Biblio

This paper presents the Virtual Open Operating System (vf-OS) Input / Output (IO) Toolkit Generator, which is a design tool to develop vf-OS IO components that interact with all kinds of manufacturing assets, either physical devices like Program Logic Controllers (PLCs), software applications like Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERPs) or legacy file formats like STEP. The vf-OS IO Toolkit Generator is based on software scaffolding, a code generation technique that allows a developer to create a working component to interact with a manufacturing asset from the vf-OS Platform without writing a line of code. As described in this paper, software scaffolding not only simplifies the development of interoperability components, but it also fosters system security and platform integration automation. Another contribution of this paper is to propose possible integrations between the IO Toolkit Generator and the vf-OS Security Command Centre in charge of platform security. Additionally, this paper describes how the concept can be extended to address other digital manufacturing platforms like Fi-Ware.

In the era of Big Data, software systems can be affected by its growing complexity, both with respect to functional and non-functional requirements. As more and more people use software applications over the web, the ability to recognize if some of this traffic is malicious or legitimate is a challenge. The traffic load of security controllers, as well as the complexity of security rules to detect attacks can grow to levels where current solutions may not suffice. In this work, we propose a hierarchical distributed architecture for security control in order to partition responsibility and workload among many security controllers. In addition, our architecture proposes a more simplified way of defining security rules to allow security to be enforced on an operational level, rather than a development level.

In the modern retailing industry, many enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are considered legacy software systems that have become too expensive to replace and too costly to re-engineer. Countering the need to maintain and extend the business value of these systems is the need to do so in the simplest, cheapest, and least risky manner available. There are a number of approaches used by software engineers to mitigate the negative impact of evolving a legacy systems, including leveraging service-oriented architecture to automate manual tasks previously performed by humans. A relatively recent approach in software engineering focuses upon implementing self-managing attributes, or “autonomic” behavior in software applications and systems of applications in order to reduce or eliminate the need for human monitoring and intervention. Entire systems can be autonomic or they can be hybrid systems that implement one or more autonomic components to communicate with external systems. In this paper, we describe a commercial development project in which a legacy multi-channel commerce enterprise resource planning system was extended with service-oriented architecture an autonomic control loop design to communicate with an external third-party security screening provider. The goal was to reduce the cost of the human labor necessary to screen an ever-increasing volume of orders and to reduce the potential for human error in the screening process. The solution automated what was previously an inefficient, incomplete, and potentially error-prone manual process by inserting a new autonomic software component into the existing order fulfillment workflow.