Sailer, Patrizia

2021-06-30, Sailer, Patrizia, Ivkić, Igor, Tauber, Markus, Mauthe, Andreas, Gouglidis, Antonios

The importance of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications is constantly increasing, especially in the context of Industry 4.0. Architectural decisions are crucial not just for performance, security and resilience reasons but also regarding costs and resource usage. In this paper we analyse two of the fundamental approaches to design control loops (i.e. time-driven and event-driven), show how they can be realised and evaluate their power requirements. Through this the design criteria can be extended also considering the optimization of energy related aspects.

2022-05, Ivkić, Igor, Sailer, Patrizia, Gouglidis, Antonios, Mauthe, Andreas, Tauber, Markus

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are formed through interconnected components capable of computation, communication, sensing and changing the physical world. The development of these systems poses a significant challenge since they have to be designed in a way to ensure cyber-security without impacting their performance. This article presents the Security Cost Modelling Framework (SCMF) and shows supported by an experimental study how it can be used to measure, normalise and aggregate the overall performance of a CPS. Unlike previous studies, our approach uses different metrics to measure the overall performance of a CPS and provides a methodology for normalising the measurement results of different units to a common Cost Unit. Moreover, we show how the Security Costs can be extracted from the overall performance measurements which allows to quantify the overhead imposed by performing security-related tasks. Furthermore, we describe the architecture of our experimental testbed and demonstrate the applicability of SCMF in an experimental study. Our results show that measuring the overall performance and extracting the security costs using SCMF can serve as basis to redesign interactions to achieve the same overall goal at less costs.

2021, Sailer, Patrizia

At a time when food procurement, food shortage, the stagnation in available arable land and rising population numbers are rising at an alarming rate, the importance of indoor farming is increasing. Indoor farming is an approach that allows fruits and vegetables to grow food in halls in racks, which gave birth to the term vertical farming. Vertical agriculture allows the optimization of food production by setting up adapted parameters in such a hall, thereby manipulating and boosting plant growth. However, since the necessary conditions for the growth can only be perfectly regulated for one type of plant per hall, it was considered to reduce the size of this unit and to design a box that provides the same functionality. In this paper I present a first prototype, which was designed as a Cyber Physical System (CPS), including power measurements of the included components. Furthermore, it demonstrates an economic approach for establishing this box in the Austrian economy based on a use case, followed by the advantages and disadvantages this change would entail. Finally, a calculation of expected costs in the first five years is presented.