Cloud-based manufacturing-as-a-service environment for customized products

This paper describes the paradigm of cloud-based services which are used to envisage a new generation of configurable manufacturing systems. Unlike previous approaches to mass customization (that simply reprogram individual machines to produce specific shapes) the system reported here is intended to enable the customized production of technologically complex products by dynamically configuring a manufacturing supply chain. In order to realize such a system, the resources (i.e. production capabilities) have to be designed to support collaboration throughout the whole production network, including their adaption to customer-specific production. The flexible service composition as well as the appropriate IT services required for its realization show many analogies with common cloud computing approaches. For this reason, this paper describes the motivation and challenges that are related to cloud-based manufacturing and illustrates emerging technologies supporting this vision byestablishing an appropriate Manufacturing-as-a-Service environment based on manufacturing service descriptions

A Semantic-Based Information Management System to Support Innovative Product Design

International competition and the rapidly global economy, unified by improved communication and transportation, offer to the consumers an enormous choice of goods and services. The result is that companies now require quality, value, time to market and innovation to be successful in order to win the increasing competition. In the engineering sector this is traduced in need of optimization of the design process and in maximization of re-use of data and knowledge already existing in the company. The “SIMI-Pro” (Semantic Information Management system for Innovative Product design) system addresses specific deficiencies in the conceptual phase of product design when knowledge management, if applied, is often sectorial. Its main contribution is in allowing easy, fast and centralized collection of data from multiple sources and in supporting the retrieval and re-use of a wide range of data that will help stylists and engineers shortening the production cycle. SIMI-Pro will be one of the first prototypes to base its information management and its knowledge sharing system on process ontology and it will demonstrate how the use of centralized network systems, coupled with Semantic Web technologies, can improve inter-working activities and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing

Graceful Navigation for Mobile Robots in Dynamic and Uncertain Environments.

The ability to navigate in everyday environments is a fundamental and necessary skill for any autonomous mobile agent that is intended to work with human users. The presence of pedestrians and other dynamic objects, however, makes the environment inherently dynamic and uncertain. To navigate in such environments, an agent must reason about the near future and make an optimal decision at each time step so that it can move safely toward the goal. Furthermore, for any application intended to carry passengers, it also must be able to move smoothly and comfortably, and the robot behavior needs to be customizable to match the preference of the individual users. Despite decades of progress in the field of motion planning and control, this remains a difficult challenge with existing methods. In this dissertation, we show that safe, comfortable, and customizable mobile robot navigation in dynamic and uncertain environments can be achieved via stochastic model predictive control. We view the problem of navigation in dynamic and uncertain environments as a continuous decision making process, where an agent with short-term predictive capability reasons about its situation and makes an informed decision at each time step. The problem of robot navigation in dynamic and uncertain environments is formulated as an on-line, finite-horizon policy and trajectory optimization problem under uncertainty. With our formulation, planning and control becomes fully integrated, which allows direct optimization of the performance measure. Furthermore, with our approach the problem becomes easy to solve, which allows our algorithm to run in real time on a single core of a typical laptop with off-the-shelf optimization packages. The work presented in this thesis extends the state-of-the-art in analytic control of mobile robots, sampling-based optimal path planning, and stochastic model predictive control. We believe that our work is a significant step toward safe and reliable autonomous navigation that is acceptable to human users.PhDMechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120760/1/jongjinp_1.pd

Tailored information dashboards: A systematic mapping of the literature

Information dashboards are extremely useful tools to exploit knowledge. Dashboards enable users to reach insights and to identify patterns within data at-a-glance. However, dashboards present a series of characteristics and configurations that could not be optimal for every user, thus requiring the modification or variation of its features to fulfill specific user requirements. This variation process is usually referred to as customization, personalization or adaptation, depending on how this variation process is achieved. Given the great number of users and the exponential growth of data sources, tailoring an information dashboard is not a trivial task, as several solutions and configurations could arise. To analyze and understand the current state-of-the-art regarding tailored information dashboards, a systematic mapping has been performed. This mapping focus on answering questions regarding how existing dashboard solutions in the literature manage the customization, personalization and/or adaptation of its elements to produce tailored displays

Identifying Modes of Intent from Driver Behaviors in Dynamic Environments

In light of growing attention of intelligent vehicle systems, we propose developing a driver model that uses a hybrid system formulation to capture the intent of the driver. This model hopes to capture human driving behavior in a way that can be utilized by semi- and fully autonomous systems in heterogeneous environments. We consider a discrete set of high level goals or intent modes, that is designed to encompass the decision making process of the human. A driver model is derived using a dataset of lane changes collected in a realistic driving simulator, in which the driver actively labels data to give us insight into her intent. By building the labeled dataset, we are able to utilize classification tools to build the driver model using features of based on her perception of the environment, and achieve high accuracy in identifying driver intent. Multiple algorithms are presented and compared on the dataset, and a comparison of the varying behaviors between drivers is drawn. Using this modeling methodology, we present a model that can be used to assess driver behaviors and to develop human-inspired safety metrics that can be utilized in intelligent vehicular systems.Comment: Submitted to ITSC 201

Steps Toward End-to-End Personalized AAL Services

In Ambient Assisted Living research and development, a significant effort has been dedicated to issues like gathering continuous information at home, standardizing formats in order to create environments more easily, extracting further information from raw data using different techniques to reconstruct context. An aspect relatively less developed but also important is the design of personalized end-to-end services for technology users being them either primary (older people) or secondary (medical doctors, caregiver, relatives). This paper explores an effort, internal to the EU project GIRAFFPLUS, for designing such services starting from a state-of-the-art continuous data gathering infrastructure. The paper presents the general project idea, the current choices for the middleware infrastructure and the pursued direction for a set of services personalized to different classes of users

Про деякі підходи до персоналізації щодо організації інтерфейсу користувача в автоматизованих системах

In modern automated systems, users are often facing the problem of information overload due to the ever increasing amounts of information to be processed in a short time. Working in these conditions affects the quality of users performing their functions in the system and the reliability of the systems themselves.In the article different existing approaches to solving this problem are described and analyzed, which are based on the idea of creating customized tools for users work with information. On the basis of these solutions a complex methodology of information representation and storage forms personalization is suggested, as well as software architecture based on it.In modern automated systems, users are often facing the problem of information overload due to the ever increasing amounts of information to be processed in a short time. Working in these conditions affects the quality of users performing their functions in the system and the reliability of the systems themselves.In the article different existing approaches to solving this problem are described and analyzed, which are based on the idea of creating customized tools for users work with information. On the basis of these solutions a complex methodology of information representation and storage forms personalization is suggested, as well as software architecture based on it

Smart Grid Ecosystem Modeling Using a Novel Framework for Heterogenous Agent Communities

The modeling of smart grids using multi-agent systems is a common approach due to the ability to model complex and distributed systems using an agent-based solution. However, the use of a multi-agent system framework can limit the integration of new operation and management models, especially artificial intelligence algorithms. Therefore, this paper presents a study of available open-source multi-agent systems frameworks developed in Python, as it is a growing programming language and is largely used for data analytics and artificial intelligence models. As a consequence of the presented study, the authors proposed a novel open-source multi-agent system framework built for smart grid modeling, entitled Python-based framework for heterogeneous agent communities (PEAK). This framework enables the use of simulation environments but also allows real integration at pilot sites using a real-time clock. To demonstrate the capabilities of the PEAK framework, a novel agent ecosystem based on agent communities is shown and tested. This novel ecosystem, entitled Agent-based ecosystem for Smart Grid modeling (A4SG), takes full advantage of the PEAK framework and enables agent mobility, agent branching, and dynamic agent communities. An energy community of 20 prosumers, of which six have energy storage systems, that can share energy among them, using a peer-to-peer market, is used to test and validate the PEAK and A4SG solutions.The authors acknowledge the work facilities and equipment provided by the GECAD research center (UIDB/00760/2020) to the project team.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio