Interim research assessment 2003-2005 - Computer Science

This report primarily serves as a source of information for the 2007 Interim Research Assessment Committee for Computer Science at the three technical universities in the Netherlands. The report also provides information for others interested in our research activities

An Approach to Automatically Distribute and Access Knowledge within Networked Embedded Systems in Factory Automation

This thesis presents a novel approach for automatically distribute and access knowledge within factory automation systems built by networked embedded systems. Developments on information, communication and computational technologies are making possible the distribution of tasks within different control resources, resources which are networked and working towards a common objective optimizing desired parameters. A fundamental task for introducing autonomy to these systems, is the option for represent knowledge, distributed within the automation network and to ensure its access by providing access mechanisms. This research work focuses on the processes for automatically distribute and access the knowledge.Recently, the industrial world has embraced service-oriented as architectural (SOA) patterns for relaxing the software integration costs of factory automation systems. This pattern defines a services provider offering a particular functionality, and service requesters which are entities looking for getting their needs satisfied. Currently, there are a few technologies allowing to implement a SOA solution, among those, Web Technologies are gaining special attention for their solid presence in other application fields. Providers and services using Web technologies for expressing their needs and skills are called Web Services. One of the main advantage of services is the no need for the service requester to know how the service provider is accomplishing the functionality or where the execution of the service is taking place. This benefit is recently stressed by the irruption of Cloud Computing, allowing the execution of certain process by the cloud resources.The caption of human knowledge and the representation of that knowledge in a machine interpretable manner has been an interesting research topic for the last decades. A well stablished mechanism for the representation of knowledge is the utilization of Ontologies. This mechanism allows machines to access that knowledge and use reasoning engines in order to create reasoning machines. The presence of a knowledge base allows as clearly the better identification of the web services, which is achievable by adding semantic notations to the service descriptors. The resulting services are called semantic web services.With the latest advances on computational resources, system can be built by a large number of constrained devices, yet easily connected, building a network of computational nodes, nodes that will be dedicated to execute control and communication tasks for the systems. These tasks are commanded by high level commanding systems, such as Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) modules. The aforementioned technologies allow a vertical approach for communicating commanding options from MES and ERP directly to the control nodes. This scenario allows to break down monolithic MES systems into small distributed functionalities, if these functionalities use Web standards for interacting and a knowledge base as main input for information, then we are arriving to the concept of Open KnowledgeDriven MES Systems (OKD-MES).The automatic distribution of the knowledge base in an OKD-MES mechanism and the accomplishment of the reasoning process in a distributed manner are the main objectives for this research. Thus, this research work describes the decentralization and management of knowledge descriptions which are currently handled by the Representation Layer (RPL) of the OKD-MES framework. This is achieved within the encapsulation of ontology modules which may be integrated by a distributed reasoning process on incoming requests. Furthermore, this dissertation presents the concept, principles and architecture for implementing Private Local Automation Clouds (PLACs), built by CPS.The thesis is an article thesis and is composed by 9 original and referred articles and supported by 7 other articles presented by the author

Modeling and exploitation of the traces of interactions in the collaborative working environment

Les sciences humaines et le progrès social ne peuvent pas se poursuivre sans collaboration. Avec le développement rapide des technologies de l'information et la popularité des appareils intelligents, le travail collaboratif est beaucoup plus simple et plus fréquents que jamais. Les gens peuvent travailler ensemble sans tenir compte de leur emplacement/ location géographique ou de la limitation de temps. Les environnements de travail de collaboration basés sur le Web sont conçus et consacrés à supporter/soutenir le travail individuel et le travail en groupe dans divers domaines: la recherche, les affaires, l'éducation, etc. N'importe quelle activité dans un système d'information produit un ensemble de traces. Dans un contexte de travail collaboratif, de telles traces peuvent être très volumineuses et hétérogènes. Pour un Environnement de Travail Collaboratif (ETC) typique Basé sur le Web, les traces sont principalement produites par des activités collaboratives ou des interactions collaboratives et peuvent être enregistrées. Les traces modélisées ne représentent pas seulement la connaissance, mais aussi l'expérience acquise par les acteurs via leurs interactions mutuelles ou les interactions qu'ils ont avec le système. Avec la complexité croissante de la structure de groupe et les besoins fréquents de collaboration, les interactions existantes deviennent de plus en plus difficiles à saisir et à analyser. Or, pour leurs travaux futurs, les gens ont souvent besoin de récupérer des informations issues de leurs activités de collaboration précédentes. Cette thèse se concentre sur la définition, la modélisation et l'exploitation des différentes traces dans le contexte d'Environnement de Travail Collaboratif et en particulier aux Traces Collaboratives dans l'espace de travail partagé de groupe (ou l'espace de travail collaboratif). Un modèle de traces de collaboration qui peuvent efficacement enrichir l'expérience du groupe et aider à la collaboration de groupe est proposé et détaillé. Nous présentons ensuite et définissons un type de filtre complexe comme un moyen possible d'exploiter ces traces. Plusieurs scénarios de base d'exploitation des traces collaboratives sont présentés. Pour chacun d'entre eux, nous présentons leurs effets et les avantages procurés par ces effets dans l'environnement de travail collaboratif. En effet, un cadre de l'exploitation des traces général est introduit et nous expliquons mis en œuvre dans un ETC. Trois approches collaboratives générant des traces sont discutées à l'aide d'exemples: l'Analyse SWOT, l'intégration de modèle de maturité de la capacité (CMMI) et le Système de Recommandation de Groupe. Une expérimentation de ce modèle a été réalisée dans le cadre de la plate-forme collaborative E-MEMORAe2.0. Cette expérience montre que notre modèle de trace collaborative et le cadre d'exploitation proposé pour l'environnement de travail collaboratif peuvent faciliter à la fois le travail personnel et de groupe. Notre approche peut être appliquée comme un moyen générique pour traiter différents sujets et problèmes, qu'il s'agisse de collaboration ou de l'exploitation des traces laissées dans un ECT.Human science and social progress cannot continue without collaboration. With the rapid development of information technologies and the popularity of smart devices, collaborative work is much simpler and more common than ever. People can work together irrespective of their geographical location or time limitation. In recently years, Web-based Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) are designed and devoted to support both individual and group work to a greater extent in various areas: research, business, learning and etc. Any activity in an information system produces a set of traces. In a collaborative working context, such traces may be very voluminous and heterogeneous. For a typical Webbased Collaborative Working Environment, traces are mainly produced by collaborative activities or interactions and can be recorded. The modeled traces not only represent knowledge but also experience concerning the interactive actions among the actors or between actors and the system. With the increasing complexity of group structure and frequent collaboration needs, the existing interactions become more difficult to grasp and to analyze. And for the future work, people often need to retrieve more information from their previous collaborative activities. This thesis focuses on defining, modeling and exploiting the various traces in the context of CWE, in particular, Collaborative Traces (CTs) in the group shared/collaborativeworkspace. A model of collaborative traces that can efficiently enrich group experience and assist group collaboration is proposed and detailed. In addition, we introduce and define a type of complex filter as a possible means to exploit the traces. Several basic scenarios of collaborative traces exploitation are presented describing their effects and advantages in CWE. Furthermore, a general traces exploitation framework is introduced and implemented in CWE. Three possible traces based collaborative approaches are discussed with comprehensive examples: SWOT Analysis, Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Group Recommendation System. As a practical experience we tested our model in the context of the E-MEMORAe2.0 collaborative platform. Practical cases show that our proposed CT model and the exploitation framework for CWE can facilitate both personal and group work. This approach can be applied as a generic way for addressing different types of collaboration and trace issues/problems in CWE.COMPIEGNE-BU (601592101) / SudocSudocFranceF

Analysis of the backpack loading efects on the human gait

Gait is a simple activity of daily life and one of the main abilities of the human being. Often during leisure, labour and sports activities, loads are carried over (e.g. backpack) during gait. These circumstantial loads can generate instability and increase biomechanicalstress over the human tissues and systems, especially on the locomotor, balance and postural regulation systems. According to Wearing (2006), subjects that carry a transitory or intermittent load will be able to find relatively efficient solutions to compensate its effects.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio