Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) Method and Its Applications in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud

The integration of cyber-physical systems and cloud manufacturing has the potential to revolutionize existing manufacturing systems by enabling better accessibility, agility, and efficiency. To achieve this, it is necessary to establish a communication method of manufacturing services over the Internet to access and manage physical machines from cloud applications. Most of the existing industrial automation protocols utilize Ethernet based Local Area Network (LAN) and are not designed specifically for Internet enabled data transmission. Recently MTConnect has been gaining popularity as a standard for monitoring status of machine tools through RESTful web services and an XML based messaging structure, but it is only designed for data collection and interpretation and lacks remote operation capability. This dissertation presents the design, development, optimization, and applications of a service-oriented Internet-scale communication method named Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) for exchanging manufacturing services in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) to enable manufacturing with heterogeneous physically connected machine tools from geographically distributed locations over the Internet. MTComm uses an agent-adapter based architecture and a semantic ontology to provide both remote monitoring and operation capabilities through RESTful services and XML messages. MTComm was successfully used to develop and implement multi-purpose applications in in a CPMC including remote and collaborative manufacturing, active testing-based and edge-based fault diagnosis and maintenance of machine tools, cross-domain interoperability between Internet-of-things (IoT) devices and supply chain robots etc. To improve MTComm’s overall performance, efficiency, and acceptability in cyber manufacturing, the concept of MTComm’s edge-based middleware was introduced and three optimization strategies for data catching, transmission, and operation execution were developed and adopted at the edge. Finally, a hardware prototype of the middleware was implemented on a System-On-Chip based FPGA device to reduce computational and transmission latency. At every stage of its development, MTComm’s performance and feasibility were evaluated with experiments in a CPMC testbed with three different types of manufacturing machine tools. Experimental results demonstrated MTComm’s excellent feasibility for scalable cyber-physical manufacturing and superior performance over other existing approaches

Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) Method and Its Applications in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud

The integration of cyber-physical systems and cloud manufacturing has the potential to revolutionize existing manufacturing systems by enabling better accessibility, agility, and efficiency. To achieve this, it is necessary to establish a communication method of manufacturing services over the Internet to access and manage physical machines from cloud applications. Most of the existing industrial automation protocols utilize Ethernet based Local Area Network (LAN) and are not designed specifically for Internet enabled data transmission. Recently MTConnect has been gaining popularity as a standard for monitoring status of machine tools through RESTful web services and an XML based messaging structure, but it is only designed for data collection and interpretation and lacks remote operation capability. This dissertation presents the design, development, optimization, and applications of a service-oriented Internet-scale communication method named Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) for exchanging manufacturing services in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) to enable manufacturing with heterogeneous physically connected machine tools from geographically distributed locations over the Internet. MTComm uses an agent-adapter based architecture and a semantic ontology to provide both remote monitoring and operation capabilities through RESTful services and XML messages. MTComm was successfully used to develop and implement multi-purpose applications in in a CPMC including remote and collaborative manufacturing, active testing-based and edge-based fault diagnosis and maintenance of machine tools, cross-domain interoperability between Internet-of-things (IoT) devices and supply chain robots etc. To improve MTComm’s overall performance, efficiency, and acceptability in cyber manufacturing, the concept of MTComm’s edge-based middleware was introduced and three optimization strategies for data catching, transmission, and operation execution were developed and adopted at the edge. Finally, a hardware prototype of the middleware was implemented on a System-On-Chip based FPGA device to reduce computational and transmission latency. At every stage of its development, MTComm’s performance and feasibility were evaluated with experiments in a CPMC testbed with three different types of manufacturing machine tools. Experimental results demonstrated MTComm’s excellent feasibility for scalable cyber-physical manufacturing and superior performance over other existing approaches

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED11):Book of Abstracts

The ICED series of conferences is the Design Society's "flagship" event. ICED11 took place on August 15-18, 2011, at the campus of the Danish Technical University in Lyngby/Copenhagen, Denmark. The Proceedings of the conference are published in 10 individual volumes, arranged according to topics. All volumes of the Proceedings may be purchased individually through Amazon and other on-line booksellers. For members of the Design Society, all papers are available on this website. The Programme and Abstract Book is publically available for download

Un interpréteur extensible pour le prototypage des langages d'aspects

The value of using different (possibly domain-specific) aspect languages to deal with a variety of crosscutting concerns in the development of complex software systems is well recognized. One should be able to use several of these languages together in a single program. However, on the one hand, developing a new Domain-Specific Aspect Language (DSAL) in order to capture all common programming patterns of the domain takes a lot of time, and on the other hand, the designer of a new language should manage the interactions with the other languages when they are used together. In this thesis, we introduce support for rapid prototyping and composing aspect languages based on interpreters. We start from a base interpreter of a subset of Java and we analyze and present a solution for its modular extension to support AOP based on a common semantics aspect base defined once and for all. The extension, called the aspect interpreter, implements a common aspect mechanism and leaves holes to be defined when developing concrete languages. The power of this approach is that the aspect languages are directly implemented from their operational semantics. This is illustrated by implementing a lightweight version of AspectJ. To apply the same approach and the same architecture to full Java without changing its interpreter (JVM), we reuse AspectJ to perform a first step of static weaving, which we complement by a second step of dynamic weaving, implemented through a thin interpretation layer. This can be seen as an interesting example of reconciling interpreters and compilers. We validate our approach by describing prototypes for AspectJ, EAOP, COOL and a couple of other DSALs and demonstrating the openness of our AspectJ implementation with two extensions, one dealing with dynamic scheduling of aspects and another with alternative pointcut semantics. Different aspect languages implemented with our framework can be easily composed. Moreover, we provide support for customizing this composition.L'intérêt de l'utilisation de différents langages d'aspects pour faire face à une variété de préoccupations transverses dans le développement de systèmes logiciels complexes est reconnu. Il faudrait être capable d'utiliser plusieurs de ces langages dans un seul logiciel donné. Cependant, d'une part la phase de développement d'un nouveau langage dédié capturant tous les patrons de programmation du domaine prend beaucoup de temps et, d'autre part, le concepteur doit gérer les interactions avec les autres langages quand ils sont utilisés simultanément. Dans cette thèse, nous introduisons un support pour le prototypage rapide et la composition des langages d'aspects, basé sur des interpréteurs. Nous partons d'un interpréteur d'un sous-ensemble de Java en étudiant et en définissant son extension modulaire afin de supporter la programmation par aspects en se basant sur une sémantique d'aspects partagée. Dans l'interpréteur d'aspects, nous avons implémenté des mécanismes communs aux langages d'aspects en laissant des trous à définir pour implémenter des langages d'aspects concrets. La puissance de cette approche est de permettre d'implémenter directement les langages à partir de leur sémantique. L'approche est validée par l'implémentation d'une version légère d'AspectJ. Pour appliquer la même approche et la même architecture à Java sans modifier son interpréteur (JVM), nous réutilisons AspectJ pour effectuer une première étape de tissage statique, qui est complétée par une deuxième étape de tissage dynamique, implémentée par une mince couche d'interprétation. C'est un exemple montrant l'intérêt qu'il peut y avoir à concilier interprétation et compilation. Des prototypes pour AspectJ, EAOP, COOL et des langages dédiés simples, valident notre approche. Nous montrons le caractère ouvert de notre implémentation d'AspectJ en décrivant deux extensions: la première permet l'ordonnancement dynamique des aspects, la deuxième propose des sémantiques alternatives pour les points de coupe. Les langages d'aspects implémentés avec notre approche peuvent être facilement composés. En outre, cette composition peut être personnalisée

Enabling Domain-Specific Rule-Based Automation With Semantic Stream Technology

The aim of this study is to consolidate semantics, streaming and user-centered rulebased home automation with the goal of thereby enabling more powerful and more user-friendly home automation systems. To reach this goal this thesis incorporates the rather new field of semantic streaming into home automation taking into account the users\u27 needs and perspective. This thesis contributes a structured literature review on rule-based home automation use cases including their classification by new criteria. As part of the analysis a participatory design study was conducted yielding that users prefer visual languages in the domain of home automation. Furthermore a new pattern in semantic streaming was discovered called dynamic sensor selection. As main contribution of this thesis a home automation system based on semantic streaming called ERAS (Event and Rule Automation System) was developed using two hierarchically-aligned visual languages called Event Language (EL) and Rule Language (RL). ERAS was completely implemented also containing an editor for each of the two visual languages. As existing semantic streaming engines and benchmarks for semantic streaming engines did proof not suitable a custom semantic streaming engine called ECQELS (Extended Continuous Query Evaluation over Linked Stream) was designed and implemented as well as a corresponding benchmark introducing the average response time as relevant feature for comparison of semantic streaming engines. The system developed in this thesis was evaluated by performing the implemented benchmark on ECQELS comparing it to CQELS, probably the most powerful existing semantic streaming engine, which yielded that ECQELS can compete with CQELS for rather simple queries. When executing multiple queries simultaneously ECQELS event outperforms CQELS. Furthermore a user acceptance study was conducted as part of the evaluation comparing the visual language EL and the textual language ECQELS regarding usability. As outcome of the study EL was slightly preferred by the users in most cases but differences could not be proven significantly. On the basis of the results of this research, it can be concluded that the use of semantic streaming technologies in the domain of home automation has the potential to provide great benefits for developing more powerful and nevertheless more userfriendly home automation systems

Applicability of HCI Techniques to Systems Interface Design

PhDThis thesis seeks to identify reasons why HCI techniques are unsuitable for application in real world design projects. User-oriented systems design and evaluation require that many considerations such as the psychology of users, the applications and target tasks be born in mind simultaneously. A selection of influential HCI design and evaluative techniques from HCI research literature are reviewed and characterised in terms of their analytic scope. Two studies of systems designers' approaches to user-oriented design and evaluation were carried out in order to gain a clearer picture of the design process as it occurs in applied and commercial projects. It was found that designers frequently lack adequate information about users, carrying Out, at best, informal user-evaluations of prototypes. Most notably HCI design and evaluative techniques, of the type common in the literature, are not being used in applied and commercial design practice. They seem to be complex, often limited in scope, and possessed of inadequate or unrepresentative views of the design process within which they might be applied. It was noted that design practice is highly varied with only a small number of common goal directed classes of activity being identified. These together with observed user-oriented information sources and design constraints provide a useful schema for viewing applied and commercial design practice. A further study of HCI specialists' practice in commercial environments was undertaken, in order to identify particular user-oriented design approaches and HCI techniques suitable for application in practice. The specialists were able to describe desirable, and undesirable properties of the techniques they used which made it possible to identify a list of specific desirable features for HCI techniques. A framework for assessing applicability of HCI techniques was developed from the findings of the thesis. This is demonstrated using an example project from the design studies and may prove valuable in supporting design, evaluation, critiquing and selection of HCI techniques

Cellulo: Tangible Haptic Swarm Robots for Learning

Robots are steadily becoming one of the significant 21st century learning technologies that aim to improve education within both formal and informal environments. Such robots, called Robots for Learning, have so far been utilized as constructionist tools or social agents that aided learning from distinct perspectives. This thesis presents a novel approach to Robots for Learning that aims to explore new added values by means of investigating uses for robots in educational scenarios beyond those that are commonly tackled: We develop a platform from scratch to be "as versatile as pen and paper", namely as composed of easy to use objects that feel like they belong in the learning ecosystem while being seamlessly usable across many activities that help teach a variety of subjects. Following this analogy, we design our platform as many low-cost, palm-sized tangible robots that operate on printed paper sheets, controlled by readily available mobile computers such as smartphones or tablets. From the learners' perspective, our robots are thus physical and manipulable points of hands-on interaction with learning activities where they play the role of both abstract and concrete objects that are otherwise not easily represented. We realize our novel platform in four incremental phases, each of which consists of a development stage and multiple subsequent validation stages. First, we develop accurately positioned tangibles, characterize their localization performance and test the learners' interaction with our tangibles in a playful activity. Second, we integrate mobility into our tangibles and make them full-blown robots, characterize their locomotion performance and test the emerging notion of moving vs. being moved in a learning activity. Third, we enable haptic feedback capability on our robots, measure their range of usability and test them within a complete lesson that highlights this newly developed affordance. Fourth, we develop the means of building swarms with our haptic-enabled tangible robots and test the final form of our platform in a lesson co-designed with a teacher. Our effort thus contains the participation of more than 370 child learners over the span of these phases, which leads to the initial insights into this novel Robots for Learning avenue. Besides its main contributions to education, this thesis further contributes to a range of research fields related to our technological developments, such as positioning systems, robotic mechanism design, haptic interfaces and swarm robotics