Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges

High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security

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

Energy-efficient through-life smart design, manufacturing and operation of ships in an industry 4.0 environment

Energy efficiency is an important factor in the marine industry to help reduce manufacturing and operational costs as well as the impact on the environment. In the face of global competition and cost-effectiveness, ship builders and operators today require a major overhaul in the entire ship design, manufacturing and operation process to achieve these goals. This paper highlights smart design, manufacturing and operation as the way forward in an industry 4.0 (i4) era from designing for better energy efficiency to more intelligent ships and smart operation through-life. The paper (i) draws parallels between ship design, manufacturing and operation processes, (ii) identifies key challenges facing such a temporal (lifecycle) as opposed to spatial (mass) products, (iii) proposes a closed-loop ship lifecycle framework and (iv) outlines potential future directions in smart design, manufacturing and operation of ships in an industry 4.0 value chain so as to achieve more energy-efficient vessels. Through computational intelligence and cyber-physical integration, we envision that industry 4.0 can revolutionise ship design, manufacturing and operations in a smart product through-life process in the near future

The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques

SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability

The value of research data to the nation

Executive Director’s report Ross Wilkinson, ANDS How can Australia address the challenge of living in bushfire prone city fringes? How can Australia most effectively farm and preserve our precious soil? How can Australia understand the Great Barrier Reef? No single discipline can answer these questions, but to address these challenges data is needed from a range of sources and disciplines. Research data that is well organised and available allows research to make substantial contributions vital to Australia’s future. For example, by drawing upon data that is able to be used by soil scientists, geneticists, plant scientists, climate analysts, and others, it is possible to conduct the multidisciplinary investigations necessary to tackle truly difficult and important challenges. The data might be provided by a Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network OzFluz tower, insect observations recorded by a citizen through the Atlas of Living Australia, genetic sequencing of insects through a Bioplatforms Australia facility, weather observations by the Bureau of Meteorology, or historical data generated by CSIRO over many decades. Each will provide a part of the jigsaw, but the pieces must be able to be put together. This requires careful collection and organisation, which together deliver enormous value to the country. However, nationally significant problems are often tackled by international cooperation, so Australia’s data assets enable Australian researchers to work with the best in the world, solving problems of both national and international significance. Australia’s data assets and research data infrastructure provide Australian researchers with an excellent platform for international collaboration. Australia has world-leading research data infrastructure: our ability to store, compute, discover, explore, analyse and publish is the best in the world. The ability to capture data through a wide range of capabilities, from the Australian Synchrotron to Integrated Marine Observation System [IMOS: imos.org.au] ocean gliders, the combination of national storage and computation through RDSI, NCI and Pawsey initiatives, the ability to publish and discover data through ANDS, the ability to analyse and explore data through Nectar, and state and local eResearch capabilities, highlights just some of the capabilities that Australian researchers are able to access. Importantly, their international partners are able to work with them using many of these resources. As well, Australian research organisations are assembling many resources to support their research. These include policies, procedures, practical infrastructure, and very importantly – people! The eResearch team and the data librarians are always keen to help. This issue of Share highlights how the data resources of Australia are providing a very substantial national benefit, and how that benefit is being realised