ABSTRACT

This chapter describes a distributed intelligent sensing and control systems (DISCS) approach that meets the primary needs of modern manufacturing systems. It focuses on design strategies for reconfiguration that are supported by appropriate system analysis and safety management techniques. In DISCS, sensing and control devices are distributed spatially over the infrastructure sites, and/or decision-making within the applications is distributed rather than centralized. The chapter provides an overview of the work on distributed sensing and control systems with an emphasis on system reconfiguration and middleware support. Middleware of distributed sensing and control systems refers to software and tools that can help hide the complexity and heterogeneity of the lower level hardware systems, and ease information processing and control at distributed application level. The deployment of wireless sensor networks in industry will occur incrementally, and middleware will be crucial to form general wireless sensor devices into real industrial solutions for distributed application systems.