Intelligent systems in manufacturing: current developments and future prospects

Global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements are demanding increasing changes in manufacturing environments. Enterprises are required to constantly redesign their products and continuously reconfigure their manufacturing systems. Traditional approaches to manufacturing systems do not fully satisfy this new situation. Many authors have proposed that artificial intelligence will bring the flexibility and efficiency needed by manufacturing systems. This paper is a review of artificial intelligence techniques used in manufacturing systems. The paper first defines the components of a simplified intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS), the different Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to be considered and then shows how these AI techniques are used for the components of IMS

Insights on Research Techniques towards Cost Estimation in Software Design

Software cost estimation is of the most challenging task in project management in order to ensuring smoother development operation and target achievement. There has been evolution of various standards tools and techniques for cost estimation practiced in the industry at present times. However, it was never investigated about the overall picturization of effectiveness of such techniques till date. This paper initiates its contribution by presenting taxonomies of conventional cost-estimation techniques and then investigates the research trends towards frequently addressed problems in it. The paper also reviews the existing techniques in well-structured manner in order to highlight the problems addressed, techniques used, advantages associated and limitation explored from literatures. Finally, we also brief the explored open research issues as an added contribution to this manuscript

Impacts of various high beam headlight intensities on driver visibility and road safety

Based on several studies, driving above certain speed at night while using low beam headlights has been found to result in insufficient visibility to respond to road hazards. Luckily, vehicle headlight technology has advanced so much and the system is commercially available in many parts of the world. However, the technical development for optimal photometric performance raises a few questions. The use of high beam headlight system creates a glare to drivers of oncoming and preceding vehicles (because of both oncoming headlights and preceding taillights), to the extent that it has become necessary to determine the need to put a limit on the luminous intensity of high-beam headlights. This study shall therefore summarize and investigate visual performance that allows for evaluation of the potential benefits of increased luminous intensity by considering glare rating related to safety. Two different car models; the Proton Prevé and the Perodua Myvi were used in the experiments. The results showed that the highest average illuminance [lux] for single vehicle was 17.5, 7.5, 5.0 and 1.0 for the distances of 30m, 60m, 120m and 150m. However, the average illuminance based on total number of vehicles was 1.0, 0.5, 0.0 and 0.0 at distances of 30m, 60m, 120m and 150m, which were considered below maximum recommended safety level (max. 9.0 – 11.0 lux). The current average vehicle high-beam headlight control was found at the level of acceptable glare control (glare to oncoming and preceding drivers) and below the maximum level of illuminance rate with the normal speed of 40 km/h

A review of asset management literature on multi-asset systems

This article gives an overview of the literature on asset management for multi-unit systems with an emphasis on two multi-asset categories: fleet (a system of homogeneous assets) and portfolio (a system of heterogeneous assets). As asset systems become more complicated, researchers have employed different terms to refer to their specific problems. With an objective to facilitate readers in searching conducive studies to their interests, this paper establishes a novel classification scheme for multi-unit systems in accordance with essential features such as diversity of assets and intervention options. Moreover, discerning differences in characteristics between cross-component and cross-asset interactions, we select three types of potential multi-component dependencies (performance, stochastic, and resource) and extend their notions to be applicable to multi-asset systems. The investigation into these dependencies enables the identification of problems that could exist in real industrial settings but are yet to be determined in academia. Ultimately, we delve into modelling approaches adopted by previous researchers. This comprehensive information allows us to offer the insights into the current trends in multi-asset maintenance. We expect that the output of this review paper will not only stress research gaps on multi-asset systems, but more importantly help systematise future studies on this aspect

Exploring Terms and Taxonomies Relating to the Cyber International Relations Research Field: or are "Cyberspace" and "Cyber Space" the same?

This project has at least two facets to it: (1) advancing the algorithms in the sub-field of bibliometrics often referred to as "text mining" whereby hundreds of thousands of documents (such as journal articles) are scanned and relationships amongst words and phrases are established and (2) applying these tools in support of the Explorations in Cyber International Relations (ECIR) research effort. In international relations, it is important that all the parties understand each other. Although dictionaries, glossaries, and other sources tell you what words/phrases are supposed to mean (somewhat complicated by the fact that they often contradict each other), they do not tell you how people are actually using them. As an example, when we started, we assumed that "cyberspace" and "cyber space" were essentially the same word with just a minor variation in punctuation (i.e., the space, or lack thereof, between "cyber" and "space") and that the choice of the punctuation was a rather random occurrence. With that assumption in mind, we would expect that the taxonomies that would be constructed by our algorithms using "cyberspace" and "cyber space" as seed terms would be basically the same. As it turned out, they were quite different, both in overall shape and groupings within the taxonomy. Since the overall field of cyber international relations is so new, understanding the field and how people think about (as evidenced by their actual usage of terminology, and how usage changes over time) is an important goal as part of the overall ECIR project