Towards automated visual flexible endoscope navigation

Background:\ud The design of flexible endoscopes has not changed significantly in the past 50 years. A trend is observed towards a wider application of flexible endoscopes with an increasing role in complex intraluminal therapeutic procedures. The nonintuitive and nonergonomical steering mechanism now forms a barrier in the extension of flexible endoscope applications. Automating the navigation of endoscopes could be a solution for this problem. This paper summarizes the current state of the art in image-based navigation algorithms. The objectives are to find the most promising navigation system(s) to date and to indicate fields for further research.\ud Methods:\ud A systematic literature search was performed using three general search terms in two medical–technological literature databases. Papers were included according to the inclusion criteria. A total of 135 papers were analyzed. Ultimately, 26 were included.\ud Results:\ud Navigation often is based on visual information, which means steering the endoscope using the images that the endoscope produces. Two main techniques are described: lumen centralization and visual odometry. Although the research results are promising, no successful, commercially available automated flexible endoscopy system exists to date.\ud Conclusions:\ud Automated systems that employ conventional flexible endoscopes show the most promising prospects in terms of cost and applicability. To produce such a system, the research focus should lie on finding low-cost mechatronics and technologically robust steering algorithms. Additional functionality and increased efficiency can be obtained through software development. The first priority is to find real-time, robust steering algorithms. These algorithms need to handle bubbles, motion blur, and other image artifacts without disrupting the steering process

A multi-agent platform for auction-based allocation of loads in transportation logistics

This paper describes an agent-based platform for the allocation of loads in distributed transportation logistics, developed as a collaboration between CWI, Dutch National Center for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam and Vos Logistics Organizing, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The platform follows a real business scenario proposed by Vos, and it involves a set of agents bidding for transportation loads to be distributed from a central depot in the Netherlands to different locations across Germany. The platform supports both human agents (i.e. transportation planners), who can bid through specialized planning and bidding interfaces, as well as automated, software agents. We exemplify how the proposed platform can be used to test both the bidding behaviour of human logistics planners, as well as the performance of automated auction bidding strategies, developed for such settings. The paper first introduces the business problem setting and then describes the architecture and main characteristics of our auction platform. We conclude with a preliminary discussion of our experience from a human bidding experiment, involving Vos planners competing for orders both against each other and against some (simple) automated strategies

Towards a Semantic-based Approach for Modeling Regulatory Documents in Building Industry

Regulations in the Building Industry are becoming increasingly complex and involve more than one technical area. They cover products, components and project implementation. They also play an important role to ensure the quality of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact. In this paper, we are particularly interested in the modeling of the regulatory constraints derived from the Technical Guides issued by CSTB and used to validate Technical Assessments. We first describe our approach for modeling regulatory constraints in the SBVR language, and formalizing them in the SPARQL language. Second, we describe how we model the processes of compliance checking described in the CSTB Technical Guides. Third, we show how we implement these processes to assist industrials in drafting Technical Documents in order to acquire a Technical Assessment; a compliance report is automatically generated to explain the compliance or noncompliance of this Technical Documents