Intelligent systems in manufacturing: current developments and future prospects

Global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements are demanding increasing changes in manufacturing environments. Enterprises are required to constantly redesign their products and continuously reconfigure their manufacturing systems. Traditional approaches to manufacturing systems do not fully satisfy this new situation. Many authors have proposed that artificial intelligence will bring the flexibility and efficiency needed by manufacturing systems. This paper is a review of artificial intelligence techniques used in manufacturing systems. The paper first defines the components of a simplified intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS), the different Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to be considered and then shows how these AI techniques are used for the components of IMS

Virtual reality simulation for the optimization of endovascular procedures : current perspectives

Endovascular technologies are rapidly evolving, often - requiring coordination and cooperation between clinicians and technicians from diverse specialties. These multidisciplinary interactions lead to challenges that are reflected in the high rate of errors occurring during endovascular procedures. Endovascular virtual reality (VR) simulation has evolved from simple benchtop devices to full physic simulators with advanced haptics and dynamic imaging and physiological controls. The latest developments in this field include the use of fully immersive simulated hybrid angiosuites to train whole endovascular teams in crisis resource management and novel technologies that enable practitioners to build VR simulations based on patient-specific anatomy. As our understanding of the skills, both technical and nontechnical, required for optimal endovascular performance improves, the requisite tools for objective assessment of these skills are being developed and will further enable the use of VR simulation in the training and assessment of endovascular interventionalists and their entire teams. Simulation training that allows deliberate practice without danger to patients may be key to bridging the gap between new endovascular technology and improved patient outcomes

Construction safety and digital design: a review

As digital technologies become widely used in designing buildings and infrastructure, questions arise about their impacts on construction safety. This review explores relationships between construction safety and digital design practices with the aim of fostering and directing further research. It surveys state-of-the-art research on databases, virtual reality, geographic information systems, 4D CAD, building information modeling and sensing technologies, finding various digital tools for addressing safety issues in the construction phase, but few tools to support design for construction safety. It also considers a literature on safety critical, digital and design practices that raises a general concern about ‘mindlessness’ in the use of technologies, and has implications for the emerging research agenda around construction safety and digital design. Bringing these strands of literature together suggests new kinds of interventions, such as the development of tools and processes for using digital models to promote mindfulness through multi-party collaboration on safet

The mission oriented terminal area simulation facility

The Mission Oriented Terminal Area Simulation (MOTAS) was developed to provide an ATC environment in which flight management and flight operations research studies can be conducted with a high degree of realism. This facility provides a flexible and comprehensive simulation of the airborne, ground-based and communication aspects of the airport terminal area environment. Major elements of the simulation are: an airport terminal area environment model, two air traffic controller stations, several aircraft models and simulator cockpits, four pseudo pilot stations, and a realistic air-ground communications network. MOTAS has been used for one study with the DC-9 simulator and a series of data link studies are planned in the near future

A method for tailoring the information content of a software process model

The framework is defined for a general method for selecting a necessary and sufficient subset of a general software life cycle's information products, to support new software development process. Procedures for characterizing problem domains in general and mapping to a tailored set of life cycle processes and products is presented. An overview of the method is shown using the following steps: (1) During the problem concept definition phase, perform standardized interviews and dialogs between developer and user, and between user and customer; (2) Generate a quality needs profile of the software to be developed, based on information gathered in step 1; (3) Translate the quality needs profile into a profile of quality criteria that must be met by the software to satisfy the quality needs; (4) Map the quality criteria to set of accepted processes and products for achieving each criterion; (5) Select the information products which match or support the accepted processes and product of step 4; and (6) Select the design methodology which produces the information products selected in step 5

Descending Price Optimally Coordinates Search

Investigating potential purchases is often a substantial investment under uncertainty. Standard market designs, such as simultaneous or English auctions, compound this with uncertainty about the price a bidder will have to pay in order to win. As a result they tend to confuse the process of search both by leading to wasteful information acquisition on goods that have already found a good purchaser and by discouraging needed investigations of objects, potentially eliminating all gains from trade. In contrast, we show that the Dutch auction preserves all of its properties from a standard setting without information costs because it guarantees, at the time of information acquisition, a price at which the good can be purchased. Calibrations to start-up acquisition and timber auctions suggest that in practice the social losses through poor search coordination in standard formats are an order of magnitude or two larger than the (negligible) inefficiencies arising from ex-ante bidder asymmetries.Comment: JEL Classification: D44, D47, D82, D83. 117 pages, of which 74 are appendi

A review of data visualization: opportunities in manufacturing sequence management.

Data visualization now benefits from developments in technologies that offer innovative ways of presenting complex data. Potentially these have widespread application in communicating the complex information domains typical of manufacturing sequence management environments for global enterprises. In this paper the authors review the visualization functionalities, techniques and applications reported in literature, map these to manufacturing sequence information presentation requirements and identify the opportunities available and likely development paths. Current leading-edge practice in dynamic updating and communication with suppliers is not being exploited in manufacturing sequence management; it could provide significant benefits to manufacturing business. In the context of global manufacturing operations and broad-based user communities with differing needs served by common data sets, tool functionality is generally ahead of user application

XRSpotlight: Example-based Programming of XR Interactions using a Rule-based Approach

Research on enabling novice AR/VR developers has emphasized the need to lower the technical barriers to entry. This is often achieved by providing new authoring tools that provide simpler means to implement XR interactions through abstraction. However, novices are then bound by the ceiling of each tool and may not form the correct mental model of how interactions are implemented. We present XRSpotlight, a system that supports novices by curating a list of the XR interactions defined in a Unity scene and presenting them as rules in natural language. Our approach is based on a model abstraction that unifies existing XR toolkit implementations. Using our model, XRSpotlight can find incomplete specifications of interactions, suggest similar interactions, and copy-paste interactions from examples using different toolkits. We assess the validity of our model with professional VR developers and demonstrate that XRSpotlight helps novices understand how XR interactions are implemented in examples and apply this knowledge in their projects

Using neutral cline decay to estimate contemporary dispersal: a generic tool and its application to a major crop pathogen

Dispersal is a key parameter of adaptation, invasion and persistence. Yet standard population genetics inference methods hardly distinguish it from drift and many species cannot be studied by direct mark-recapture methods. Here, we introduce a method using rates of change in cline shapes for neutral markers to estimate contemporary dispersal. We apply it to the devastating banana pest Mycosphaerella fijiensis, a wind-dispersed fungus for which a secondary contact zone had previously been detected using landscape genetics tools. By tracking the spatio-temporal frequency change of 15 microsatellite markers, we find that σ, the standard deviation of parent–offspring dispersal distances, is 1.2 km/generation1/2. The analysis is further shown robust to a large range of dispersal kernels. We conclude that combining landscape genetics approaches to detect breaks in allelic frequencies with analyses of changes in neutral genetic clines offers a powerful way to obtain ecologically relevant estimates of dispersal in many species