Flexible manufacturing is one of the core goals of Industry 4.0 and brings new challenges to current industrial control systems. Our detailed field study on auto glass industry revealed that existing production lines are laborious to reconfigure, difficult to upscale, and costly to upgrade during production switching. Such inflexibility arises from the tight coupling of devices, controllers, and control tasks. In this work, we propose a new architecture for industrial control systems named Control-as-a-Service (CaaS). CaaS transfers and distributes control tasks from dedicated controllers into Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) switches. By combining control and transmission functions in switches, CaaS virtualizes the industrial TSN network to one Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). We propose a set of techniques that realize end-to-end determinism for in-network industrial control and a joint task and traffic scheduling algorithm. We evaluate the performance of CaaS on testbeds based on real-world networked control systems. The results show that the idea of CaaS is feasible and effective, and CaaS achieves absolute packet delivery, 42-45% lower latency, and three orders of magnitude lower jitter. We believe CaaS is a meaningful step towards the distribution, virtualization, and servitization of industrial control.

A new design of circular multi-pass cells (CMPC) with two rows of reflection spots on mirrors is presented. The effective optical path length (OPL) of this novel CMPC is double that of traditional CMPC with the same diameter and interval of spots. This OPL can be readily adjusted to have regular intervals by rough rotation adjustment. We achieved a spatial separation of pre- and post-transfer optical systems that was adequately large even in the cases with a large number of passes. Analytical chief ray tracing analysis and a generalized method for parameter determination for designing the cell are presented in detail. The stable condition of the double-row CMPC (DR-CMPC) is also derived by the ABCD matrix method. Designs with maximum effective OPL of 74.72 m, 48.67 m and 24.57 m are demonstrated and verified by ray tracing simulations within a 25 cm diameter DR-CMPC. An adjustment of the regular intervals to 1 m can be achieved in both designs. The overall astigmatism of the design with an effective OPL of 74.72 m is only 9.30 × 10⁻⁶ mm, which is four orders of magnitude smaller than that of the traditional CMPC with similar geometric parameters.

We present a generalized method for designing a novel circular multi-pass cell (MPC) with multifold overall optical path length, or alternatively enlarged path-to-volume ratio in the same magnification compared to traditional version, by exploiting the vertical dimension of cavity mirrors. Multiple rows of reflection spots can be generated on arbitrary number of different horizontal planes within the cell that consists of two easy-fabricating circular spherical mirrors. Base on this method, one can arbitrarily determine the interval of reflection spots in both horizontal and vertical directions, so that almost seamless and regular distributed dense spot pattern, and consequently large path-to-volume ratio can be achieved. A series of q-preserving configurations of the multiple-row circular multi-pass cell are calculated and simulated, in which the q-parameters of probe Gaussian beams can be approximately unchanged after the whole transmission within the cells. The maximum optical path length among these simulation cases is 201.8 m within 427.2 mL volume. Furthermore, we demonstrate a practical optical setup with 21.9 m optical path length within 100.1 mL, which is the smallest volume case among the existing actual MPCs with similar overall optical path lengths.

A sensitive acetylene (C₂H₂) sensing system based on a novel triple-row circular multi-pass cell (CMPC) was demonstrated. This CMPC has an effective optical length of 21.9 m within an extremely small volume of 100.1 mL. We utilized wavelength modulation spectroscopy (WMS) for absorption spectroscopy detection of C₂H₂. The distance between the two minima of the second harmonic was used to normalize the maximum value of it, which makes the time to obtain stable output for continuous detection shorten dramatically. A fiber-coupled distributed feedback (DFB) diode laser emitting at 1.5316 µm was employed as a light source. An Allan deviation analysis yielded a detection sensitivity of 76.75 ppb with a normalized noise equivalent absorption coefficient of 8.8 × 10⁻¹⁰ cm^-1 Hz^-1/2 during an average time of 340 s. With a fast stable time, reduced size and high detection sensitivity, the proposed sensing system is suitable for trace gas sensing in a weight-limited unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and an exhalation diagnosis for smoking test.

During this study we constructed a generalized parametric modified four-objective multipass matrix system (MMS). We used an optical system comprising four asymmetrical spherical mirrors to improve the alignment process. The use of a paraxial equation for the design of the front transfer optics yielded the initial condition for modeling our MMS. We performed a ray tracing simulation to calculate the significant aberration of the system (astigmatism). Based on the calculated meridional and sagittal focus positions, the complementary focusing mirror was easily designed to provide an output beam free of astigmatism. We have presented an example of a 108-transit multipass system ($5\times 7$ matrix arrangement) with a relatively larger numerical aperture source (xenon light source). The whole system exhibits zero theoretical geometrical loss when simulated with Zemax software. The MMS construction strategy described in this study provides an anastigmatic output beam and the generalized approach to design a controllable matrix spot pattern on the field mirrors. Asymmetrical reflective mirrors aid in aligning the whole system with high efficiency. With the generalized design strategy in terms of optics configuration and asymmetrical fabrication method in this paper, other kinds of multipass matrix system coupled with different sources and detector systems also can be achieved.

A new method is proposed to produce identical beam emittances in the transverse phase planes from a severely asymmetric beam extracted from a slow-cycling synchrotron. This is important to obtain a good beam distribution at the irradiation spot when the spot scanning method is used for the treatment in hadron therapy. The method makes use of the beam rotation effect either by a solenoid or by a rotational quadrupole section, referred to as rotator, to produce identical emittances in the two transverse phase planes. It is also helpful for the stabilization of the beam spot at the irradiation point. Simulation studies with an artificially generated beam have been carried out to prove the principle. The method is not only applicable to fixed treatment nozzles but also to rotational gantry nozzles. Both a solenoid and a section of quadrupole rotator can be used, with the former being ideal for proton gantries and the latter for fixed carbon nozzles. There is a practical limit in using room-temperature solenoid due to the high beam rigidity in the case of a carbon beam, for which a superconducting solenoid has to be used. The comparison with other methods and the practical applications of the method are also presented.