Investigation on quantitative assessment of energy consumption and the associated sustainability performance of CNC milling machines

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The increasing trend of energy prices increment and more and tighter environmental legislation, has led to manufacturing industry and enterprises paying more attention to investigation of more prominent energy/resource efficient production methods, quantitative analysis on energy consumption in manufacturing systems and corresponding timely decision makings. This is further evidenced and supported by the development of latest ISO standards such as ISO 14000, ISO 20140, ISO/TC 39/SC 2, N1760 and ISO 14955 for this cause. Therefore, developing a comprehensive methodological approach for quantitative analysis of energy consumptions and the associated sustainability aspects of CNC machines and operations is the key driver for this research, albeit incorporating its implementation and application perspectives on shopfloor machining operations is the predominant goal as well. The research presented consists of two inter-related parts. The first part discusses the development of the systematic integrated ERWC approach used for the modelling and simulation tenacities in CNC machines and machining operations by taking account of energy consumption (E), resource utilization (R) and waste resulted in production (W), and collectively the resultant carbon footprint (C). The ERWC modelling and analysis is explored in details with support of the MATLAB-based simulations developed and relevant case carried out. The second part of the research is focused on evaluation of the methodological approach by design of a special testing workpiece and the well-designed CNC machining experiments. The experiments are carried out on the Bridgeport 3-axis CNC milling machine, so the maximum output power of the machine can be determined using the designed testing workpiece and appropriate testing procedures. In the experiments, the milling machine is opted with the clamped power logger for power data-acquisition. The results are used to further validate the model, approach and simulations developed. The contributions to knowledge are largely raised from developing the integrated ERWC modelling approach, innovative design of the testing workpiece, and their implementation perspectives on the 3-axis CNC milling machine, as supported with original research thoughts and exploration

Honey bee based trust management system for cloud computing

Cloud computing has been considered as the new computing paradigm that would offer computer resources over the Internet as service.With the widespread use of cloud, computing would become another utility similar to electricity, water, gas and telephony where the customer would be paying only for the services consumed contrary to the current practice of paying a monthly or annual fixed charge irrespective of use.For cloud computing to become accepted by everybody, several issues need to be resolved.One of the most important issues to be addressed is cloud security.Trust management is one of the important components of cloud security that requires special attention. In this paper, the authors propose the concept that honey bee algorithm which has been developed to solve complex optimization problems can be successfully used to address this issue.The authors have taken a closer look at the optimization problems that had been solved using the honey bee algorithm and the similarity between these problems and the cloud computing environment.Thus concluding that the honey bee algorithm could be successfully used to solve the trust management issue in cloud computing

Current trends on ICT technologies for enterprise information s²ystems

The proposed paper discusses the current trends on ICT technologies for Enterprise Information Systems. The paper starts by defining four big challenges of the next generation of information systems: (1) Data Value Chain Management; (2) Context Awareness; (3) Interaction and Visualization; and (4) Human Learning. The major contributions towards the next generation of information systems are elaborated based on the work and experience of the authors and their teams. This includes: (1) Ontology based solutions for semantic interoperability; (2) Context aware infrastructures; (3) Product Avatar based interactions; and (4) Human learning. Finally the current state of research is discussed highlighting the impact of these solutions on the economic and social landscape

Performance Comparison of Parallel Bees Algorithm on Rosenbrock Function

The optimization algorithms that imitate nature have acquired much attention principally mechanisms for solving the difficult issues for example the travelling salesman problem (TSP) which is containing routing and scheduling of the tasks. This thesis presents the parallel Bees Algorithm as a new approach for optimizing the last results for the Bees Algorithm. Bees Algorithm is one of the optimization algorithms inspired from the natural foraging ways of the honey bees of finding the best solution. It is a series of activities based on the searching algorithm in order to access the best solutions. It is an iteration algorithm; therefore, it is suffering from slow convergence. The other downside of the Bee Algorithm is that it has needless computation. This means that it spends a long time for the bees algorithm converge the optimum solution. In this study, the parallel bees algorithm technique is proposed for overcoming of this issue. Due to that, this would lead to reduce the required time to get a solution with faster results accuracy than original Bees Algorithm

An integrated framework for developing generic modular reconfigurable platforms for micro manufacturing and its implementation

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The continuing trends of miniaturisation, mass customisation, globalisation and wide use of the Internet have great impacts upon manufacturing in the 21st century. Micro manufacturing will play an increasingly important role in bridging the gap between the traditional precision manufacturing and the emerging technologies like MEMS/NEMS. The key requirements for micro manufacturing in this context are hybrid manufacturing capability, modularity, reconfigurability, adaptability and energy/resource efficiency. The existing design approaches tend to have narrow scope and are largely limited to individual manufacturing processes and applications. The above requirements demand a fundamentally new approach to the future applications of micro manufacturing so as to obtain producibility, predictability and productivity covering the full process chains and value chains. A novel generic modular reconfigurable platform (GMRP) is proposed in such a context. The proposed GMRP is able to offer hybrid manufacturing capabilities, modularity, reconfigurablity and adaptivity as both an individual machine tool and a micro manufacturing system, and provides a cost effective solution to high value micro manufacturing in an agile, responsive and mass customisation manner. An integrated framework has been developed to assist the design of GMRPs due to their complexity. The framework incorporates theoretical GMRP model, design support system and extension interfaces. The GMRP model covers various relevant micro manufacturing processes and machine tool elements. The design support system includes a user-friendly interface, a design engine for design process and design evaluation, together with scalable design knowledge base and database. The functionalities of the framework can also be extended through the design support system interface, the GMRP interface and the application interface, i.e. linking to external hardware and/or software modules. The design support system provides a number of tools for the analysis and evaluation of the design solutions. The kinematic simulation of machine tools can be performed using the Virtual Reality toolbox in Matlab. A module has also been developed for the multiscale modelling, simulation and results analysis in Matlab. A number of different cutting parameters can be studied and the machining performance can be subsequently evaluated using this module. The mathematical models for a non-traditional micro manufacturing process, micro EDM, have been developed with the simulation performed using FEA. Various design theories and methodologies have been studied, and the axiomatic design theory has been selected because of its great power and simplicity. It has been applied in the conceptual design of GMRP and its design support system. The implementation of the design support system is carried out using Matlab, Java and XML technologies. The proposed GMRP and framework have been evaluated through case studies and experimental results

Bio-inspired multi-agent systems for reconfigurable manufacturing systems

The current market’s demand for customization and responsiveness is a major challenge for producing intelligent, adaptive manufacturing systems. The Multi-Agent System (MAS) paradigm offers an alternative way to design this kind of system based on decentralized control using distributed, autonomous agents, thus replacing the traditional centralized control approach. The MAS solutions provide modularity, flexibility and robustness, thus addressing the responsiveness property, but usually do not consider true adaptation and re-configuration. Understanding how, in nature, complex things are performed in a simple and effective way allows us to mimic nature’s insights and develop powerful adaptive systems that able to evolve, thus dealing with the current challenges imposed on manufactur- ing systems. The paper provides an overview of some of the principles found in nature and biology and analyses the effectiveness of bio-inspired methods, which are used to enhance multi-agent systems to solve complex engineering problems, especially in the manufacturing field. An industrial automation case study is used to illustrate a bio-inspired method based on potential fields to dynamically route pallets

ReSCon '12, Research Student Conference: Book of Abstracts

The fifth SED Research Student Conference (ReSCon2012) was hosted over three days, 18-20 June 2012, in the Hamilton Centre at Brunel University. The conference consisted of 130 oral and 70 poster presentations, based on the high quality and diverse research being conducted within the School of Engineering and Design by postgraduate research students. The conference is held annually, and ReSCon plays a key role in contributing to research and innovations within the School