The Component Packaging Problem: A Vehicle for the Development of Multidisciplinary Design and Analysis Methodologies

This report summarizes academic research which has resulted in an increased appreciation for multidisciplinary efforts among our students, colleagues and administrators. It has also generated a number of research ideas that emerged from the interaction between disciplines. Overall, 17 undergraduate students and 16 graduate students benefited directly from the NASA grant: an additional 11 graduate students were impacted and participated without financial support from NASA. The work resulted in 16 theses (with 7 to be completed in the near future), 67 papers or reports mostly published in 8 journals and/or presented at various conferences (a total of 83 papers, presentations and reports published based on NASA inspired or supported work). In addition, the faculty and students presented related work at many meetings, and continuing work has been proposed to NSF, the Army, Industry and other state and federal institutions to continue efforts in the direction of multidisciplinary and recently multi-objective design and analysis. The specific problem addressed is component packing which was solved as a multi-objective problem using iterative genetic algorithms and decomposition. Further testing and refinement of the methodology developed is presently under investigation. Teaming issues research and classes resulted in the publication of a web site, (http://design.eng.clemson.edu/psych4991) which provides pointers and techniques to interested parties. Specific advantages of using iterative genetic algorithms, hurdles faced and resolved, and institutional difficulties associated with multi-discipline teaming are described in some detail

Challenges to knowledge representation in multilingual contexts

To meet the increasing demands of the complex inter-organizational processes and the demand for continuous innovation and internationalization, it is evident that new forms of organisation are being adopted, fostering more intensive collaboration processes and sharing of resources, in what can be called collaborative networks (Camarinha-Matos, 2006:03). Information and knowledge are crucial resources in collaborative networks, being their management fundamental processes to optimize. Knowledge organisation and collaboration systems are thus important instruments for the success of collaborative networks of organisations having been researched in the last decade in the areas of computer science, information science, management sciences, terminology and linguistics. Nevertheless, research in this area didn’t give much attention to multilingual contexts of collaboration, which pose specific and challenging problems. It is then clear that access to and representation of knowledge will happen more and more on a multilingual setting which implies the overcoming of difficulties inherent to the presence of multiple languages, through the use of processes like localization of ontologies. Although localization, like other processes that involve multilingualism, is a rather well-developed practice and its methodologies and tools fruitfully employed by the language industry in the development and adaptation of multilingual content, it has not yet been sufficiently explored as an element of support to the development of knowledge representations - in particular ontologies - expressed in more than one language. Multilingual knowledge representation is then an open research area calling for cross-contributions from knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences. This workshop joined researchers interested in multilingual knowledge representation, in a multidisciplinary environment to debate the possibilities of cross-fertilization between knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences applied to contexts where multilingualism continuously creates new and demanding challenges to current knowledge representation methods and techniques. In this workshop six papers dealing with different approaches to multilingual knowledge representation are presented, most of them describing tools, approaches and results obtained in the development of ongoing projects. In the first case, Andrés Domínguez Burgos, Koen Kerremansa and Rita Temmerman present a software module that is part of a workbench for terminological and ontological mining, Termontospider, a wiki crawler that aims at optimally traverse Wikipedia in search of domainspecific texts for extracting terminological and ontological information. The crawler is part of a tool suite for automatically developing multilingual termontological databases, i.e. ontologicallyunderpinned multilingual terminological databases. In this paper the authors describe the basic principles behind the crawler and summarized the research setting in which the tool is currently tested. In the second paper, Fumiko Kano presents a work comparing four feature-based similarity measures derived from cognitive sciences. The purpose of the comparative analysis presented by the author is to verify the potentially most effective model that can be applied for mapping independent ontologies in a culturally influenced domain. For that, datasets based on standardized pre-defined feature dimensions and values, which are obtainable from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) have been used for the comparative analysis of the similarity measures. The purpose of the comparison is to verify the similarity measures based on the objectively developed datasets. According to the author the results demonstrate that the Bayesian Model of Generalization provides for the most effective cognitive model for identifying the most similar corresponding concepts existing for a targeted socio-cultural community. In another presentation, Thierry Declerck, Hans-Ulrich Krieger and Dagmar Gromann present an ongoing work and propose an approach to automatic extraction of information from multilingual financial Web resources, to provide candidate terms for building ontology elements or instances of ontology concepts. The authors present a complementary approach to the direct localization/translation of ontology labels, by acquiring terminologies through the access and harvesting of multilingual Web presences of structured information providers in the field of finance, leading to both the detection of candidate terms in various multilingual sources in the financial domain that can be used not only as labels of ontology classes and properties but also for the possible generation of (multilingual) domain ontologies themselves. In the next paper, Manuel Silva, António Lucas Soares and Rute Costa claim that despite the availability of tools, resources and techniques aimed at the construction of ontological artifacts, developing a shared conceptualization of a given reality still raises questions about the principles and methods that support the initial phases of conceptualization. These questions become, according to the authors, more complex when the conceptualization occurs in a multilingual setting. To tackle these issues the authors present a collaborative platform – conceptME - where terminological and knowledge representation processes support domain experts throughout a conceptualization framework, allowing the inclusion of multilingual data as a way to promote knowledge sharing and enhance conceptualization and support a multilingual ontology specification. In another presentation Frieda Steurs and Hendrik J. Kockaert present us TermWise, a large project dealing with legal terminology and phraseology for the Belgian public services, i.e. the translation office of the ministry of justice, a project which aims at developing an advanced tool including expert knowledge in the algorithms that extract specialized language from textual data (legal documents) and whose outcome is a knowledge database including Dutch/French equivalents for legal concepts, enriched with the phraseology related to the terms under discussion. Finally, Deborah Grbac, Luca Losito, Andrea Sada and Paolo Sirito report on the preliminary results of a pilot project currently ongoing at UCSC Central Library, where they propose to adapt to subject librarians, employed in large and multilingual Academic Institutions, the model used by translators working within European Union Institutions. The authors are using User Experience (UX) Analysis in order to provide subject librarians with a visual support, by means of “ontology tables” depicting conceptual linking and connections of words with concepts presented according to their semantic and linguistic meaning. The organizers hope that the selection of papers presented here will be of interest to a broad audience, and will be a starting point for further discussion and cooperation

A survey of free software for the design, analysis, modelling, and simulation of an unmanned aerial vehicle

The objective of this paper is to analyze free software for the design, analysis, modelling, and simulation of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Free software is the best choice when the reduction of production costs is necessary; nevertheless, the quality of free software may vary. This paper probably does not include all of the free software, but tries to describe or mention at least the most interesting programs. The first part of this paper summarizes the essential knowledge about UAVs, including the fundamentals of flight mechanics and aerodynamics, and the structure of a UAV system. The second section generally explains the modelling and simulation of a UAV. In the main section, more than 50 free programs for the design, analysis, modelling, and simulation of a UAV are described. Although the selection of the free software has been focused on small subsonic UAVs, the software can also be used for other categories of aircraft in some cases; e.g. for MAVs and large gliders. The applications with an historical importance are also included. Finally, the results of the analysis are evaluated and discussed—a block diagram of the free software is presented, possible connections between the programs are outlined, and future improvements of the free software are suggested. © 2015, CIMNE, Barcelona, Spain.Internal Grant Agency of Tomas Bata University in Zlin [IGA/FAI/2015/001, IGA/FAI/2014/006

Automatic generation of software interfaces for supporting decisionmaking processes. An application of domain engineering & machine learning

[EN] Data analysis is a key process to foster knowledge generation in particular domains or fields of study. With a strong informative foundation derived from the analysis of collected data, decision-makers can make strategic choices with the aim of obtaining valuable benefits in their specific areas of action. However, given the steady growth of data volumes, data analysis needs to rely on powerful tools to enable knowledge extraction. Information dashboards offer a software solution to analyze large volumes of data visually to identify patterns and relations and make decisions according to the presented information. But decision-makers may have different goals and, consequently, different necessities regarding their dashboards. Moreover, the variety of data sources, structures, and domains can hamper the design and implementation of these tools. This Ph.D. Thesis tackles the challenge of improving the development process of information dashboards and data visualizations while enhancing their quality and features in terms of personalization, usability, and flexibility, among others. Several research activities have been carried out to support this thesis. First, a systematic literature mapping and review was performed to analyze different methodologies and solutions related to the automatic generation of tailored information dashboards. The outcomes of the review led to the selection of a modeldriven approach in combination with the software product line paradigm to deal with the automatic generation of information dashboards. In this context, a meta-model was developed following a domain engineering approach. This meta-model represents the skeleton of information dashboards and data visualizations through the abstraction of their components and features and has been the backbone of the subsequent generative pipeline of these tools. The meta-model and generative pipeline have been tested through their integration in different scenarios, both theoretical and practical. Regarding the theoretical dimension of the research, the meta-model has been successfully integrated with other meta-model to support knowledge generation in learning ecosystems, and as a framework to conceptualize and instantiate information dashboards in different domains. In terms of the practical applications, the focus has been put on how to transform the meta-model into an instance adapted to a specific context, and how to finally transform this later model into code, i.e., the final, functional product. These practical scenarios involved the automatic generation of dashboards in the context of a Ph.D. Programme, the application of Artificial Intelligence algorithms in the process, and the development of a graphical instantiation platform that combines the meta-model and the generative pipeline into a visual generation system. Finally, different case studies have been conducted in the employment and employability, health, and education domains. The number of applications of the meta-model in theoretical and practical dimensions and domains is also a result itself. Every outcome associated to this thesis is driven by the dashboard meta-model, which also proves its versatility and flexibility when it comes to conceptualize, generate, and capture knowledge related to dashboards and data visualizations

Component-led integrative optimisation methodology for avionic thermal management

The modern military aircraft can be defined as a System of Systems (SoS); several distinct systems operating simultaneously across boundary interfaces. As the on-board subsystems have become more complex and diverse, the development process has become more isolated. When considering thermal management of distributed heat loads, the aircraft has become a collection of individually optimised components and subsystems, rather than the implementation of a single system to perform a given task. Avionic thermal management is quickly becoming a limiting factor of aircraft performance, reliability and effectiveness. The challenge of avionic thermal management is growing with the increasing complexity and power density of avionic packages. The aircraft relies on a heat rejection growth capacity to accommodate the additional through-life avionic heat loads. Growth capacity is defined as an allowable thermal loading growth designed into the system by the underutilisation of spatial and cooling supply at aircraft introduction; however, this is a limited resource and aircraft subsystem cooling capability is reaching a critical point. The depleted growth capacity coupled with increased avionic power demands has led to component thermal failure. However, due to the poor resolution of existing data acquisition, experimental facilities or thermodynamic modeling, the exact inflight-operating conditions remain relatively unknown. The knowledge gap identified in this work is the lack of definitive methodology to generate high fidelity data of in-flight thermal conditions of fast-jet subsystems and provide evidence towards effective future thermal management technologies. It is shown that, through the development of a new methodology, the knowledge gap can be reduced and as an output of this approach the unknown system behaviour can be defined. A multidisciplinary approach to the replication, analysis and optimisation of a fast-jet TMS is detailed. The development of a new Ground Test Facility (GTF) allows previously unidentified system thermal behaviour to be evaluated at component, subsystem and system level. The development of new data to characterise current thermal performance of a fast jet TMS allows recommendations of several new technologies to be implemented through a component led integrative system optimisation. This approach is to consider the TMS as a single system to achieve a single goal of component thermal management. Three technologies are implemented to optimise avionic conditions through the minimisation of bleed air consumption, improve avionic reliability through increased avionic component isothermalisation and increase growth capacity through improved avionic heat exchanger fin utilisation. These component level technologies improved system level performance. A reduction in TMS bleed air consumption from 1225kg to 510kg was found to complete a typical flight profile. A peak predicted aircraft specific fuel consumption saving of 1.23% is seen at a cruise flight condition because of this approach to avionic thermal management