153,002 research outputs found
3D-based Advanced Machine Service Support
In the face of today's unpredictable and fluctuating global market, there have
been trends in industry towards wider adoption of more advanced and flexible new
generation manufacturing systems. These have brought about new challenges to
manufacturing equipment builders/suppliers in respect of satisfying ever-increasing
customers' requirements for such advanced manufacturing systems. To stay competitive,
in addition to supplying high quality equipment, machine builders/suppliers must also be
capable of providing their customers with cost-effective, efficient and comprehensive
service support, throughout the equipment's lifecycle.
This research study has been motivated by the relatively unexplored potential of
integrating 3D virtual technology with various machine service support tools/techniques
to address the aforementioned challenges. The hypothesis formulated for this study is
that a 3D-based virtual environment can be used as an integration platform to improve
service support for new generation manufacturing systems. In order to ensure the rigour
of the study, it has been initiated with a two-stage (iterative) literature review, consisting
of: a preliminary review for the identification of practical problems/main issues related to
the area of machine service support and in-depth reviews for the identification of research
problems/questions and potential solutions. These were then followed by iterations of
intensive research activities, consisting of: requirements identification, concept
development, prototype implementation, testing and exploration, reflection and feedback.
The process has been repeated and revised continuously until satisfactory results,
required for answering the identified research problems/questions, were obtained.
The main focus of this study is exploring how a 3D-based virtual environment can
be used as an integration platform for supporting a more cost-effective and
comprehensive strategy for improving service support for new generation manufacturing
systems. One of the main outcomes of this study is the proposal of a conceptual
framework for a novel 3D-based advanced machine service support strategy and a
reference architecture for a corresponding service support system, for allowing machine
builders/suppliers to: (1) provide more cost-effective remote machine maintenance
support, and (2) provide more efficient and comprehensive extended service support
during the equipment's life cycle. The proposed service support strategy advocates the
tight integration of conventional (consisting of mainly machine monitoring, diagnostics,
prognostics and maintenance action decision support) and extended (consisting of mainly
machine re-configuration, upgrade and expansion support) service support functions.
The proposed service support system is based on the integration of a 3D-based virtual
environment with the equipment control system, a re-configurable automated service
support system, coupled with a maintenance-support-tool/strategy support environment
and an equipment re-configuration/upgrade/expansion support environment, in a
network/lntenet framework.
The basic concepts, potential benefits and limitations of the proposed strategy/
system have been explored via a prototype based on a laboratory-scale test bed. The
prototype consists of a set of integrated modular network-ready software tools consisting
of: (1) an integrated 20/30 visualisation and analysis module, (2) support tools library
modules, (3) communication modules and (4) a set of modular and re-configurable
automated data logging, maintenance and re-configuration support modules. A number
of test cases based on various machine service support scenarios, have been conducted
using the prototype. The experimentation has shown the potential and feasibility
(technical implementation aspects) of the proposed 3D-based approach.
This research study has made an original contribution to knowledge in the field of
machine service support. It has contributed a novel approach of using a 3D-based virtual
environment as an integration platform for improving the capability of machine
builders/suppliers in providing more cost-effective and comprehensive machine service
support for complex new generation manufacturing systems. Several important findings
have resulted from this work in particular with respect to how various 20/30
visualisation environments are integrated with machine service support tools/techniques
for improving service support for complex manufacturing systems. A number of aspects
have also been identified for future work
Planetary Science Virtual Observatory architecture
In the framework of the Europlanet-RI program, a prototype of Virtual
Observatory dedicated to Planetary Science was defined. Most of the activity
was dedicated to the elaboration of standards to retrieve and visualize data in
this field, and to provide light procedures to teams who wish to contribute
with on-line data services. The architecture of this VO system and selected
solutions are presented here, together with existing demonstrators
Iris: an Extensible Application for Building and Analyzing Spectral Energy Distributions
Iris is an extensible application that provides astronomers with a
user-friendly interface capable of ingesting broad-band data from many
different sources in order to build, explore, and model spectral energy
distributions (SEDs). Iris takes advantage of the standards defined by the
International Virtual Observatory Alliance, but hides the technicalities of
such standards by implementing different layers of abstraction on top of them.
Such intermediate layers provide hooks that users and developers can exploit in
order to extend the capabilities provided by Iris. For instance, custom Python
models can be combined in arbitrary ways with the Iris built-in models or with
other custom functions. As such, Iris offers a platform for the development and
integration of SED data, services, and applications, either from the user's
system or from the web. In this paper we describe the built-in features
provided by Iris for building and analyzing SEDs. We also explore in some
detail the Iris framework and software development kit, showing how astronomers
and software developers can plug their code into an integrated SED analysis
environment.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy &
Computin
PRISE: An Integrated Platform for Research and Teaching of Critical Embedded Systems
In this paper, we present PRISE, an integrated workbench for Research and Teaching of critical embedded systems at ISAE, the French Institute for Space and Aeronautics Engineering. PRISE is built around state-of-the-art technologies for the engineering of space and avionics systems used in Space and Avionics domain. It aims at demonstrating key aspects of critical, real-time, embedded systems used in the transport industry, but also validating new scientific contributions for the engineering of software functions. PRISE combines embedded and simulation platforms, and modeling tools. This platform is available for both research and teaching. Being built around widely used commercial and open source software; PRISE aims at being a reference platform for our teaching and research activities at ISAE
Cloudbus Toolkit for Market-Oriented Cloud Computing
This keynote paper: (1) presents the 21st century vision of computing and
identifies various IT paradigms promising to deliver computing as a utility;
(2) defines the architecture for creating market-oriented Clouds and computing
atmosphere by leveraging technologies such as virtual machines; (3) provides
thoughts on market-based resource management strategies that encompass both
customer-driven service management and computational risk management to sustain
SLA-oriented resource allocation; (4) presents the work carried out as part of
our new Cloud Computing initiative, called Cloudbus: (i) Aneka, a Platform as a
Service software system containing SDK (Software Development Kit) for
construction of Cloud applications and deployment on private or public Clouds,
in addition to supporting market-oriented resource management; (ii)
internetworking of Clouds for dynamic creation of federated computing
environments for scaling of elastic applications; (iii) creation of 3rd party
Cloud brokering services for building content delivery networks and e-Science
applications and their deployment on capabilities of IaaS providers such as
Amazon along with Grid mashups; (iv) CloudSim supporting modelling and
simulation of Clouds for performance studies; (v) Energy Efficient Resource
Allocation Mechanisms and Techniques for creation and management of Green
Clouds; and (vi) pathways for future research.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, Conference pape
- âŠ