Safe reconfigurations of agents-based embedded control systems

The development of safe reconfigurable embedded control systems is a tremendous task since they must fulfill functional as well as safety requirements. In this paper the authors propose an agent-based approach to handle safe reconfigurations of control systems. The specification of the solution is covered by a set of UML-compliant metamodels. More specifically, the different software architectural configurations of the control system are described as a set of inter-connected software components. The reconfiguration is thus assured by an autonomous software agent which interacts with users and applies several forms of reconfiguration at different granularity levels of the system´s architecture. Three architectural levels are defined in order to consider all possible reconfiguration scenarios of embedded control systems. In order to bring the reconfigurable system into safe behaviors after any reconfiguration, the agent has the ability of monitoring the system´s environment and to apply appropriate reconfigurations under well-defined constraints.