Academic OPNET Research
and Educational Projects

Project Responsible: Eric RONDEAU

Participants: Aubrun Christophe, David Michael, Divoux Thierry, Georges Jean-Philippe, Idelmerfaa Zahra, Krommenacker Nicolas, Lecuire Vincent, Lepage Francis, Maimour-Bouyoucef Moufida, Moureaux Jean-Marie.

Ph. D. people: Boughanmi Najet, Chafik Abdellatif, Diouri Idriss, Duran Faundez Cristian, Kone Cheick Tidjane, Moussa Neila, Salles Nicolas

Key-words : Networked Control Systems, Wireless sensors, Industrial Wireless Networks, Quality of Services,

Collaborative and distributed applications interconnected by networks are commonly named Networked Systems (NS). The study of NS is based both on the identification of Quality of Control (QoC) parameters representing the application functional requirements and on the network performance assessment to obtain its level of Quality of Service (QoS). The general objective of the NS project is to jointly adapt and tune the parameters of QoC and QoS to ensure the ambient systems work in a safety and optimal way.

This project is organized in three complementary actions:

- Networked Control systems (NCS). The goal is to propose models and methods enabling to design networked industrial applications strongly time constraint. Usually, the researches on NCS are classified in two approaches: the “control over network” and the “control of network”. In the first approach, the network is a passive resource and the perturbations induced by the communications are only compensated at controller level. In the second one, the network has to continually offer enough QoS for minimizing the impact of information transport between controllers and the plant. The NCS action almost investigates the second approach and also develops strategies combining the two approaches.

The works in progress :

•  Estimating bounded end-to-end delays on switched Ethernet architectures implementing the Classification of Service (CoS) by using the Network Calculus Theory.

•  Configuration of the service policies on switched Ethernet architectures from experimental approach.

•  Achieving NCS assessment environment in Opnet network simulator.

•  Optimizing the service availability on switched Ethernet architectures in NCS framework.

References:

- N. Vatanski, JP. Georges, C. Aubrun, E. Rondeau, SL. Jämsä Jounela. Networked Control with delay measurement and estimation , Journal of Control Engineering Practice, 2009.

- J.P Georges, N. Krommenacker, T. Divoux, E. Rondeau, A design process of switched Ethernet architectures according to real-time application constraints , EAAI Journal, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence 19 (2006), pages 335-344, Elsevier, ISSN: 0952-1976, 2006.

- J.P Georges, T. Divoux, E. Rondeau, Confronting the performances of a switched Ethernet network with industrial constraints by using the network calculus , IJCS, International Journal of Communication Systems, ISSN: 1074-5351, vol 18, Issue 9, pages 877-903, John Wiley & Sons, novembre 2005.