Distributed machining control and monitoring using smart sensors/actuators

The study of smart sensors and actuators led, during the past few years, to the development of facilities which improve traditional sensors and actuators in a necessary way to automate production systems. In an other context, many studies are carried out aiming at defining a decisional structure for production activity control and the increasing need of reactivity leads to the autonomization of decisional levels close to the operational system. We suggest in this paper to study the natural convergence between these two approaches and we propose an integration architecture dealing with machine tool and machining control that enables the exploitation of distributed smart sensors and actuators in the decisional system

Integration of a failure monitoring within a hybrid dynamic simulation environment

The complexity and the size of the industrial chemical processes induce the monitoring of a growing number of process variables. Their knowledge is generally based on the measurements of system variables and on the physico-chemical models of the process. Nevertheless this information is imprecise because of process and measurement noise. So the research ways aim at developing new and more powerful techniques for the detection of process fault. In this work, we present a method for the fault detection based on the comparison between the real system and the reference model evolution generated by the extended Kalman filter. The reference model is simulated by the dynamic hybrid simulator, PrODHyS. It is a general object-oriented environment which provides common and reusable components designed for the development and the management of dynamic simulation of industrial systems. The use of this method is illustrated through a didactic example relating to the field of Chemical Process System Engineering

A Survey on IT-Techniques for a Dynamic Emergency Management in Large Infrastructures

This deliverable is a survey on the IT techniques that are relevant to the three use cases of the project EMILI. It describes the state-of-the-art in four complementary IT areas: Data cleansing, supervisory control and data acquisition, wireless sensor networks and complex event processing. Even though the deliverable’s authors have tried to avoid a too technical language and have tried to explain every concept referred to, the deliverable might seem rather technical to readers so far little familiar with the techniques it describes

Next generation software environments : principles, problems, and research directions

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research and development in software environments. Conferences have been devoted to the topic of practical environments, journal papers produced, and commercial systems sold. Given all the activity, one might expect a great deal of consensus on issues, approaches, and techniques. This is not the case, however. Indeed, the term "environment" is still used in a variety of conflicting ways. Nevertheless substantial progress has been made and we are at least nearing consensus on many critical issues.The purpose of this paper is to characterize environments, describe several important principles that have emerged in the last decade or so, note current open problems, and describe some approaches to these problems, with particular emphasis on the activities of one large-scale research program, the Arcadia project. Consideration is also given to two related topics: empirical evaluation and technology transition. That is, how can environments and their constituents be evaluated, and how can new developments be moved effectively into the production sector

Design methodology for smart actuator services for machine tool and machining control and monitoring

This paper presents a methodology to design the services of smart actuators for machine tools. The smart actuators aim at replacing the traditional drives (spindles and feed-drives) and enable to add data processing abilities to implement monitoring and control tasks. Their data processing abilities are also exploited in order to create a new decision level at the machine level. The aim of this decision level is to react to disturbances that the monitoring tasks detect. The cooperation between the computational objects (the smart spindle, the smart feed-drives and the CNC unit) enables to carry out functions for accommodating or adapting to the disturbances. This leads to the extension of the notion of smart actuator with the notion of agent. In order to implement the services of the smart drives, a general design is presented describing the services as well as the behavior of the smart drive according to the object oriented approach. Requirements about the CNC unit are detailed. Eventually, an implementation of the smart drive services that involves a virtual lathe and a virtual turning operation is described. This description is part of the design methodology. Experimental results obtained thanks to the virtual machine are then presented

Structured Review of the Evidence for Effects of Code Duplication on Software Quality

This report presents the detailed steps and results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to investigate the evidence for the claim that code duplication has a negative effect on code changeability. This report contains only the details of the review for which there is not enough place to include them in the companion paper published at a conference (Hordijk, Ponisio et al. 2009 - Harmfulness of Code Duplication - A Structured Review of the Evidence)