A component-based approach to human–machine interface systems that support agile manufacturing

The development of next generation manufacturing systems is currently an active area of research worldwide. Globalisation is placing new demands on the manufacturing industry with products having shorter lifecycles and being required in more variants. Manufacturing systems must therefore be agile to support frequent manufacturing system reconfiguration involving globally distributed engineering partners. The research described in this thesis addresses one aspect within this research area, the Human Machine Interface (HMI) system that support the personnel involved in the monitoring, diagnostics and reconfiguration of automated manufacturing production machinery. Current HMI systems are monolithic in their design, generally offer poor connectivity to other manufacturing systems and require highly skilled personnel to develop and maintain them. The new approach established in the research and presented in this thesis provides a specification capture technique (using a novel storyboarding modelling notation) that enables the end users HMI functionality to be specified and rapidly developed into fully functional End User HMI's via automated generation tools. A novel feature in this HMI system architecture that all machine information is stored in a common unified machine data model which ensures consistent accurate machine data is available to all machine lifecycle engineering tools including the HMI. The system's run-time architecture enables remote monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to be available to geographically distributed engineering partners using standard internet technologies. The implementation of this novel HMI approach has been prototyped and evaluated using the industrial collaborators full scale demonstrator machines within cylinder head machining and engine assembly applications

Improving Reuse of Distributed Transaction Software with Transaction-Aware Aspects

Implementing crosscutting concerns for transactions is difficult, even using Aspect-Oriented Programming Languages (AOPLs) such as AspectJ. Many of these challenges arise because the context of a transaction-related crosscutting concern consists of loosely-coupled abstractions like dynamically-generated identifiers, timestamps, and tentative value sets of distributed resources. Current AOPLs do not provide joinpoints and pointcuts for weaving advice into high-level abstractions or contexts, like transaction contexts. Other challenges stem from the essential complexity in the nature of the data, operations on the data, or the volume of data, and accidental complexity comes from the way that the problem is being solved, even using common transaction frameworks. This dissertation describes an extension to AspectJ, called TransJ, with which developers can implement transaction-related crosscutting concerns in cohesive and loosely-coupled aspects. It also presents a preliminary experiment that provides evidence of improvement in reusability without sacrificing the performance of applications requiring essential transactions. This empirical study is conducted using the extended-quality model for transactional application to define measurements on the transaction software systems. This quality model defines three goals: the first relates to code quality (in terms of its reusability); the second to software performance; and the third concerns software development efficiency. Results from this study show that TransJ can improve the reusability while maintaining performance of TransJ applications requiring transaction for all eight areas addressed by the hypotheses: better encapsulation and separation of concern; loose Coupling, higher-cohesion and less tangling; improving obliviousness; preserving the software efficiency; improving extensibility; and hasten the development process

Improving modularity of interactive software with the MDPC Architecture

International audienceThe "Model - Display view - Picking view - Controller" model is a refinement of the MVC architecture. It introduces the "Picking View" component, which offloads the need from the controller to analytically compute the picked element. We describe how using the MPDC architecture leads to benefits in terms of modularity and descriptive ability when implementing interactive components. We report on the use of the MDPC architecture in a real application : we effectively measured gains in controller code, which is simpler and more focused

Authoring knowledge based tutors: ‘tools for content, instructional strategy, student model, and interface design

Abstract While intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), also called knowledge based tutors, are becoming more common and proving to be increasingly effective, each one must still be built from scratch at a significant cost. We have developed domain independent tools for authoring all aspects of a knowledge based tutor: the domain model, the teaching strategies, the student model, and the learning environment. In this paper we describe these tools, discuss a number of design issues and design tradeoffs that are involved in building ITS authoring tools, and discuss knowledge acquisition and representation issues encountered in our work. We also describe how we plan to use these tools (collectively called Eon), including "ontology objects," as a meta-authoring tool for designing special purpose authoring tools tailored for specific domain types

XR Development with the Relay and Responder Pattern

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) provide powerful, natural, and robust ways to interact with digital content, across a number of different domains. AR and VR, collectively known as Extended Reality (XR), can facilitate the execution of surgical procedures, aid in maintenance and repair of mechanical equipment, provide novel visualization paradigms for data analysis, and even empower new ways to experience video games. These experiences are built on rich, complex real-time interactive systems (RISs) that require the integration of numerous components supporting everything from rendering of virtual content to tracking of objects and people in the real world. There are decades of research on the development of robust RISs, utilizing different software engineering modalities, which facilitate the creation of these systems. While in the past, developers would frequently write all of the components and the “logical glue” themselves (often built with graphics suites such as OpenGL and DirectX), with the the rise of popular 3D game creation engines, such as Unity and Unreal, new development modalities have begun to emerge. While the underlying game engines provide a significantly easier pipeline to integrate different subsystems of AR/VR applications, there are a number of development questions that arise when considering how interaction, visualization, rendering, and application logic should interact, as developers are often left to create the “logical glue” on their own, leading to software components with low reusability. As the needs of users of these systems increase and become more complex, and as the software and hardware technology improves and becomes more sophisticated, the underlying subsystems must also evolve to help meet these needs. In this work, I present a new software design pattern, the Relay & Responder (R&R) pattern, that attempts to address the concerns found with many traditional object-oriented approaches in XR systems. The R&R pattern simplifies the design of these systems by separating logical components from the communication infrastructure that connects them, while minimizing coupling and facilitating the creation of logical hierarchies that can improve XR application design and module reuse. Additionally, I explore how this pattern can, across a number of different research development efforts, aid in the creation of powerful and rich XR RISs. I first present related work in XR system design and introduce the R&R pattern. Then I discuss how XR development can be eased by utilizing modular building blocks and present the Mercury Messaging framework, which implements the R&R pattern. Next I delve into three new XR systems that explore complex XR RIS designs (including user study management modules) using the pattern and framework. I then address the creation of multi-user, networked XR RISs using R&R and Mercury. Finally I end with a discussion on additional considerations, advantages, and limitations of the pattern and framework, in addition to prospective future work that will help improve both

Python as a Federation Tool for GENESIS 3.0

The GENESIS simulation platform was one of the first broad-scale modeling systems in computational biology to encourage modelers to develop and share model features and components. Supported by a large developer community, it participated in innovative simulator technologies such as benchmarking, parallelization, and declarative model specification and was the first neural simulator to define bindings for the Python scripting language. An important feature of the latest version of GENESIS is that it decomposes into self-contained software components complying with the Computational Biology Initiative federated software architecture. This architecture allows separate scripting bindings to be defined for different necessary components of the simulator, e.g., the mathematical solvers and graphical user interface. Python is a scripting language that provides rich sets of freely available open source libraries. With clean dynamic object-oriented designs, they produce highly readable code and are widely employed in specialized areas of software component integration. We employ a simplified wrapper and interface generator to examine an application programming interface and make it available to a given scripting language. This allows independent software components to be ‘glued’ together and connected to external libraries and applications from user-defined Python or Perl scripts. We illustrate our approach with three examples of Python scripting. (1) Generate and run a simple single-compartment model neuron connected to a stand-alone mathematical solver. (2) Interface a mathematical solver with GENESIS 3.0 to explore a neuron morphology from either an interactive command-line or graphical user interface. (3) Apply scripting bindings to connect the GENESIS 3.0 simulator to external graphical libraries and an open source three dimensional content creation suite that supports visualization of models based on electron microscopy and their conversion to computational models. Employed in this way, the stand-alone software components of the GENESIS 3.0 simulator provide a framework for progressive federated software development in computational neuroscience

NASA Tech Briefs, February 2006

Topics discussed include: Nearly Direct Measurement of Relative Permittivity; DCS-Neural-Network Program for Aircraft Control and Testing; Dielectric Heaters for Testing Spacecraft Nuclear Reactors; Using Doppler Shifts of GPS Signals To Measure Angular Speed; Monitoring Temperatures of Tires Using Luminescent Materials; Highly Efficient Multilayer Thermoelectric Devices; Very High-Speed Digital Video Capability for In-Flight Use; MMIC DHBT Common-Base Amplifier for 172 GHz; Modular, Microprocessor-Controlled Flash Lighting System; Generic Environment for Simulating Launch Operations; Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation; X-Windows Socket Widget Class; Infrastructure for Rapid Development of Java GUI Programs; Processing Raman Spectra of High-Pressure Hydrogen Flames; X-Windows Information Sharing Protocol Widget Class; Simulating Humans as Integral Parts of Spacecraft Missions; Analyzing Power Supply and Demand on the ISS; Polyimides From a-BPDA and Aromatic Diamines; Making Plant-Support Structures From Waste Plant Fiber; Large Deployable Reflectarray Antenna; Periodically Discharging, Gas-Coalescing Filter; Ion Milling On Steps for Fabrication of Nanowires; Neuro-Prosthetic Implants With Adjustable Electrode Arrays; Microfluidic Devices for Studying Biomolecular Interactions; Studying Functions of All Yeast Genes Simultaneously; Polarization Phase-Compensating Coats for Metallic Mirrors; Tunable-Bandwidth Filter System; Methodology for Designing Fault-Protection Software; and Ground-Based Localization of Mars Rovers

Current Research on IMS Learning Design and Lifelong Competence Development Infrastructures

These proceedings consist of the papers presented at the Third TENCompetence Open Workshop which were accepted after peer reviewing. The workshop theme was Current Research on IMS Learning Design and Lifelong Competence Development Infrastructures. The workshop took place at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, on the 21st and 22nd of June 2007