An Overview of the BFO - Basic Formal Ontology - and Its Applicability for Satellite Systems

This work aims to present an overview of the top-level ontology BFO - Basic Formal Ontology - and its applicability for Satellite Systems. As an upper level ontology, the BFO was designed to be extended, providing the basis for the specification of detailed representational artifacts about scientific information domains. These aspects and the challenges of satellite systems complexity and large size compose a suitable scenario for the creation of a specialized dialect to improve efficiency and accuracy when modeling such systems. By analyzing BFO based ontologies in other disciplines and existing satellite models it is possible to describe an application for satellite systems, which can provide a foundation for the creation of a concrete ontology to be applied on satellite modeling

Use of COTS functional analysis software as an IVHM design tool for detection and isolation of UAV fuel system faults

This paper presents a new approach to the development of health management solutions which can be applied to both new and legacy platforms during the conceptual design phase. The approach involves the qualitative functional modelling of a system in order to perform an Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) design – the placement of sensors and the diagnostic rules to be used in interrogating their output. The qualitative functional analysis was chosen as a route for early assessment of failures in complex systems. Functional models of system components are required for capturing the available system knowledge used during various stages of system and IVHM design. MADe™ (Maintenance Aware Design environment), a COTS software tool developed by PHM Technology, was used for the health management design. A model has been built incorporating the failure diagrams of five failure modes for five different components of a UAV fuel system. Thus an inherent health management solution for the system and the optimised sensor set solution have been defined. The automatically generated sensor set solution also contains a diagnostic rule set, which was validated on the fuel rig for different operation modes taking into account the predicted fault detection/isolation and ambiguity group coefficients. It was concluded that when using functional modelling, the IVHM design and the actual system design cannot be done in isolation. The functional approach requires permanent input from the system designer and reliability engineers in order to construct a functional model that will qualitatively represent the real system. In other words, the physical insight should not be isolated from the failure phenomena and the diagnostic analysis tools should be able to adequately capture the experience bases. This approach has been verified on a laboratory bench top test rig which can simulate a range of possible fuel system faults. The rig is fully instrumented in order to allow benchmarking of various sensing solution for fault detection/isolation that were identified using functional analysis

Model Based Mission Assurance: NASA's Assurance Future

Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is seeing increased application in planning and design of NASAs missions. This suggests the question: what will be the corresponding practice of Model Based Mission Assurance (MBMA)? Contemporaneously, NASAs Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) is evaluating a new objectives based approach to standards to ensure that the Safety and Mission Assurance disciplines and programs are addressing the challenges of NASAs changing missions, acquisition and engineering practices, and technology. MBSE is a prominent example of a changing engineering practice. We use NASAs objectives-based strategy for Reliability and Maintainability as a means to examine how MBSE will affect assurance. We surveyed MBSE literature to look specifically for these affects, and find a variety of them discussed (some are anticipated, some are reported from applications to date). Predominantly these apply to the early stages of design, although there are also extrapolations of how MBSE practices will have benefits for testing phases. As the effort to develop MBMA continues, it will need to clearly and unambiguously establish the roles of uncertainty and risk in the system model. This will enable a variety of uncertainty-based analyses to be performed much more rapidly than ever before and has the promise to increase the integration of CRM (Continuous Risk Management) and PRA (Probabilistic Risk Analyses) even more fully into the project development life cycle. Various views and viewpoints will be required for assurance disciplines, and an over-arching viewpoint will then be able to more completely characterize the state of the project/program as well as (possibly) enabling the safety case approach for overall risk awareness and communication

An evaluation of failure modes and effects analysis generation method for conceptual design

Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is used in the manufacturing industry to improve product quality and productivity. However, the traditional approach has many shortcomings that affect its effectiveness and limit its usefulness, especially in the early stages of design. Automating the FMEA report generation process seems to answer some of these problems, and there has been much past and on-going research in this area. However, most of the work is limited to specific applications. This paper proposes a method for FMEA generation for a generic application using minimum information during the conceptual design stage. Prototype software has been created for the proposed method. It has been evaluated using case studies from the design and manufacture of two-way radios. The evaluation revealed the feasibility of the proposal, as well as some weaknesses that need further improvement. Generally, the capability of the method to generate FMEA report with minimum information is demonstrated

Web application for reliability analysis within civil aviation domain

Analýzy spolehlivosti jsou klíčovými složkami při hodnocení posouzení rizik během fáze návrhu v leteckém průmyslu. Analýza stromu poruch (FTA) a analýza poruchových režimů a efektů (FMEA) se běžně kombinují při analýze systému a vyhodnocování možných poruch. Kombinování metodik vyžaduje sjednocení struktury dat tak, aby byla použitelná pro všechny analytické metody zároveň. Existující aplikace poskytují nástroje samostatně, což vede k nekonzistenci dat, duplikátům a překlepům při migraci napříč aplikacemi. Tato práce si klade za cíl vytvořit rozšiřitelné řešení, které by poskytlo nástroje k provedení jedné z technik FTA a FMEA a přitom se spoléhalo na ontologický model použitelný pro obě techniky zároveň. Diplomová práce analyzuje existující řešení a ontologie a na základě těchto vstupů navrhuje nezbytné požadavky, které jsou ve spolupráci se zúčastněnými doménovými odborníky prioritizovány. Výsledné řešení implementuje aplikaci zaměřenou primárně na FTA, která nabízí definování partonomie systému, konstrukci FTA a automatický převod stromů do FMEA vzhledem k jednotnému ontologickému modelu. Aplikace je na závěr otestována doménovými odborníky na základě skutečných leteckých dat.Reliability analyses are key components in a risk assessment evaluation during the design phase in an aviation industry. Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) and Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) are commonly combined together to review the system and to evaluate possible failures. The combination of methodologies requires a unified data usable for all the analyses. Existing applications provide the tools separately which introduces inconsistencies, duplicates and typos when the data are migrated across the applications. This thesis thus aims to create an extensible solution that would provide tools to perform one of FTA and FMEA techniques and yet rely on an ontological model usable for both. The thesis analyses existing solutions and ontologies and given these inputs proposes necessary requirements that are prioritized in cooperation with involved domain experts. The resulting solution implements an application focusing primarily on FTA which offers possibilities for system partonomy definition, FTA construction and an automatic conversion of the trees to FMEA tables given the unified ontological model. The application is finally reviewed by the domain experts on real aviation data

Continuous Improvement Through Knowledge-Guided Analysis in Experience Feedback

Continuous improvement in industrial processes is increasingly a key element of competitiveness for industrial systems. The management of experience feedback in this framework is designed to build, analyze and facilitate the knowledge sharing among problem solving practitioners of an organization in order to improve processes and products achievement. During Problem Solving Processes, the intellectual investment of experts is often considerable and the opportunities for expert knowledge exploitation are numerous: decision making, problem solving under uncertainty, and expert configuration. In this paper, our contribution relates to the structuring of a cognitive experience feedback framework, which allows a flexible exploitation of expert knowledge during Problem Solving Processes and a reuse such collected experience. To that purpose, the proposed approach uses the general principles of root cause analysis for identifying the root causes of problems or events, the conceptual graphs formalism for the semantic conceptualization of the domain vocabulary and the Transferable Belief Model for the fusion of information from different sources. The underlying formal reasoning mechanisms (logic-based semantics) in conceptual graphs enable intelligent information retrieval for the effective exploitation of lessons learned from past projects. An example will illustrate the application of the proposed approach of experience feedback processes formalization in the transport industry sector

Knowledge Reuse Through Electronic Knowledge Repositories: An Empirical Study And Ontological Improvement Effort For The Manufacturing Industry

Knowledge management adoption is growing, and will continue to grow in no small part because of its recent inclusion into the ISO 9001 quality standard. As organizations look towards ways in which to manage their knowledge, the codification of explicit knowledge through Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) and Electronic Knowledge Repositories (EKRs) will undoubtedly gain more interest. An EKR is a form of KMS that emphasizes the codification and storage of organizational expertise for the purposes of Knowledge Reuse (KRU). Unfortunately, the factors surrounding KRU are not well understood. While previous studies have viewed EKR usage from a narrow perspective, a broader and interconnected view of KRU via EKRs has yet to emerge. Additionally, while there have been numerous benefits linked to EKRs, there are still issues that limit their utility, particularly in the manufacturing arena where information complexity and geography have made it increasingly difficult to share knowledge. Hence, this research employed a two pronged approach. First, using a multi-theoretical perspective to model KRU via EKRs, a quantitative study was conducted and identified several socio-technical factors that predicted greater KRU. These factors had not been previously modeled within the context of KRU via EKRs, and hence add to both the theoretical and practical implications of the domain. Additionally, the KRU construct was also tied to a back end resulting outcome view that was informed by the Expectation Confirmation Model (ECM). Through this view, the research quantitatively validated that KRU not only predicted greater performance, but also impacted greater knowledge sharing and continuance of use. This ancillary benefit helps to reinforce the importance of EKRs in that additional gains are manifested along with the core component of KRU. Second, the research extended the capability of manufacturing EKRs by developing a holistic design and process based ontology that connects key concepts within these domains to provide an overall interconnected view. Additionally, to ensure the relevance of the ontology, a mature and globally recognized industry standard was used as the basis to develop it. The ontology was then formalized and tested via Semantic Web tools: Protege, RDF, and SPARQL. The results demonstrate an improved approach to knowledge recall by providing rich and accurate query returns. The ability to use standalone and federated queries to effectively cull the complexity of this interconnected domain is an enhancement to keyword based and traditional relational database approaches. Additionally, to assist with greater industry adoption a systematic and constructive approach for developing and operationalizing the ontology is provided. Finally, in the spirit of the program in which this dissertation is presented, rounding out the research effort are broader organizational management recommendations for overall knowledge management. Referencing industry targeted literature and syncing them with findings from these two research efforts, several pragmatic and sequentially logical approaches to knowledge management are offered

Analysis reuse exploiting taxonomical information and belief assignment in industrial problem solving

To take into account the experience feedback on solving complex problems in business is deemed as a way to improve the quality of products and processes. Only a few academic works, however, are concerned with the representation and the instrumentation of experience feedback systems. We propose, in this paper, a model of experiences and mechanisms to use these experiences. More specifically, we wish to encourage the reuse of already performed expert analysis to propose a priori analysis in the solving of a new problem. The proposal is based on a representation in the context of the experience of using a conceptual marker and an explicit representation of the analysis incorporating expert opinions and the fusion of these opinions. The experience feedback models and inference mechanisms are integrated in a commercial support tool for problem solving methodologies. The results obtained to this point have already led to the definition of the role of ‘‘Rex Manager’’ with principles of sustainable management for continuous improvement of industrial processes in companies

Alternative sweetener from curculigo fruits

This study gives an overview on the advantages of Curculigo Latifolia as an alternative sweetener and a health product. The purpose of this research is to provide another option to the people who suffer from diabetes. In this research, Curculigo Latifolia was chosen, due to its unique properties and widely known species in Malaysia. In order to obtain the sweet protein from the fruit, it must go through a couple of procedures. First we harvested the fruits from the Curculigo trees that grow wildly in the garden. Next, the Curculigo fruits were dried in the oven at 50 0C for 3 days. Finally, the dried fruits were blended in order to get a fine powder. Curculin is a sweet protein with a taste-modifying activity of converting sourness to sweetness. The curculin content from the sample shown are directly proportional to the mass of the Curculigo fine powder. While the FTIR result shows that the sample spectrum at peak 1634 cm–1 contains secondary amines. At peak 3307 cm–1 contains alkynes

Model Based Mission Assurance in a Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) Framework: State-of-the-Art Assessment

This report explores the current state of the art of Safety and Mission Assurance (S&MA) in projects that have shifted towards Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). Its goal is to provide insight into how NASA's Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) should respond to this shift. In MBSE, systems engineering information is organized and represented in models: rigorous computer-based representations, which collectively make many activities easier to perform, less error prone, and scalable. S&MA practices must shift accordingly. The "Objective Structure Hierarchies" recently developed by OSMA provide the framework for understanding this shift. Although the objectives themselves will remain constant, S&MA practices (activities, processes, tools) to achieve them are subject to change. This report presents insights derived from literature studies and interviews. The literature studies gleaned assurance implications from reports of space-related applications of MBSE. The interviews with knowledgeable S&MA and MBSE personnel discovered concerns and ideas for how assurance may adapt. Preliminary findings and observations are presented on the state of practice of S&MA with respect to MBSE, how it is already changing, and how it is likely to change further. Finally, recommendations are provided on how to foster the evolution of S&MA to best fit with MBSE