Sensor data-based decision making

Increasing globalization and growing industrial system complexity has amplified the interest in the use of information provided by sensors as a means of improving overall manufacturing system performance and maintainability. However, utilization of sensors can only be effective if the real-time data can be integrated into the necessary business processes, such as production planning, scheduling and execution systems. This integration requires the development of intelligent decision making models that can effectively process the sensor data into information and suggest appropriate actions. To be able to improve the performance of a system, the health of the system also needs to be maintained. In many cases a single sensor type cannot provide sufficient information for complex decision making including diagnostics and prognostics of a system. Therefore, a combination of sensors should be used in an integrated manner in order to achieve desired performance levels. Sensor generated data need to be processed into information through the use of appropriate decision making models in order to improve overall performance. In this dissertation, which is presented as a collection of five journal papers, several reactive and proactive decision making models that utilize data from single and multi-sensor environments are developed. The first paper presents a testbed architecture for Auto-ID systems. An adaptive inventory management model which utilizes real-time RFID data is developed in the second paper. In the third paper, a complete hardware and inventory management solution, which involves the integration of RFID sensors into an extremely low temperature industrial freezer, is presented. The last two papers in the dissertation deal with diagnostic and prognostic decision making models in order to assure the healthy operation of a manufacturing system and its components. In the fourth paper a Mahalanobis-Taguchi System (MTS) based prognostics tool is developed and it is used to estimate the remaining useful life of rolling element bearings using data acquired from vibration sensors. In the final paper, an MTS based prognostics tool is developed for a centrifugal water pump, which fuses information from multiple types of sensors in order to take diagnostic and prognostics decisions for the pump and its components --Abstract, page iv

The design and development of multi-agent based RFID middleware system for data and devices management

Thesis (D. Tech. (Electrical Engineering)) - Central University of technology, Free State, 2012Radio frequency identification technology (RFID) has emerged as a key technology for automatic identification and promises to revolutionize business processes. While RFID technology adoption is improving rapidly, reliable and widespread deployment of this technology still faces many significant challenges. The key deployment challenges include how to use the simple, unreliable raw data generated by RFID deployments to make business decisions; and how to manage a large number of deployed RFID devices. In this thesis, a multi-agent based RFID middleware which addresses some of the RFID data and device management challenges was developed. The middleware developed abstracts the auto-identification applications from physical RFID device specific details and provides necessary services such as device management, data cleaning, event generation, query capabilities and event persistence. The use of software agent technology offers a more scalable and distributed system architecture for the proposed middleware. As part of a multi-agent system, application-independent domain ontology for RFID devices was developed. This ontology can be used or extended in any application interested with RFID domain ontology. In order to address the event processing tasks within the proposed middleware system, a temporal-based RFID data model which considers both applications’ temporal and spatial granules in the data model itself for efficient event processing was developed. The developed data model extends the conventional Entity-Relationship constructs by adding a time attribute to the model. By maintaining the history of events and state changes, the data model captures the fundamental RFID application logic within the data model. Hence, this new data model supports efficient generation of application level events, updating, querying and analysis of both recent and historical events. As part of the RFID middleware, an adaptive sliding-window based data cleaning scheme for reducing missed readings from RFID data streams (called WSTD) was also developed. The WSTD scheme models the unreliability of the RFID readings by viewing RFID streams as a statistical sample of tags in the physical world, and exploits techniques grounded in sampling theory to drive its cleaning processes. The WSTD scheme is capable of efficiently coping with both environmental variations and tag dynamics by automatically and continuously adapting its cleaning window size, based on observed readings

The level of Marzano higher-order thinking skills among polytechnic students

This study aims to identify polytechnic students' level of Marzano Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) based on two dimensions, 'Extension and Refinement of Knowledge' and 'Meaningful Use of Knowledge,' and to analyze the difference in the students' level of Marzano HOTS based on these two dimensions depending on the students' demographic factors. This study design was a survey using quantitative methods. A total of 313 students were randomly selected as the survey sample. A questionnaire in the form of closed-ended questions was used as the research instrument. Data were analyzed using frequency percentage and MANOVA test. The findings showed no significant differences in the eight HOTS in the dimension of 'Extension and Refinement of Knowledge' with the gender and socio-economic status (SES) factors. However, there were significant differences in the eight HOTS with the academic achievement factor. Meanwhile, based on the dimension of 'Meaningful Use of Knowledge,' the findings showed no significant differences in the five HOTS in this dimension with the gender and academic achievement factors. The paper includes implications of the Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) for students to improve their academic performance. In future research, the authors can further identify university students' HOTS levels in the technical area

Resource Management in a Peer to Peer Cloud Network for IoT

Software-Defined Internet of Things (SDIoT) is defined as merging heterogeneous objects in a form of interaction among physical and virtual entities. Large scale of data centers, heterogeneity issues and their interconnections have made the resource management a hard problem specially when there are different actors in cloud system with different needs. Resource management is a vital requirement to achieve robust networks specially with facing continuously increasing amount of heterogeneous resources and devices to the network. The goal of this paper is reviews to address IoT resource management issues in cloud computing services. We discuss the bottlenecks of cloud networks for IoT services such as mobility. We review Fog computing in IoT services to solve some of these issues. It provides a comprehensive literature review of around one hundred studies on resource management in Peer to Peer Cloud Networks and IoT. It is very important to find a robust design to efficiently manage and provision requests and available resources. We also reviewed different search methodologies to help clients find proper resources to answer their needs

Enabling Location-Based Services in Data Centers

In this article, we explore services and capabilities that can be enabled by the localization of various assets in a data center or IT environment. We also describe the underlying location estimation method and the protocol to enable localization. Finally, we present a management framework for these services and present a few case studies to assess benefits of location-based services in data centers