Space Transportation Materials and Structures Technology Workshop

The Space Transportation Materials and Structures Technology Workshop was held on September 23-26, 1991, in Newport News, Virginia. The workshop, sponsored by the NASA Office of Space Flight and the NASA Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology, was held to provide a forum for communication within the space materials and structures technology developer and user communities. Workshop participants were organized into a Vehicle Technology Requirements session and three working panels: Materials and Structures Technologies for Vehicle Systems, Propulsion Systems, and Entry Systems

DSL-based Interoperability and Integration in the Smart Manufacturing Digital Thread

In the industry 4.0 ecosystem, a Digital Thread connects the data and processes for smarter manufacturing. It provides an end to end integration of the various digital entities thus fostering interoperability, with the aim to design and deliver complex and heterogeneous interconnected systems. We develop a service oriented domain specific Digital Thread platform in a Smart Manufacturing research and prototyping context. We address the principles, architecture and individual aspects of a growing Digital Thread platform. It conforms to the best practices of coordination languages, integration and interoperability of external services from various platforms, and provides orchestration in a formal methods based, low-code and graphical model driven fashion. We chose the Cinco products DIME and Pyrus as the underlying IT platforms for our Digital Thread solution to serve the needs of the applications addressed: manufacturing analytics and predictive maintenance are in fact core capabilities for the success of smart manufacturing operations. In this regard, we extend the capabilities of these two platforms in the vertical domains of data persistence, IoT connectivity and analytics, to support the basic operations of smart manufacturing. External native DSLs provide the data and capability integrations through families of SIBs. The small examples constitute blueprints for the methodology, addressing the knowledge, terminology and concerns of domain stakeholders. Over time, we expect reuse to increase, reducing the new integration and development effort to a progressively smaller portion of the models and code needed for at least the most standard application

Design, Application and Evaluation of a Multi Agent System in the Logistics Domain

The increasing demand for flexibility of automated production systems also affects the automated material flow systems (aMFS) they contain and demands reconfigurable systems. However, the centralized control concept usually applied in aMFS hinders an easy adaptation, as the entire control software has to be re-tested, when manually changing sub-parts of the control. As adaption and subsequent testing are a time-consuming task, concepts for splitting the control from one centralized to multiple, decentralized control nodes are required. Therefore, this paper presents a holistic agent-based control concept for aMFS, whereby the system is divided into so-called automated material flow modules (aMFM), each being controlled by a dedicated module agent. The concept allows the reconfiguration of aMFS, consisting of heterogeneous, stationary aMFM, during runtime. Furthermore, it includes aspects such as uniform agent knowledge bases through metamodel-based development, a communication ontology considering different information types and properties, strategic route optimization in decentralized control architecture and a visualization concept to make decisions of the module agents comprehensible to operators and maintenance staff. The evaluation of the concept is performed by means of material flow simulations as well as a prototypical implementation on a lab-sized demonstrator.Comment: 13 pages, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9042827

A Taxonomy of Recurring Data Analysis Problems in Maintenance Analytics

Modern maintenance strategies increasingly focus on vast amounts of diverse data and multifaceted analytical approaches in order to make efficient use of given resources and unveil hidden potentials. While there is often no universal solution approach to a specific case at hand, it is still possible to observe recurring problem classes for which generic solution templates can be applied and thus the establishment of a reusable knowledge base appears beneficial. To this end, we apply a taxonomy development approach to identify and systematize dimensions and characteristics of recurring data analysis problems in data-driven maintenance scenarios. Our research method integrates findings from a systematic literature review and expert interviews with data scientists from industry. Thus, we add descriptive theory to the field of maintenance analytics and propose a taxonomy that distinguishes between analytical maintenance objectives, data characteristics and analytical techniques

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

Capturing design process information and rationale to support knowledge-based design and analysis integration

Issued as final reportUnited States. Dept. of Commerc

Assessing the leanness in product design: a model for planned design reuse

Shrinking product lifecycles, tough international competition, swiftly changing technologies, ever increasing customer quality expectation and demanding high variety options are some of the forces that drive next generation of development processes. To overcome these challenges, design cost and development time of product has to be reduced as well as quality to be improved. Design reuse is considered one of the lean strategies to win the race in this competitive environment. design reuse can reduce the product development time, product development cost as well as number of defects which will ultimately influence the product performance in cost, time and quality. However, it has been found that no or little work has been carried out for quantifying the effectiveness of design reuse in product development performance such as design cost, development time and quality. Therefore, in this study we propose a systematic design reuse based product design framework and developed a design leanness index (DLI) as a measure of effectiveness of design reuse. The DLI is a representative measure of reuse effectiveness in cost, development time and quality. Through this index, a clear relationship between reuse measure and product development performance metrics has been established. Finally, a cost based model has been developed to maximise the design leanness index for a product within the given set of constraints achieving leanness in design process