Category Archives: Talks

IoT Challenges for Smart Manufacturing

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Today, I gave a keynote at the IoT-ASAP 2018 workshop at ICSA 2018. Here are an abstract and the slides:
Distributed control systems for manufacturing are currently evolving towards Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) systems. Sensors and actuators get equipped with internet connectivity, which allows them to interface with cloud platforms. This potentially enables a number of application cases. However, industrial “things” may be much more complex and more resource-constrained than typical consumer space “things”. This talk provides an overview of Industrial IoT application cases and sketches various challenges for researchers and practitioners using the example of turning a level sensor for industrial tanks into an IoT device.

Six years of Performance Modeling at ABB

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Despite significant scientific research, systematic performance engineering techniques are still hardly used in industry, as many practitioners rely on ad-hoc performance firefighting. While there have been several industrial case studies on performance modeling in the last few years, more experience is needed to better understand the constraints in practice and to optimize existing tool-chains. I gave a talk summarizing six years of performance modeling at the Decartes/Kieker/Palladio Performance Symposium 2014 in Stuttgart. In three projects, different approaches to performance modeling were taken, and experiences on the capabilities and limitations of existing tools were gathered.

Towards the Automation Cloud: Architectural Challenges

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I gave this talk at the GI-Fachgruppentreffen Architekturen 2013 at Fraunhofer IESE, Kaiserslautern on Monday: “Future industrial automation systems will execute a number of control and monitoring functions in central data centers. The cloud computing paradigm will reduce IT costs and enable small companies to flexibly automate production processes. Centralized control and monitoring across companies and domains will facilitate a novel smart ecosystem for industrial automation connecting both embedded devices and information systems. To realize this vision, a number of technical, economical, and social challenges need to be solved. This talk focuses on software architecture challenges for cloud-connected automation systems. It points out the architectural impact of critical non-functional properties, such as latency, security, and multi-tenancy.”

Evolving an Industrial Software System for 30 Years

Yesterday, I gave the industrial keynote at the Workshop on Managed Software Evolution of the DFG Priority Programme 1593. It was held in conjunction with SE 2013, the german multi-conference on software engineering. Slides will be posted soon.
Abstract: Long-living software systems are a necessity in the industrial automation domain, where automation devices are typically operated for decades. Thus, it is a major challenge to design, implement, and maintain such software-intensive systems. This talk presents the case of an industrial control system called MicroSCADA, which has an evolution history of already more than 30 years. We analyze several technical and organizational factors that contributed to the successful evolution of the system since the 1980s. By this, the talk argues for more empirical research in the area of long-living software systems. The talk concludes with an overview of some recent approaches for sustainable software architectures at ABB Corporate Research.

Web Performance Meetup Karlsruhe

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Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Web Performance Meetup Karlsruhe on Performance Modeling at ABB. The presented case study demonstrates the capabilities of various modern performance  modeling tools and a design space exploration tool (i.e., PerOpteryx by Anne) in an industrial setting, provides lessons learned, and helps other software architects in solving similar problems. The meetup group targets web developers and is held roughly once per month. There have already been talks from Facebook and SoundCloud.com.