New paper published at ESEC/FSE 2019 in Tallinn, Estonia: “The concepts of decision forces and the decision forces viewpoint were proposed to help software architects to make architectural decisions more transparent and the documentation of their rationales more explicit. However, practical experience reports and guidelines on how to use the viewpoint in typical industrial project setups are not available. Existing works mainly focus on basic tool support for the documentation of the viewpoint or show how forces can be used as part of focused architecture review sessions. With this paper, we share experiences and lessons learned from applying the decision forces viewpoint in a distributed industrial project setup, which involves consultants supporting architects during the re-design process of an existing large software system. Alongside our findings, we describe new forces that can serve as template for similar projects, discuss challenges applying them in a distributed consultancy project, and share ideas for potential extensions.”

Our paper at the ICSE 2019 conference in Montreal proposed a reference architecture for interoperable Industrie 4.0 systems:

“Industrial control systems are complex, software-intensive systems that manage mission-critical production processes. Commissioning such systems requires installing, configuring, and integrating thousands of sensors, actuators, and controllers and is still a largely manual and costly process. We introduce the vendor-neutral OpenPnP reference architecture, which can largely automate the configuration and integration tasks for commissioning. Using an example implementation, we demonstrate that OpenPnP can reduce the configuration and integration effort up to 90 percent and scales up to tens of thousands of communicated signals per second for large Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) systems. OpenPnP can serve as a template for practitioners implementing IIoT applications throughout the automation industry and streamline commissioning processes in many thousands of control system installations.”

Several interesting performance measurements and models, published at ICPE 2019 in Mumbai, India: “The OPC UA communication architecture is currently becoming an integral part of industrial automation systems, which control complex production processes, such as electric power generation or paper production. We have carried out extensive performance measurements with OPC UA client/server and pub/sub communication and created a CPU utilization prediction model based on linear regression that can be used to size hardware environments. We found that the server CPU is the main bottleneck for OPC UA pub/sub communication, but allows a throughput of up to 40,000 signals per second on a Raspberry Pi Zero.”