Dynamic system simulation on the web

Computer simulation is the discipline of designing a model of an actual or theoretical physical system, executing the model on digital computer, and analysing the execution output. Of late, simulation has been influenced by an increasingly popular phenomenon - the World Wide Web or WWW. Java is a programming language for the WWW that brings a high level of dynamism to Web applications. Java makes it particularly suitable to represent applications on the Web. It has created an illusion of machine independence and interoperability for many applications. Therefore WWW can be considered as an environment for providing modelling and simulation applications. Research in the area of Web-based simulation is developing rapidly as WWW programming tools develop. Bulk of this research is focused only on discrete event simulation. This dissertation introduces dynamic system simulation on the Web. It presents and demonstrates a Web-based simulation software (SimDynamic), entirely developed in Java, for modelling, simulating, and analysing dynamic systems with 3D animated illustration, wherever applicable. SimDynamic can also be used as a non Web-based application on a PC. In both cases, it supports complete model creation and modification capabilities along with graphical and numerical output. Detail design and functional ability of SimDynamic are provided. Some real world systems have been modeled using SimDynamic and results are presented. Characteristic features of the software are discussed from software engineering point of view. Complete source code and installation instructions are included. Current SimDynamic limitations and potential customization and expansion issues are explored

A web-based teleoperative mobile robotic system : Master of Engineering in Information Engineering at Massey University, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

With the rapid development of internet technology, it becomes real that human beings can access, modify and control a remote hardware device via internet connection. Such remote operations can replace the human to be present at a dangerous or unreachable place or can make as many as possible users to access the hardware in different places at a low cost. The thesis research was aimed at developing a web based mobile robot control framework for education purpose. It should be composed of a mobile robot. Http server, dynamic user interface and video server. With it users can view and control the real robot via a normal web browser and can choose to run either simulation or the real robot. This is done by setting up operational parameters via a friendly GUI (graphic user interface). Users also can upload and compile their own C code to control the robot and get back the running results. The main objectives of this thesis research are hardware upgrading for Nomadic Super Scout mobile robot and web based php programming. For the first objective, the onboard PC was replaced by a laptop that is remotely placed and connected to the robot control system via Bluetooth wireless. The Nserver for robot simulation was set up in the Linux operating environment. For the second objective, the software programming was focused on building a web control platform which should be user friendly. An Apache server was developed where PHP program was used for the user interface. The main advantage of using PHP is that it does not need to install or download any software or script to get access to the remote robot via a normal web browser on any operation like windows or Linux. The web-based mobile robot system was tested using two different cases. One case demonstrated how the user specifies a set of motion parameters of the robot that is programmed to perform a wall-following behaviour. The other demonstrated how the user uploads a collision avoidance program to run the robot that is placed among obstacles. Both case studies were performed in real environments and the results proved the success of the developed web-based robotic system

Integrating peer-to-peer into web services

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is emerging as a new standard for building large loosely coupled systems. Web Services, the dominant implementation platform for SOA, use a server-centric approach to manage all components. This limits the deployment of Web Services to static domains, since a service invocation will fail if the server component changes its availability or location. This research focuses on the possibilities of integrating P2P technology into the Web Services environment as a means of increasing its robustness. A P2P-Web Services architecture is presented that enables service discovery and service invocations in dynamic environments. The corresponding experiments on the reference system and the simulation system present the characteristics and improvements of the hybrid system

Performance evaluation of a distributed integrative architecture for robotics

The eld of robotics employs a vast amount of coupled sub-systems. These need to interact cooperatively and concurrently in order to yield the desired results. Some hybrid algorithms also require intensive cooperative interactions internally. The architecture proposed lends it- self amenable to problem domains that require rigorous calculations that are usually impeded by the capacity of a single machine, and incompatibility issues between software computing elements. Implementations are abstracted away from the physical hardware for ease of de- velopment and competition in simulation leagues. Monolithic developments are complex, and the desire for decoupled architectures arises. Decoupling also lowers the threshold for using distributed and parallel resources. The ability to re-use and re-combine components on de- mand, therefore is essential, while maintaining the necessary degree of interaction. For this reason we propose to build software components on top of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) using Web Services. An additional bene t is platform independence regarding both the operating system and the implementation language. The robot soccer platform as well as the associated simulation leagues are the target domain for the development. Furthermore are machine vision and remote process control related portions of the architecture currently in development and testing for industrial environments. We provide numerical data based on the Python frameworks ZSI and SOAPpy undermining the suitability of this approach for the eld of robotics. Response times of signi cantly less than 50 ms even for fully interpreted, dynamic languages provides hard information showing the feasibility of Web Services based SOAs even in time critical robotic applications

Application of BIM in sustainability analysis

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is the process of generating and managing building data during its life cycle. Typically it uses three-dimensional, real-time, dynamic building modeling software to increase productivity in building design and construction. The process produces the Building Information Model, which encompasses building geometry, spatial relationships, geographic information, quantities and properties of building components. On the other hand, Green Building Index (GBI) as the localized sustainability building rating system in Malaysia assesses the impact of building on environment based on energy efficiency, indoor environment quality, sustainable site & management, materials & resources, water efficiency and innovation. By integrating GBI assessment criteria with BIM technology, this research proposes a comparative case study analysis of Residential New Construction (RNC) and Non-Residential New Construction (NRNC) based on the Autodesk Ecotect Analysis software (a comprehensive, concept-to-detail sustainable design analysis tool that provides a wide range of simulation and analysis functionality through desktop and web-service platforms) and Autodesk Green Building Studio (A web-based energy analysis service which performs whole building analysis, optimizes energy efficiency, and works toward carbon neutrality earlier in the design process) to investigate the influence of construction material on energy consumption, lifecycle energy cost and carbon emission

Robust and Decentralized Control of Web Winding Systems

This research addresses the velocity and tension regulation problems in web handling, including those found in the single element of an accumulator and those in the large-scale system settings. A continuous web winding system is a complex large-scale interconnected dynamics system with numerous tension zones to transport the web while processing it. A major challenge in controlling such systems is the unexpected disturbances that propagate through the system and affect both tension and velocity loops along the way. To solve this problem, a unique active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) strategy is proposed. Simulation results show remarkable disturbance rejection capability of the proposed control scheme in coping with large dynamic variations commonly seen in web winding systems. Another complication in web winding system stems from its large-scale and interconnected dynamics which makes control design difficult. This motivates the research in formulating a novel robust decentralized control strategy. The key idea in the proposed approach is that nonlinearities and interactions between adjunct subsystems are regarded as perturbations, to be estimated by an augmented state observer and rejected in the control loop, therefore making the local control design extremely simple. The proposed decentralized control strategy was implemented on a 3-tension-zone web winding processing line. Simulation results show that the proposed control method leads to much better tension and velocity regulation quality than the existing controller common in industry. Finally, this research tackles the challenging problem of stability analysis. Although ADRC has demonstrated the validity and advantage in many applications, the rigorous stability study has not been fully addressed previously. To this end, stability characterization of ADRC is carried out in this work. The closed-loop system is first reformulated, resulting in a form that allows the application of the well established singular perturbation method. Based on the decom