A comparison of processing techniques for producing prototype injection moulding inserts.

This project involves the investigation of processing techniques for producing low-cost moulding inserts used in the particulate injection moulding (PIM) process. Prototype moulds were made from both additive and subtractive processes as well as a combination of the two. The general motivation for this was to reduce the entry cost of users when considering PIM. PIM cavity inserts were first made by conventional machining from a polymer block using the pocket NC desktop mill. PIM cavity inserts were also made by fused filament deposition modelling using the Tiertime UP plus 3D printer. The injection moulding trials manifested in surface finish and part removal defects. The feedstock was a titanium metal blend which is brittle in comparison to commodity polymers. That in combination with the mesoscale features, small cross-sections and complex geometries were considered the main problems. For both processing methods, fixes were identified and made to test the theory. These consisted of a blended approach that saw a combination of both the additive and subtractive processes being used. The parts produced from the three processing methods are investigated and their respective merits and issues are discussed

The concept of collaborative engineering: a systematic literature review

Collaborative engineering is not a new subject but it assumes a new importance in the Industry 4.0 (I4.0). There are other concepts frequently mismatched with collaboration. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to put forward a collaborative engineering concept, along its sub concepts, supported by an extensive systematic literature review. A critical analysis and discussion about the fundamental importance of learning, and the central human role in collaboration, in the I4.0, is presented, based on the main insights brought through the literature review. This study also enables to realize about the importance of collaboration in the current digitalization era, along with the importance of recent approaches and technology for enabling or promoting collaboration. Main current practices of human centered and autonomous machine-machine approaches and applications of collaboration in engineering, namely in manufacturing and management, are presented, along with main difficulties and further open research opportunities on collaboration.This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [UIDB/00319/2020, UIDB/50014/2020, and EXPL/EME-SIS/1224/2021]

Reducing risk in pre-production investigations through undergraduate engineering projects.

This poster is the culmination of final year Bachelor of Engineering Technology (B.Eng.Tech) student projects in 2017 and 2018. The B.Eng.Tech is a level seven qualification that aligns with the Sydney accord for a three-year engineering degree and hence is internationally benchmarked. The enabling mechanism of these projects is the industry connectivity that creates real-world projects and highlights the benefits of the investigation of process at the technologist level. The methodologies we use are basic and transparent, with enough depth of technical knowledge to ensure the industry partners gain from the collaboration process. The process we use minimizes the disconnect between the student and the industry supervisor while maintaining the academic freedom of the student and the commercial sensitivities of the supervisor. The general motivation for this approach is the reduction of the entry cost of the industry to enable consideration of new technologies and thereby reducing risk to core business and shareholder profits. The poster presents several images and interpretive dialogue to explain the positive and negative aspects of the student process

NEGOSEIO: framework for the sustainability of model-oriented enterprise interoperability

Dissertation to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical and Computer Engineering(Industrial Information Systems)This dissertation tackles the problematic of Enterprise Interoperability in the current globally connected world. The evolution of the Information and Communication Technologies has endorsed the establishment of fast, secure and robust data exchanges, promoting the development of networked solutions. This allowed the specialisation of enterprises (particularly SMEs) and favoured the development of complex and heterogeneous provider systems. Enterprises are abandoning their self-centrism and working together on the development of more complete solutions. Entire business solutions are built integrating several enterprises (e.g., in supply chains, enterprise nesting) towards a common objective. Additionally, technologies, platforms, trends, standards and regulations keep evolving and demanding enterprises compliance. This evolution needs to be continuous, and is naturally followed by a constant update of each networked enterprise’s interfaces, assets, methods and processes. This unstable environment of perpetual change is causing major concerns in both SMEs and customers as the current interoperability grounds are frail, easily leading to periods of downtime, where business is not possible. The pressure to restore interoperability rapidly often leads to patching and to the adoption of immature solutions, contributing to deteriorate even more the interoperable environment. This dissertation proposes the adoption of NEGOSEIO, a framework that tackles interoperability issues by developing strong model-based knowledge assets and promoting continuous improvement and adaptation for increasing the sustainability of interoperability on enterprise systems. It presents the research motivations and the developed framework’s main blocks, which include model-based knowledge management, collaboration service-oriented architectures implemented over a cloud-based solution, and focusing particularly on its negotiation core mechanism to handle inconsistencies and solutions for the detected interoperability problems. It concludes by validating the research and the proposed framework, presenting its application in a real business case of aerospace mission design on the European Space Agency (ESA).FP7 ENSEMBLE, UNITE, MSEE and IMAGINE project

Intelligent negotiation mechanism for supporting the interoperability within the sensing enterprise

The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the European Commission through the funding of the UNITE, MSEE and IMAGINE FP7 projects, and the European Space Agency - Concurrent Design Facility (ESA-CDF) for their support in the development of the business case presented in this paper.The Sensing Enterprise is a novel concept that refers to an enterprise anticipating future decisions by using multi-dimensional information captured through physical and virtual objects. The Sensing Enterprise concept is shifting focus towards a borderless enterprise, having at its core the collaboration and continuous interactions among smart objects and systems. But in the actual competitive and global business context, the maintenance of the collaboration environment through the interoperation among heterogeneous smart virtual and physical objects in a collaborative organizational environment becomes difficult to achieve. Therefore, in a dynamic context a change in any component of the networked partners affects the others, creating difficulties to sustain operating networked environment. In this respect, this paper proposes an intelligent negotiation framework as a key mechanism to achieve and maintain the interoperability between the organisations' smart objects and applications, and its validation in an industrial scenario. To allow a sustainable, flexible and generic approach towards the infrastructure implementation in global scale, a cloud-based platform is proposed for setting of the Sensing Enterprise framework.publishersversionpublishe

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

High Energy Physics Forum for Computational Excellence: Working Group Reports (I. Applications Software II. Software Libraries and Tools III. Systems)

Computing plays an essential role in all aspects of high energy physics. As computational technology evolves rapidly in new directions, and data throughput and volume continue to follow a steep trend-line, it is important for the HEP community to develop an effective response to a series of expected challenges. In order to help shape the desired response, the HEP Forum for Computational Excellence (HEP-FCE) initiated a roadmap planning activity with two key overlapping drivers -- 1) software effectiveness, and 2) infrastructure and expertise advancement. The HEP-FCE formed three working groups, 1) Applications Software, 2) Software Libraries and Tools, and 3) Systems (including systems software), to provide an overview of the current status of HEP computing and to present findings and opportunities for the desired HEP computational roadmap. The final versions of the reports are combined in this document, and are presented along with introductory material.Comment: 72 page