Recent progress toward the realization of the “Internet of Things” has improved the ability of physical and soft/cyber entities to operate effectively within large-scale, heterogeneous systems. It is important that such capacity be accompanied by feedback control capabilities sufficient to ensure that the overall systems behave according to their specifications and meet their functional objectives. To achieve this, such systems require new architectures that facilitate the online deployment, composition, interoperability, and scalability of control system components. Most current control systems lack scalability and interoperability because their design is based on a fixed configuration of specific components, with knowledge of their individual characteristics only implicitly passed through the design. This paper addresses the need for flexibility when replacing components or installing new components, which might occur when an existing component is upgraded or when a new application requires a new component, without the need to readjust or redesign the overall system. A semantically enhanced feedback control architecture is introduced for a class of systems, aimed at accommodating new components into a closed-loop control framework by exploiting the semantic inference capabilities of an ontology-based knowledge model. This architecture supports continuous operation of the control system, a crucial property for large-scale systems for which interruptions have negative impact on key performance metrics that may include human comfort and welfare or economy costs. A case-study example from the smart buildings domain is used to illustrate the proposed architecture and semantic inference mechanisms.

中文翻译：

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语义增强的反馈控制方案在线配置


最近在实现“物联网”方面取得的进展提高了物理和软/网络实体在大规模异构系统中有效运行的能力。重要的是，这种能力必须伴有反馈控制能力，足以确保整个系统按照其规范运行并满足其功能目标。为了实现这一目标，此类系统需要新的架构来促进控制系统组件的在线部署、组合、互操作性和可扩展性。大多数当前的控制系统缺乏可扩展性和互操作性，因为它们的设计基于特定组件的固定配置，而对它们各自特性的了解只是隐式地通过设计。本文解决了更换组件或安装新组件时的灵活性需求，这种情况可能发生在升级现有组件或新应用程序需要新组件时，而无需重新调整或重新设计整个系统。针对一类系统引入了语义增强的反馈控制架构，旨在通过利用基于本体的知识模型的语义推理能力将新组件容纳到闭环控制框架中。该架构支持控制系统的连续运行，这是大型系统的一个重要属性，对于大型系统来说，中断会对关键性能指标产生负面影响，其中可能包括人类舒适度和福利或经济成本。使用智能建筑领域的案例研究示例来说明所提出的架构和语义推理机制。