Biographical information: Dr. Markus Fromherz is a Principal Engineer and manager of the Embedded Reasoning Area in the Systems and Practices Laboratory at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His research interests are in the domain of intelligent embedded software, in particular constraint-based modeling, model-based planning, scheduling, and control, and model-based design analysis and optimization. He has led and contributed to several research, development, and technology transfer efforts on intelligent control systems for Xerox. Markus Fromherz received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1991 from the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and his M.S. in Computer Science in 1987 from ETH Zurich. He has published in the areas of software engineering, model-based computing, on-line scheduling, and ad-hoc network algorithms. He has also co-authored more than 30 patents.

A Joint CSE and JDEHP Colloquium

Thursday, November 4, 2004.

Refreshments: 3:30 p.m.

Talk: 4:00 p.m. 115 Avery Hall

Embedded Reasoning for Highly Reconfigurable Systems

With the proliferation of embedded processors, sensors, and actuators, tomorrow's smart systems (cars, factories, buildings, machines) promise to be highly versatile, adaptive, and robust. One particular aspect of such systems will be their extreme reconfigurability. Systems will increasingly be built from smart components, configured on demand, and upgraded over time to suit changing requirements. These and other novel properties will be achieved in large part through embedded reasoning technologies that help determine a system's state and capabilities, coordinate its tightly coupled components in the context of dynamic goals, and control its behavior by integrating long-range planning, robust behavior selection, and reactive control.
I will present a snapshot from a long-term program at PARC in which we have developed and deployed real-time model-based planning and scheduling techniques for system-level control in modular high-end printing systems. I will discuss our approach and the issues we are facing as we extend this to an intelligent distributed control system for highly reconfigurable systems.

A lecture at CSCE 421/821

Friday, November 5, 2004

111 Avery Hall

Constraint-based scheduling has become the dominant form of modeling and solving scheduling problems. Recently, due to ever more powerful embedded processors, it has become possible to embed and run constraint-based schedulers on-line even for fast processes such as product assembly sequencing. This makes constraint-based scheduling interesting for embedded applications as a new tool for system control, distributed and reconfigurable control, and the integration of various planning, scheduling, and control tasks. This tutorial gives a brief introduction to constraint-based scheduling, generic constraint programming techniques for modeling and solving scheduling problems, and a concrete real-time application example.

Required reading for class: "Constrained-Based Scheduling" Markus Fromherz, Invited Tutorial to the American Control Conference (ACC 01).
Recommended reading for class: