NAMUR Award 2017

Every year NAMUR presents the NAMUR Award for outstanding scientific theses (diploma/master's and doctoral theses) submitted to universities and universities of applied sciences, with a view to motivating young researchers to get scientifically involved in intelligent process and operations management.
The award is endowed with EUR 1,000 for a Diploma/Master's thesis and EUR 2,000 for a doctoral thesis.
As of 2017, the tutoring chairs will receive EUR 2,500 each to support young scientists working in process automation.

At the 2017 NAMUR Annual General Meeting three outstanding theses were honoured with a NAMUR Award.

Dr. Dirk Kuschnerus received the NAMUR Award for his doctoral thesis on Modellierung und Verifikation sicherheitskritischer konfigurierbarer Systeme in der Prozessmesstechnik (Modelling and Verification of Safety-critical Configurable Systems in Process Measurement Technology).

The thesis was written at the Lehrstuhl für Elektronische Schaltungstechnik (chair for electronic circuit technology) at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and supervised by Professor Thomas Musch.

The safety-critical processes of process automation are subject to rigorous functional safety standards. Vertical and horizontal integration presents new verification challenges. This calls for a dynamic approach to the devices involved.

Based on the domain-specific modelling language for process automation systems which he had developed, Dr. Kuschnerus developed an algorithm which formally proves the dynamic safety consistency of the systems examined.

The result of Dr. Kuschnerus’ thesis is an online safety verification which permits the operation of dynamically developed applications on the basis of safety-critical processes.

Sebastian Gau, M.Sc., received the NAMUR Award for his Master’s thesis on Optimal and Suboptimal Control of Switched Linear Systems. The thesis was written at the Lehrstuhl für Automatisierungstechnik (chair for automation technology) at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern and supervised by Professor Ping Zhang.

Numerous chemical and industrial processes can be modelled as switching systems. Sebastian Gau developed a new process for the predictive control of linear switching systems to determine the optimum strategy when selecting a specific operating mode.

Furthermore, Sebastian Gau compared existing processes for the optimum control of switching systems in terms of their online and offline computing time, flexibility, complexity and practical applicability and formulated recommendations for their application, based on his evaluations.

Dipl.-Ing. Chris Paul Iatrou (graduate engineer) received the NAMUR Award for his diploma thesis on Entwurf und Implementation eines OPC-Hardware-Stacks (Design and Implementation of an OPC Hardware Stack). The thesis was written at the Institut für Automatisierungstechnik (Institute for Automation Technology) at the Technische Universität Dresden and supervised by Professor Leon Urbas.

Modularisation or Industry 4.0 supply chain requirements present increasing challenges for the real-time transmission of the data generated.

In his diploma thesis, Chris Paul Iatrou developed a hardware implementation of a real–time capable OPCUA stack. In this way, the M-to-M protocol can be realised in a high-energy effective way in a communication chip with minimum storage space, e.g. in an FPGA.

In this way, data can be directly transmitted from the sensor in real time via 5G radio or 2-wire Ethernet.

NAMUR congratulates the winners.

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