A multi-agent approach for design consistency checking

The last decade has seen an explosion of interest to advanced product development methods, such as Computer Integrated Manufacture, Extended Enterprise and Concurrent Engineering. As a result of the globalization and future distribution of design and manufacturing facilities, the cooperation amongst partners is becoming more challenging due to the fact that the design process tends to be sequential and requires communication networks for planning design activities and/or a great deal of travel to/from designers' workplaces. In a virtual environment, teams of designers work together and use the Internet/Intranet for communication. The design is a multi-disciplinary task that involves several stages. These stages include input data analysis, conceptual design, basic structural design, detail design, production design, manufacturing processes analysis, and documentation. As a result, the virtual team, normally, is very changeable in term of designers' participation. Moreover, the environment itself changes over time. This leads to a potential increase in the number of design. A methodology of Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control (IDMC) is proposed to alleviate some of the related difficulties. This thesis looks at the Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control, in the context of the European Aerospace Industry, and suggests a methodology for a conceptual framework based on a multi-agent architecture. This multi-agent architecture is a kernel of an Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control System (IDMCS) that aims at ensuring that the overall design is consistent and acceptable to all participating partners. A Methodology of Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control is introduced and successfully implemented to detect design mismatches in complex design environments. A description of the research models and methods for intelligent mismatch control, a taxonomy of design mismatches, and an investigation into potential applications, such as aerospace design, are presented. The Multi-agent framework for mismatch control is developed and described. Based on the methodology used for the IDMC application, a formal framework for a multi-agent system is developed. The Methods and Principles are trialed out using an Aerospace Distributed Design application, namely the design of an A340 wing box. The ontology of knowledge for agent-based Intelligent Distributed Mismatch Control System is introduced, as well as the distributed collaborative environment for consortium based projects

Intelligent Products: Shifting the Production Control Logic in Construction (With Lean and BIM)

Production management and control in construction has not been addressed/updated ever since the introduction of Critical Path Method and the Last Planner® system. The predominant outside-in control logic and a fragmented and deep supply chain in construction significantly affect the efficiency over a lifecycle. In a construction project, a large number of organisations interact with the product throughout the process, requiring a significant amount of information handling and synchronisation between these organisations. However, due to the deep supply chains and problems with lack of information integration, the information flow down across the lifecycle poses a significant challenge. This research proposes a product centric system, where the control logic of the production process is embedded within the individual components from the design phase. The solution is enabled by a number of technologies and tools such as Building Information Modelling, Internet of Things, Messaging Systems and within the conceptual process framework of Lean Construction. The vision encompasses the lifecycle of projects from design to construction and maintenance, where the products can interact with the environment and its actors through various stages supporting a variety of actions. The vision and the tools and technologies required to support it are described in this pape

A Web Smart Space Framework for Intelligent Search Engines

A web smart space is an intelligent environment which has additional capability of searching the information smartly and efficiently. New advancements like dynamic web contents generation has increased the size of web repositories. Among so many modern software analysis requirements, one is to search information from the given repository. But useful information extraction is a troublesome hitch due to the multi-lingual; base of the web data collection. The issue of semantic based information searching has become a standoff due to the inconsistencies and variations in the characteristics of the data. In the accomplished research, a web smart space framework has been proposed which introduces front end processing for a search engine to make the information retrieval process more intelligent and accurate. In orthodox searching anatomies, searching is performed only by using pattern matching technique and consequently a large number of irrelevant results are generated. The projected framework has insightful ability to improve this drawback and returns efficient outcomes. Designed framework gets text input from the user in the form complete question, understands the input and generates the meanings. Search engine searches on the basis of the information provided

Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

Coordination approaches and systems - part I : a strategic perspective

This is the first part of a two-part paper presenting a fundamental review and summary of research of design coordination and cooperation technologies. The theme of this review is aimed at the research conducted within the decision management aspect of design coordination. The focus is therefore on the strategies involved in making decisions and how these strategies are used to satisfy design requirements. The paper reviews research within collaborative and coordinated design, project and workflow management, and, task and organization models. The research reviewed has attempted to identify fundamental coordination mechanisms from different domains, however it is concluded that domain independent mechanisms need to be augmented with domain specific mechanisms to facilitate coordination. Part II is a review of design coordination from an operational perspective

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications