significant amount of repetition. It is thus an error-prone and time-consuming task. Given that PLCs interface with hardware, this involves economic aspects as well, due to the fact that programming errors may cause damage to equipment. With PLC Factory, we managed to automate repetitive tasks associated with PLC programming and interfacing PLCs from EPICS. This tool is being adopted at ESS, and has shown potential for a large increase in productivity compared to the status quo. We describe PLC Factory as well as its embedded domain-specific programming language PLCF#, which it is built upon.