Application of Reverse Engineering and Rapid Prototyping to Casting

The automotive industry has an increasing need for the re manufacturing of spare parts through reverse engineering. In this thesis we will review the techniques used in Fused Deposition Modeling system for the reverse engineering of vintage automotive parts. The objective of the project is to be able to generate part-to-CAD and CAD-to-part reconstruction of the original part for future usage. These newly created 3D models will be added to the 3D Part Database. The integration of reverse engineering and rapid prototyping is being used for getting product to the market quickly by resolving a long-standing conflict between design and manufacturing. Rapid prototyping (RP) technology has undoubtedly had a major impact on the manufacturing industry throughout the world. RP technology has developed as a result of the requirements of manufacturing industry. There are a number of application areas where RP has been used to good effect and one of these is Metal Casting. This thesis describes work carried out to investigate potential applications for metal casting, as well as an attempt to explore the limits of the technology. It will go on to discuss how the technology may be developed to better serve the requirements of the manufacturing industr

Logic-Based Specification Languages for Intelligent Software Agents

The research field of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) aims to find abstractions, languages, methodologies and toolkits for modeling, verifying, validating and prototyping complex applications conceptualized as Multiagent Systems (MASs). A very lively research sub-field studies how formal methods can be used for AOSE. This paper presents a detailed survey of six logic-based executable agent specification languages that have been chosen for their potential to be integrated in our ARPEGGIO project, an open framework for specifying and prototyping a MAS. The six languages are ConGoLog, Agent-0, the IMPACT agent programming language, DyLog, Concurrent METATEM and Ehhf. For each executable language, the logic foundations are described and an example of use is shown. A comparison of the six languages and a survey of similar approaches complete the paper, together with considerations of the advantages of using logic-based languages in MAS modeling and prototyping.Comment: 67 pages, 1 table, 1 figure. Accepted for publication by the Journal "Theory and Practice of Logic Programming", volume 4, Maurice Bruynooghe Editor-in-Chie

PCLIPS

CLIPS is an expert system, created specifically to allow rapid implementation of an expert system. CLIPS is written in C, and thus needs a very small amount of memory to run. Parallel CLIPS (PCLIPS) is an extension to CLIPS which is intended to be used in situations where a group of expert systems are expected to run simultaneously and occasionally communicate with each other on an integrated network. PCLIPS is a coarse-grained data distribution system. Its main goal is to take information in one knowledge base and distribute it to other knowledge bases so that all the executing expert systems are able to use that knowledge to solve their disparate problems

The pros and cons of using SDL for creation of distributed services

In a competitive market for the creation of complex distributed services, time to market, development cost, maintenance and flexibility are key issues. Optimizing the development process is very much a matter of optimizing the technologies used during service creation. This paper reports on the experience gained in the Service Creation projects SCREEN and TOSCA on use of the language SDL for efficient service creation

You can't always sketch what you want: Understanding Sensemaking in Visual Query Systems

Visual query systems (VQSs) empower users to interactively search for line charts with desired visual patterns, typically specified using intuitive sketch-based interfaces. Despite decades of past work on VQSs, these efforts have not translated to adoption in practice, possibly because VQSs are largely evaluated in unrealistic lab-based settings. To remedy this gap in adoption, we collaborated with experts from three diverse domains---astronomy, genetics, and material science---via a year-long user-centered design process to develop a VQS that supports their workflow and analytical needs, and evaluate how VQSs can be used in practice. Our study results reveal that ad-hoc sketch-only querying is not as commonly used as prior work suggests, since analysts are often unable to precisely express their patterns of interest. In addition, we characterize three essential sensemaking processes supported by our enhanced VQS. We discover that participants employ all three processes, but in different proportions, depending on the analytical needs in each domain. Our findings suggest that all three sensemaking processes must be integrated in order to make future VQSs useful for a wide range of analytical inquiries.Comment: Accepted for presentation at IEEE VAST 2019, to be held October 20-25 in Vancouver, Canada. Paper will also be published in a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) IEEE VIS (InfoVis/VAST/SciVis) 2019 ACM 2012 CCS - Human-centered computing, Visualization, Visualization design and evaluation method

A methodology for evaluating the aesthetic quality of 3D printed parts

Abstract Nowadays, 3D printing is recognized as one of the key technologies that enables the distributed manufacturing adoption. However, inexperienced people might perceive this technology as far from easy user-usability because of evident aesthetic defects on 3D printed parts. In this paper, an indicator-based methodology is proposed for the assessment and the ranking of the aesthetic capability of 3D printers by evaluating the ability of a 3D printer to reproduce a reference part without defects. The reference part includes several geometric features that characterize most of as-built aesthetic defects. In addition, a benchmarking analysis was carried out to show an example of the methodology applied to three different machines