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

AI and OR in management of operations: history and trends

The last decade has seen a considerable growth in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for operations management with the aim of finding solutions to problems that are increasing in complexity and scale. This paper begins by setting the context for the survey through a historical perspective of OR and AI. An extensive survey of applications of AI techniques for operations management, covering a total of over 1200 papers published from 1995 to 2004 is then presented. The survey utilizes Elsevier's ScienceDirect database as a source. Hence, the survey may not cover all the relevant journals but includes a sufficiently wide range of publications to make it representative of the research in the field. The papers are categorized into four areas of operations management: (a) design, (b) scheduling, (c) process planning and control and (d) quality, maintenance and fault diagnosis. Each of the four areas is categorized in terms of the AI techniques used: genetic algorithms, case-based reasoning, knowledge-based systems, fuzzy logic and hybrid techniques. The trends over the last decade are identified, discussed with respect to expected trends and directions for future work suggested

Intelligent management experience on efficient electric power system

Electric power system is one of the most critical and strategic infrastructures of industrial societies. Nowadays, it is necessary the modernization and automation of the electric power grid to increase energy efficiency, reduce emissions, and transit to renewable energy. Power utilities face the challenge of using information and communication networks more effectively to manage the demand, generation, transmission, and distribution of their commodity services. Communication network constitutes the core of the electric system automation applications, the design of a cost-effective, and reliable network architecture is crucial. To resolve this difficulty in this work we study the integration of advanced artificial intelligence technology into existing network management system. This work focuses on an intelligent framework and a language for formalizing knowledge management descriptions and combining them with existing OSI management model. We have normalized the knowledge management base necessary to manage the current resources in the telecommunication networks. Intelligent agents learn the normal behaviour of each measurement variable and combine the intelligent knowledge for the management of the network resources. We present an analysis of corporate network management requirements and technologies, together with our implementation experience with the development of an integrated management system for a company network

A knowledge graph-supported information fusion approach for multi-faceted conceptual modelling

It has become progressively more evident that a single data source is unable to comprehensively capture the variability of a multi-faceted concept, such as product design, driving behaviour or human trust, which has diverse semantic orientations. Therefore, multi-faceted conceptual modelling is often conducted based on multi-sourced data covering indispensable aspects, and information fusion is frequently applied to cope with the high dimensionality and data heterogeneity. The consideration of intra-facets relationships is also indispensable. In this context, a knowledge graph (KG), which can aggregate the relationships of multiple aspects by semantic associations, was exploited to facilitate the multi-faceted conceptual modelling based on heterogeneous and semantic-rich data. Firstly, rules of fault mechanism are extracted from the existing domain knowledge repository, and node attributes are extracted from multi-sourced data. Through abstraction and tokenisation of existing knowledge repository and concept-centric data, rules of fault mechanism were symbolised and integrated with the node attributes, which served as the entities for the concept-centric knowledge graph (CKG). Subsequently, the transformation of process data to a stack of temporal graphs was conducted under the CKG backbone. Lastly, the graph convolutional network (GCN) model was applied to extract temporal and attribute correlation features from the graphs, and a temporal convolution network (TCN) was built for conceptual modelling using these features. The effectiveness of the proposed approach and the close synergy between the KG-supported approach and multi-faceted conceptual modelling is demonstrated and substantiated in a case study using real-world data

Managing smart cities with deepint.net

In this keynote, the evolution of intelligent computer systems will be examined. The need for human capital will be emphasised, as well as the need to follow one’s “gut instinct” in problem-solving. We will look at the benefits of combining information and knowledge to solve complex problems and will examine how knowledge engineering facilitates the integration of different algorithms. Furthermore, we will analyse the importance of complementary technologies such as IoT and Blockchain in the development of intelligent systems. It will be shown how tools like "Deep Intelligence" make it possible to create computer systems efficiently and effectively. "Smart" infrastructures need to incorporate all added-value resources so they can offer useful services to the society, while reducing costs, ensuring reliability and improving the quality of life of the citizens. The combination of AI with IoT and with blockchain offers a world of possibilities and opportunities

Intelligent Models in Complex Problem Solving

Artificial Intelligence revived in the last decade. The need for progress, the growing processing capacity and the low cost of the Cloud have facilitated the development of new, powerful algorithms. The efficiency of these algorithms in Big Data processing, Deep Learning and Convolutional Networks is transforming the way we work and is opening new horizons

A systematic literature review on the use of artificial intelligence in energy self-management in smart buildings

Buildings are one of the main consumers of energy in cities, which is why a lot of research has been generated around this problem. Especially, the buildings energy management systems must improve in the next years. Artificial intelligence techniques are playing and will play a fundamental role in these improvements. This work presents a systematic review of the literature on researches that have been done in recent years to improve energy management systems for smart building using artificial intelligence techniques. An originality of the work is that they are grouped according to the concept of "Autonomous Cycles of Data Analysis Tasks", which defines that an autonomous management system requires specialized tasks, such as monitoring, analysis, and decision-making tasks for reaching objectives in the environment, like improve the energy efficiency. This organization of the work allows us to establish not only the positioning of the researches, but also, the visualization of the current challenges and opportunities in each domain. We have identified that many types of researches are in the domain of decision-making (a large majority on optimization and control tasks), and defined potential projects related to the development of autonomous cycles of data analysis tasks, feature engineering, or multi-agent systems, among others.European Commissio