Advanced Techniques for Assets Maintenance Management

16th IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing INCOM 2018 Bergamo, Italy, 11–13 June 2018. Edited by Marco Macchi, László Monostori, Roberto PintoThe aim of this paper is to remark the importance of new and advanced techniques supporting decision making in different business processes for maintenance and assets management, as well as the basic need of adopting a certain management framework with a clear processes map and the corresponding IT supporting systems. Framework processes and systems will be the key fundamental enablers for success and for continuous improvement. The suggested framework will help to define and improve business policies and work procedures for the assets operation and maintenance along their life cycle. The following sections present some achievements on this focus, proposing finally possible future lines for a research agenda within this field of assets management

Does OO sync with the way we think?

Given that corrective-maintenance costs already dominate the software life cycle and look set to increase significantly, reliability in the form of reducing such costs should be the most important software improvement goal. Yet the results are not promising when we review recent corrective-maintenance data for big systems in general and for OO in particular-possibly because of mismatches between the OO paradigm and how we think

Experimental comparison between proportional and PWM-solenoid valves controlled servopneumatic positioning systems

The performance of the Dynamical Adaptive Backstepping-Sliding Mode Control (DAB-SMC) scheme for positioning of a pneumatic cylinder regulated by two types of PWM-solenoid valves is experimentally investigated. The goal is to study the compromise in controller’s performance as the system moves from using a proportional valve to employing the low-cost PWM-solenoid valves. Sinusoidal and multiple-step inputs are used as the reference position trajectories. Experimental results show that the DAB-SMC scheme works best with the proportional valve. The performance, however, deteriorates by more than twofold, once the system utilizes PWM- solenoid valves of 3/2-way or 2/2-way configurations. From this study, tradeoff between performances of different types of valves applied on a DAB-SMC scheme-controlled servo positioning system is successfully documented. This information helps to configure appropriate servopneumatic system for positioning applications

Integrating automated support for a software management cycle into the TAME system

Software managers are interested in the quantitative management of software quality, cost and progress. An integrated software management methodology, which can be applied throughout the software life cycle for any number purposes, is required. The TAME (Tailoring A Measurement Environment) methodology is based on the improvement paradigm and the goal/question/metric (GQM) paradigm. This methodology helps generate a software engineering process and measurement environment based on the project characteristics. The SQMAR (software quality measurement and assurance technology) is a software quality metric system and methodology applied to the development processes. It is based on the feed forward control principle. Quality target setting is carried out before the plan-do-check-action activities are performed. These methodologies are integrated to realize goal oriented measurement, process control and visual management. A metric setting procedure based on the GQM paradigm, a management system called the software management cycle (SMC), and its application to a case study based on NASA/SEL data are discussed. The expected effects of SMC are quality improvement, managerial cost reduction, accumulation and reuse of experience, and a highly visual management reporting system

Continuous Improvement Through Knowledge-Guided Analysis in Experience Feedback

Continuous improvement in industrial processes is increasingly a key element of competitiveness for industrial systems. The management of experience feedback in this framework is designed to build, analyze and facilitate the knowledge sharing among problem solving practitioners of an organization in order to improve processes and products achievement. During Problem Solving Processes, the intellectual investment of experts is often considerable and the opportunities for expert knowledge exploitation are numerous: decision making, problem solving under uncertainty, and expert configuration. In this paper, our contribution relates to the structuring of a cognitive experience feedback framework, which allows a flexible exploitation of expert knowledge during Problem Solving Processes and a reuse such collected experience. To that purpose, the proposed approach uses the general principles of root cause analysis for identifying the root causes of problems or events, the conceptual graphs formalism for the semantic conceptualization of the domain vocabulary and the Transferable Belief Model for the fusion of information from different sources. The underlying formal reasoning mechanisms (logic-based semantics) in conceptual graphs enable intelligent information retrieval for the effective exploitation of lessons learned from past projects. An example will illustrate the application of the proposed approach of experience feedback processes formalization in the transport industry sector

Modeling and analysis of multi-hop routing in wireless sensor networks by using matlab

Due to the limited energy and the non-equivalence of wireless sensor network nodes, it is imperative to reduce and rationally use the energy consumption of the nodes to prolong the network lifetime. In this project, a random multi-hop routing approach for wireless sensor networks was modeled and simulated. In order to minimize energy consumption and improve the network lifetime, the simulated protocol depends on the selection of specific sensor nodes to be cluster header for the wireless sensor nodes which receive the packets from other normal sensor nodes randomly and then send it to a base station or Sink. This project classifies the network into two sizes, large size and small size and does compression between both networks when applying this protocol in order to assist the improvement of these networks. Simulation results showed improvement when the network size is changed from a large size to a small size. The lifetime is improved by about 76% that means the number of the round is increased from 80 -333, as well as the end to end delay, is improved around 30% from 180 ns – 280 ns to 100 ns – 170 ns. While for throughput, it is improved 85% from 5x106 bits to 2.5x107 bits. The packet loss also showed the improvement from 12000 to 2500 which means the improvement is about 20.83%. Lastly, the residual energy is improved by 73% approximately 3200 s (1200 s ~ 4400)

Analysis reuse exploiting taxonomical information and belief assignment in industrial problem solving

To take into account the experience feedback on solving complex problems in business is deemed as a way to improve the quality of products and processes. Only a few academic works, however, are concerned with the representation and the instrumentation of experience feedback systems. We propose, in this paper, a model of experiences and mechanisms to use these experiences. More specifically, we wish to encourage the reuse of already performed expert analysis to propose a priori analysis in the solving of a new problem. The proposal is based on a representation in the context of the experience of using a conceptual marker and an explicit representation of the analysis incorporating expert opinions and the fusion of these opinions. The experience feedback models and inference mechanisms are integrated in a commercial support tool for problem solving methodologies. The results obtained to this point have already led to the definition of the role of ‘‘Rex Manager’’ with principles of sustainable management for continuous improvement of industrial processes in companies