What makes industries believe in formal methods

The introduction of formal methods in the design and development departments of an industrial company has far reaching and long lasting consequences. In fact it changes the whole environment of methods, tools and skills that determine the design culture of that company. A decision to replace current design practice by formal methods, therefore, appears a vital one and is not lightly taken. The past has shown that efforts to introduce formal methods in industry has faced a lot of controversy and opposition at various hierarchical levels in companies, resulting in a marginal spread of such methods. This paper revisits the requirements for formal description techniques and identifies some critical success and inhibiting factors associated with the introduction of formal methods in the industrial practice. One of the inhibiting factors is the often encountered lack of appropriateness of the formal model to express and manipulate the design concerns that determine the world of the engineer. This factor motivated our research in the area of architectural and implementation design concepts. The last two sections of this paper report on some results of this research

Design and development of a hybrid control system for flexible manufacturing : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Technology in Manufacturing and Industrial Technology at Massey University

Irregular Pagination MisnumberedFlexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) appeared upon the manufacturing scene in the early 1970s, installations presently number in the thousands. However, many current installations in fact lack flexibility, do not operate in real-time and are prohibitively expensive. Therefore there are obvious benefits to be gained from making improvements to existing flexible manufacturing systems. Research conducted for this thesis focused on two major areas. The implementation of the FMS control system on a SCADA package and the development of an auction based scheduling system. This entailed the development of a hybrid control model composed of three distinct layers; factory, cell and intelligent entity. Key portions of both the factory and cell controllers were then implemented so as to create a minimal system. This has been completed to the point where the auction algorithm has been implemented and tested in an appropriate framework. In achieving the goals mentioned above a number of novel design concepts have been utilised. There are two which are most important, these are the use of low cost modules for the construction of a flexible co-operative manufacturing system, and the ability of this system to operate in a physically distributed area via a Local Area Network. Meaning it is inherently adaptable and resistant to failure. These novel design concepts were ingrained throughout the entire three layered control model. It is felt that this research has succeeded in demonstrating the possibility of implementing a FMS control system on a low cost SCADA package using low cost software and computing elements. The ability of the distributed, auction-based approach to operate successfully within this system, has also been demonstrated through simulation

Leadership conversations: the impact on patient environments

Purpose – The aim of this study is to examine 15 NHS acute trusts in England that achieved high scores at all their hospitals in the first four national Patient Environment audits. No common external explanations were discernible. This paper seeks to examine whether the facilities managers responsible for the Patient Environment displayed a consistent leadership style. Design/methodology/approach – Overall, six of the 15 trusts gave permission for the research to take place and a series of unstructured interviews and observations were arranged with 22 facilities managers in these trusts. Responses were transcribed and categorised through multiple iteration. Findings – The research found common leadership and managerial behaviours, many of which could be identified from other literature. The research also identified managers deliberately devoting energy and time to creating networks of conversations. This creation of networks through managing conversation is behaviour less evident in mainstream leadership literature or in the current Department of Health and NHS leadership models. Practical implications – The findings of this study offer managers (particularly those in FM and managers across NHS) a unique insight into the potential impact of leaders giving an opportunity to re-model thinking on management and leadership and the related managerial development opportunities. It provides the leverage to move facilities management from the role of a commodity or support service, to a position as a true enabler of business. Originality/value – Original research is presented in a previously under-examined area. The paper illuminates how facilities management within trusts achieving high Patient Environment Action Team (PEAT) scores is led.</p

Design & development of a simulation model to analyse scheduling rules in an FMS in a virtual manufacturing environment : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Technology in Manufacturing and Industrial Technology at Massey University

Due to the rapid changes in the needs of the customer for new products, the future manufacturing systems must cope with these changes. Hence, the need for the manufacturing systems to support these changes in the products with shorter lead times within a single manufacturing facility. The Virtual Manufacturing System (VMS) is one concept which can assist in meeting these demands. The VMS concept enables the manufacturing system designers to emulate and test the performance of the future manufacturing systems. This research has given an overview of the new concepts of Virtual Manufacturing Systems and Virtual Manufacturing in general. A Virtual Reality Software tool has been used to realise the VMS concept. A Virtual Manufacturing Environment representing a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) has been modelled. A simulation control language is employed for developing simulation control logics and decision making control logics for the development of the FMS model. The modelled FMS is implemented and tested through simulation experiments. The testing is done by analysing the traditional scheduling rules in a manufacturing facility. Average Machine Utilisation, Mean Flow Time, Average Queue Lengths and the System Production Rate are measured as the System Performance Measures for the evaluation of the scheduling rules. This research has identified that the Virtual Manufacturing Software is a powerful tool which can identify optimum configurations and highlight potential problems before a final and expensive manufacturing system is established physically

An improved cell controller for the aerospace manufacturing

The aerospace manufacturing industry is unique in that production typically focuses on high variety and quality but low volume. Existing flexible manufacturing cells are limited to certain types of machines, robots and cells which makes it difficult to introduce any changes. In this paper idea of treating machines, robots, any hardware and software as resource has been introduced. It describes the development of the Flexa Cell Coordinator (FCC), a system that is providing a solution to manage cells and their resources in a new flexible manner. It can control, organise and coordinate between cells and resources and is capable of controlling remote cells because of its distributed nature. It also provides connectivity with company systems e.g., Enterprise Resource Planner (ERP). It is extendable and capable of adding multiple cells inside the system. In FCC resources (e.g., tracker) can also be shared between cells. The paper presents its development and results of initial successful testing

Enhanced cell controller for aerospace manufacturing

Aerospace manufacturing industry is unique in that production typically focuses on high variety and quality but extremely low volume. Manufacturing processes are also sometimes unique and not repeatable and, hence, costly. Production is getting more expensive with the introduction of industrial robots and their cells. This paper describes the development of the Flexa Cell Coordinator (FCC), a system that is providing a solution to manage resources at assembly cell level. It can control, organise and coordinate between the resources and is capable of controlling remote cells and resources because of its distributed nature. It also gives insight of a system to the higher management via its rich reporting facility and connectivity with company systems e.g., Enterprise Resource Planner (ERP). It is able to control various kinds of cells and resources (network based) which are not limited to robots and machines. It is extendable and capable of adding multiple numbers of cells inside the system. It also provides the facility of scheduling the task to avoid the deadlocking in the process. In FCC resources (e.g., tracker) can also be shared between cells

Highlighting matched and mismatched segments in translation memory output through sub-­tree alignment

In recent years, it is becoming more and more clear that the localisation industry does not have the necessary manpower to satisfy the increasing demand for high-quality translation. This has fuelled the search new and existing technologies that would increase translator throughput. As Translation Memory (TM) systems are the most commonly employed tool by translators, a number of enhancements are available to assist them in their job. One such enhancement would be to show the translator which parts of the sentence that needs to be translated match which parts of the fuzzy match suggested by the TM. For this information to be used, however, the translators have to carry it over to the TM translation themselves. In this paper, we present a novel methodology that can automatically detect and highlight the segments that need to be modified in a TM-­suggested translation. We base it on state-­of-the-art sub-­tree align- ment technology (Zhechev,2010) that can produce aligned phrase-­based-­tree pairs from unannotated data. Our system operates in a three-­step process. First, the fuzzy match selected by the TM and its translation are aligned. This lets us know which segments of the source-­language sentence correspond to which segments in its translation. In the second step, the fuzzy match is aligned to the input sentence that is currently being translated. This tells us which parts of the input sentence are available in the fuzzy match and which still need to be translated. In the third step, the fuzzy match is used as an intermediary, through which the alignments between the input sentence and the TM translation are established. In this way, we can detect with precision the segments in the suggested translation that the translator needs to edit and highlight them appropriately to set them apart from the segments that are already good translations for parts of the input sentence. Additionally, we can show the alignments—as detected by our system—between the input and the translation, which will make it even easier for the translator to post-edit the TM suggestion. This alignment information can additionally be used to pre- translate the mismatched segments, further reducing the post-­editing load

Reproduction of Twentieth Century Intradecadal to Multidecadal Surface Temperature Variability in Radiatively Forced Coupled Climate Models

[1] Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 3 simulations that included time-varying radiative forcings were ranked according to their ability to consistently reproduce twentieth century intradecadal to multidecadal (IMD) surface temperature variability at the 5° by 5° spatial scale. IMD variability was identified using the running Mann-Whitney Z method. Model rankings were given context by comparing the IMD variability in preindustrial control runs to observations and by contrasting the IMD variability among the ensemble members within each model. These experiments confirmed that the inclusion of time-varying external forcings brought simulations into closer agreement with observations. Additionally, they illustrated that the magnitude of unforced variability differed between models. This led to a supplementary metric that assessed model ability to reproduce observations while accounting for each model\u27s own degree of unforced variability. These two metrics revealed that discernable differences in skill exist between models and that none of the models reproduced observations at their theoretical optimum level. Overall, these results demonstrate a methodology for assessing coupled models relative to each other within a multimodel framework