While traditionally the environment considered by an autonomous mechatronic systems only consists of the measurable, surrounding physical world, today advanced mechatronic systems also include the context established by the information technology. This trend makes mechatronic systems possible which consist of cooperating agents which optimize and reconfigure the system behavior by adjusting the...

Fault tolerance is becoming an important issue for the effective use of FPGA-based architectures in missioncritical applications. This paper introduces an innovative approach to design FPGA systems with on-line diagnosis and reconfiguration, at a limited cost in terms of FPGA redundant resources and interconnections. The technique is based on high-level synthesis of the self-checking datapath t...

The NGN (Next Generation Network), which can provide advanced multimedia services over an all-IP based network, has been the subject of much attention for years. While there have been tremendous efforts to develop its architecture and protocols, especially for IMS, which is a key technology of the NGN, it is far from being widely deployed. However, efforts to create an advanced signaling infras...

We present an embedded processor based approach for Built-In Self-Test (BIST) and diagnosis of programmable logic and memory resources in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The resources under test include the programmable logic blocks (PLBs), large random access memories (RAMs), and digital signal processors (DSPs) in all of their modes of operation. The approach is applicable to any FPGA...

We present an approach to self-adaptive systems utilizing explicit models of the design-space of the application. The design-space is captured by allowing the specification of alternatives for any component at any level in the model hierarchy. Non-functional requirements and additional knowledge about the system are captured in the form of OCL constraints parameterized by operational parameters...

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is an established technique for non-invasive stimulation of human cortex. Although studies have shown an influence of rTMS on single cortical regions and on simple behavioral response patterns, its influences on the dynamics of task-related activity in cortical networks have not been characterized. We provide such a characterization by showing...

Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology seeks to solve the problem of multiple incompatible broadcast / telecom standards available in different locations, by having standard specific processing defined in software. This software will be downloaded and run on generic hardware, so that different broadcast / telecom standards can be supported by downloading corresponding software modules. Computi...

Modern information systems are becoming more and more socio-technical systems, namely systems composed of human (social) agents and software (technical) systems operating together in a common environment. The structure of such systems has to evolve dynamically in response to the changes of the environment. When new requirements are introduced, when an actor leaves the system or when a new actor...

The exchange of Network State Beacons (NSBs) is crucial to monitoring the dynamic state of MANETs like sensor networks. The rate of beacon exchange (FX) and the network state define both the time and nature of a proactive action to reconfigure the network in order to combat network performance degradation at a time of crisis. It is thus essential to select the FX within optimized bounds, so tha...

On-chip Built-In Self-Test (BIST) based diagnosis of the embedded Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) core in a generic System-on-Chip (SoC) is presented. In this approach, the embedded processor core in the SoC is used for reconfiguration of the FPGA core for BIST, initiating the BIST sequence, retrieving the BIST results, and for performing diagnosis of faulty programmable logic blocks, memo...