Abstract 

The nature and complexity of new applications for monitoring and control, along with new advances in miniaturization, ubiquitous communication and digital convergence, have driven the development of wireless sensors and actuators networks, this has allowed to devise new applications which were previously impractical due to technological limitations.

The network nodes are distributed over the coverage area of the application and cooperate to solve specific problems. This system architecture increases the flexibility thereof, helps to reduce the impact caused by faults in a component and implementation costs, facilitates the diagnosis, maintenance and traceability processes, and fosters new levels of safety, comfort and productivity in all areas, covering from industrial environments to individuals, such as home automation applications and healthcare.

In general, these applications demand a high level of assurance of proper operation and safety, and its concurrent non-deterministic nature makes their analysis and design complex. This has led in some cases not get a good match between experimental results and the proposed performance specifications, which is a result of imprecise models for analyzing and designing these systems are used, and to make use of inadequate validation methods and platforms that do not support the models utilized. It is desirable to have a complete process to develop these systems which contains all the elements necessary for its realization.

This new area includes disciplines that have been isolated developments, such as instrumentation, communications networks, control theory, signal processing, computer and information, so each one uses different methods for analysis and design with own modeling formalisms and tools, where each representation highlights certain characteristics without considering the other subsystems. That is, the different system components are designed and analyzed by different tools, limiting the analysis of the interaction between them and the use of concurrent design methodological approaches to optimize some of the critical parameters in these applications.

Additionally, one of the greatest challenges in developing these applications is focused on the design optimization based on a factor, could result in decreased quality of implementation in terms of another, then a compromise between them should be established.

Given the above conditions, this thesis has made several contributions aimed at establishing a methodology for designing applications of wireless sensors and actuators network with bounded delays. This methodology is supported in coordinating the activities of different levels of the architecture of the nodes of these systems, thereby contributing to solving some of the challenges present in this area.

The proposed methodology uses a node architecture which considers the application requirements, allows the verification of end-to-end time constraints, and finds a distribution of application components to provide a balance between the minimum power consumption and minimal delays in generating actions.

Additionally is presented a minimal set of components in Colored Petri Nets to analyze the performance of these systems and verify their structural and behavioral properties.

The results obtained by simulation and experimentation confirm the validity and effectiveness of the design methodology proposed, and allow to appreciate the importance of to obtain operation configurations in which they make a balance between the power consumed at the nodes and delays in control applications implemented on WSAN, while maintains bounded delays.