Reducing human effort in engineering drawing validation.

Oil & Gas facilities are extremely huge and have complex industrial structures that are documented using thousands of printed sheets. During the last years, it has been a tendency to migrate these paper sheets towards a digital environment, with the final end of regenerating the original computer-aided design (CAD) projects which are useful to visualise and analyse these facilities through diverse computer applications. Usually, this was done manually by re-sketching each page using CAD applications. Nevertheless, some applications have appeared which generate the CAD document automatically given the paper sheets. In this last case, the final document is always verified by an engineer due to the need of being a zero-error process. Since the need of an engineer is absolutely accepted, we present a new method to reduce the required engineer working time. This is done by highlighting the digitised components in the CAD document that the automatic method could have incorrectly identified. Thus, the engineer is required only to look at these components. The experimental section shows our method achieves a reduction of approximately 40% of the human effort keeping a zero-error process

Big Data and the Internet of Things

Advances in sensing and computing capabilities are making it possible to embed increasing computing power in small devices. This has enabled the sensing devices not just to passively capture data at very high resolution but also to take sophisticated actions in response. Combined with advances in communication, this is resulting in an ecosystem of highly interconnected devices referred to as the Internet of Things - IoT. In conjunction, the advances in machine learning have allowed building models on this ever increasing amounts of data. Consequently, devices all the way from heavy assets such as aircraft engines to wearables such as health monitors can all now not only generate massive amounts of data but can draw back on aggregate analytics to "improve" their performance over time. Big data analytics has been identified as a key enabler for the IoT. In this chapter, we discuss various avenues of the IoT where big data analytics either is already making a significant impact or is on the cusp of doing so. We also discuss social implications and areas of concern.Comment: 33 pages. draft of upcoming book chapter in Japkowicz and Stefanowski (eds.) Big Data Analysis: New algorithms for a new society, Springer Series on Studies in Big Data, to appea

CLOI-NET: Class segmentation of industrial facilities' point cloud datasets

Shape segmentation from point cloud data is a core step of the digital twinning process for industrial facilities. However, it is also a very labor intensive step, which counteracts the perceived value of the resulting model. The state-of-the-art method for automating cylinder detection can detect cylinders with 62% precision and 70% recall, while other shapes must then be segmented manually and shape segmentation is not achieved. This performance is promising, but it is far from drastically eliminating the manual labor cost. We argue that the use of class segmentation deep learning algorithms has the theoretical potential to perform better in terms of per point accuracy and less manual segmentation time needed. However, such algorithms could not be used so far due to the lack of a pre-trained dataset of laser scanned industrial shapes as well as the lack of appropriate geometric features in order to learn these shapes. In this paper, we tackle both problems in three steps. First, we parse the industrial point cloud through a novel class segmentation solution (CLOI-NET) that consists of an optimized PointNET++ based deep learning network and post-processing algorithms that enforce stronger contextual relationships per point. We then allow the user to choose the optimal manual annotation of a test facility by means of active learning to further improve the results. We achieve the first step by clustering points in meaningful spatial 3D windows based on their location. Then, we apply a class segmentation deep network, and output a probability distribution of all label categories per point and improve the predicted labels by enforcing post-processing rules. We finally optimize the results by finding the optimal amount of data to be used for training experiments. We validate our method on the largest richly annotated dataset of the most important to model industrial shapes (CLOI) and yield 82% average accuracy per point, 95.6% average AUC among all classes and estimated 70% labor hour savings in class segmentation. This proves that it is the first to automatically segment industrial point cloud shapes with no prior knowledge at commercially viable performance and is the foundation for efficient industrial shape modeling in cluttered point clouds