Communication Architecture Design for Real-Time Networked Control Systems

Networked control over data networks has received increasing attention in recent years. Among many problems in networked control systems (NCSs) is the need to reduce control latency and jitter and to deal with packet dropouts. This paper introduces our recent progress on a queuing communication architecture for real-time NCS applications, and simple strategies for dealing with packet dropouts. Case studies for a middle-scale process or multiple small-scale processes are presented for TCP/IP based real-time NCSs. Variations of network architecture design are modelled, simulated, and analysed for evaluation of control latency and jitter performance. It is shown that a simple bandwidth upgrade or adding hierarchy does not necessarily bring benefits for performance improvement of control latency and jitter. A co-design of network and control is necessary to maximise the real-time control performance of NCSs

SKMA - A Key Management Architecture for SCADA Systems

Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are widely used in the management of critical infrastructure such as electricity and water distrubution systems. Currently there is little understanding of how to best protect SCADA systems from malicious attacks. We review the constraints and requirements for SCADA security and propose a suitable architecture (SKMA) for secure SCADA communications. The architecture includes a proposed key management protocol (SKMP). We compare the architecture with a previous proposal from Sandia Labs.

John Frazer

John Frazer, Professor, trained at the Architectural Association, taught first at Cambridge University and then the AA in the 1970s and again in the '90s. He was Head of School of Design Research History and Criticism at the University of Ulster in the 1980s, he also ran a systems and design consultancy with his wife Julia (including projects for Cedric Price and Walter Segal) and was founder and chairman of Autographics software. He is currently Swire Chair Professor and Head of School of Design in Hong Kong.----- This is a very personal perspective on a concept of universal and future significance. It is personal, both is the sense that it is an unashamedly biased view of both the significance of the project, and the nature of that significance and because the author was personally involved as one of the consultants on GENERATOR and subsequently involved Cedric Price in its educational application at the Architectural Association. GENERATOR is still very much alive and was still developing whilst this chapter was being written.

Interactive architecture

This chapter explores the development of concepts of interactive environments by comparing two major projects that frame the period of this book. The Fun Palace of 1960 and the Generator of 1980 both proposed interactive environments responsive to the needs and behaviour of their users, but the contrast in terms of the available technology and what it enabled could not be more marked. The Fun Palace broke new architectural, organizational and social ground and was arguably the first proposition for cybernetic architecture; the Generator demonstrated how it could be achieved. Both projects are now acknowledged as seminal architectural propositions of the twentieth century, and both were designed by Cedric Price.

Landscape symphonies : gardening as a source of landscape architecture practice engaged with change

The notion of designing with change constitutes a fundamental and foundational theoretical premise for much of what constitutes landscape architecture, notably through engagement with ecology, particularly since the work of Ian McHarg in the 1960s and his key text Design with Nature. However, while most if not all texts in landscape architecture would cite this engagement of change theoretically, few go any further than citation, and when they do their methods seem fixated on utilising empirical, quantitative scientific tools for doing so, rather than the tools of design, in an architectural sense, as implied by the name of the discipline, landscape architecture.