11,371 research outputs found
Architectural and Management Strategies for the Design, Construction and Operation of Energy Efficient and Intelligent Primary Care Centers in Chile
Primary care centers are establishments with elevated social relevance and high operational
energy consumption. In Chile, there more than 628 family healthcare centers (CESFAM) have been
built in the last two decades and with plans for hundreds more in the next few years. We revised
the architecture, construction management and energy performance of five CESFAM centers to
determine possible instances of overall improvement. Staff was interviewed, and state documents
reviewed, which allowed the conceptualization of the architectonic and energy structure of the
centers, as well as the process of implementation. At the same time, energy simulations were done
for each one of the centers, controlling for different climates, construction solutions and orientations.
Our study revealed that strategies employed by the primary healthcare centers in Chile have aided a
progressive implementation of establishments with elevated costs and materialization times, as well
as neglect for climatic conditions. These energy evaluations show relevant and consistent impacts
of the architectural form and material conditions, especially in southern zones, demonstrating the
need to work with shared knowledge resources such as BIM. There is a clear necessity to define
technological, morphological and construction strategies specific to each climate zone in order to
achieve energetically efficient and intelligent healthcare establishments
Knowledge Representation for Robots through Human-Robot Interaction
The representation of the knowledge needed by a robot to perform complex
tasks is restricted by the limitations of perception. One possible way of
overcoming this situation and designing "knowledgeable" robots is to rely on
the interaction with the user. We propose a multi-modal interaction framework
that allows to effectively acquire knowledge about the environment where the
robot operates. In particular, in this paper we present a rich representation
framework that can be automatically built from the metric map annotated with
the indications provided by the user. Such a representation, allows then the
robot to ground complex referential expressions for motion commands and to
devise topological navigation plans to achieve the target locations.Comment: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Robotics Workshop at ICLP
201
Energy performance assessment of HVAC systems by inspection and monitoring
The paper discusses the collection and processing of energy performance data as part of the inspection of HVAC systems, aimed at identifying technically feasible and cost-effective Energy Conservation Opportunities (ECO), as required by EPBD. Case studies developed by the HARMONAC project have shown that low-cost or no-cost ECO's - mostly related to system operation and management - can be identified with an effective system monitoring. Building Management Systems (BMS) may be a powerful tool for this task, provided their HW and SW architecture is designed with adequate attention to energy monitoring. Dedicated instrumentation - such as electricity meters and temperature loggers - may also be employed as an alternative / integration to BMS monitoring. The paper also discusses the application of data analysis tools - such as "carpet plots" and "energy signatures" - to the identification of component malfunctioning, control problems, inadequate maintenance, or system schedule optimization, and to the evaluation of achieved energy saving
Vacuum mechatronics
The discipline of vacuum mechatronics is defined as the design and development of vacuum-compatible computer-controlled mechanisms for manipulating, sensing and testing in a vacuum environment. The importance of vacuum mechatronics is growing with an increased application of vacuum in space studies and in manufacturing for material processing, medicine, microelectronics, emission studies, lyophylisation, freeze drying and packaging. The quickly developing field of vacuum mechatronics will also be the driving force for the realization of an advanced era of totally enclosed clean manufacturing cells. High technology manufacturing has increasingly demanding requirements for precision manipulation, in situ process monitoring and contamination-free environments. To remove the contamination problems associated with human workers, the tendency in many manufacturing processes is to move towards total automation. This will become a requirement in the near future for e.g., microelectronics manufacturing. Automation in ultra-clean manufacturing environments is evolving into the concept of self-contained and fully enclosed manufacturing. A Self Contained Automated Robotic Factory (SCARF) is being developed as a flexible research facility for totally enclosed manufacturing. The construction and successful operation of a SCARF will provide a novel, flexible, self-contained, clean, vacuum manufacturing environment. SCARF also requires very high reliability and intelligent control. The trends in vacuum mechatronics and some of the key research issues are reviewed
Towards Business Processes Orchestrating the Physical Enterprise with Wireless Sensor Networks
The industrial adoption of wireless sensor net- works (WSNs) is hampered by two main factors. First, there is a lack of integration of WSNs with business process modeling languages and back-ends. Second, programming WSNs is still challenging as it is mainly performed at the operating system level. To this end, we provide makeSense: a unified programming framework and a compilation chain that, from high-level business process specifications, generates code ready for deployment on WSN nodes
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