A generic operational simulation for early design civil unmanned aerial vehicles

Contemporary aerospace programmes often suffer from large cost overruns, delivery delays and inferior product quality. This is caused in part by poor predictive quality of the early design phase processes with regards to the operational environment of a product. This paper develops the idea of a generic operational simulation that can help designers to rigorously analyse and test their early product concepts. The simulation focusses on civil Unmanned Air Vehicle products and missions to keep the scope of work tractable. The research agenda is introduced along with ideas, initial results and future work. Designers specify details about their product, its environment and anticipated operational procedures. The simulation returns information that can help to estimate the value of the product using the value-driven design approach. Information will include recurring and non-recurring mission cost items. The research aim is to show that an operational simulation can improve early design concepts, thereby reducing delays and cost overruns. Moreover, a trade-off between mission fidelity and model generality is sought along with a generic ontology of civil Unmanned Air Vehicle missions and guidelines about capturing operational informatio

Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments

Intelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement

A Simulation Model Articulation of the REA Ontology

This paper demonstrates how the REA enterprise ontology can be used to construct simulation models for business processes, value chains and collaboration spaces in supply chains. These models support various high-level and operational management simulation applications, e.g. the analysis of enterprise sustainability and day-to-day planning. First, the basic constructs of the REA ontology and the ExSpect modelling language for simulation are introduced. Second, collaboration space, value chain and business process models and their conceptual dependencies are shown, using the ExSpect language. Third, an exhibit demonstrates the use of value chain models in predicting the financial performance of an enterprise

Semantic web services for simulation component reuse and interoperability: An ontology approach

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry primarily due to economic factors associated with developing proprietary software platforms. Regardless of their widespread use, CSPs have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. The limited reuse and interoperability of CSPs are affected by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of software components and web services. The current representations of Web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging Semantic Web. The authors present new research that partially alleviates the problem of limited semantic reuse and interoperability of simulation components in CSPs. Semantic models, in the form of ontologies, utilized by the authors’ Web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through a simulation component ontology that is used to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (i.e. including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The research presented here is based on the development of an ontology, connector software, and a Web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, by adopting a less intrusive interface between participants Although specific to CSPs this work has wider implications for the simulation community. The reason being that the community as a whole stands to benefit through from an increased awareness of the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering (for example, ontology-supported component discovery and reuse, and service-oriented computing), and it is expected that this will eventually lead to the development of a unique Software Engineering-inspired methodology to build simulations in future

A Web Services Component Discovery and Deployment Architecture for Simulation Model Reuse

CSPs are widely used in industry, although have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. Reuse across organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organization use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontology to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development carried out within CSPI-PDG and Fluidity Group at Brunel University, of an ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organization simulation, adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community

Semantic web service architecture for simulation model reuse

COTS simulation packages (CSPs) have proved popular in an industrial setting with a number of software vendors. In contrast, options for re-using existing models seem more limited. Re-use of simulation component models by collaborating organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues however that restrict the inter-organization use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontology to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development of ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture in order to understand how such ontology are created, maintained and subsequently used for simulation model reuse. The ontology is extracted from health service simulation - comprising hospitals and the National Blood Service. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter- organization simulation, uncovering domain semantics and adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community

Ontology-based patterns for the integration of business processes and enterprise application architectures

Increasingly, enterprises are using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an approach to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). SOA has the potential to bridge the gap between business and technology and to improve the reuse of existing applications and the interoperability with new ones. In addition to service architecture descriptions, architecture abstractions like patterns and styles capture design knowledge and allow the reuse of successfully applied designs, thus improving the quality of software. Knowledge gained from integration projects can be captured to build a repository of semantically enriched, experience-based solutions. Business patterns identify the interaction and structure between users, business processes, and data. Specific integration and composition patterns at a more technical level address enterprise application integration and capture reliable architecture solutions. We use an ontology-based approach to capture architecture and process patterns. Ontology techniques for pattern definition, extension and composition are developed and their applicability in business process-driven application integration is demonstrated

The role of linked data and the semantic web in building operation

Effective Decision Support Systems (DSS) for building service managers require adequate performance data from many building data silos in order to deliver a complete view of building performance. Current performance analysis techniques tend to focus on a limited number of data sources, such as BMS measured data (temperature, humidity, C02), excluding a wealth of other data sources increasingly available in the modern building, including weather data, occupant feedback, mobile sensors & feedback systems, schedule information, equipment usage information. This paper investigates the potential for using Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies to improve interoperability across AEC domains, overcoming many of the roadblocks hindering information transfer currently

The P3 platform: an approach and software system for developing diagrammatic model-based methods in design research

Many issues in design and design management have been explored by building models which capture the relationships between different aspects of the problem at hand. These models require computer support to construct and analyse. However, appropriate modelling tools can be time-consuming to develop in a research environment. Reflecting upon five design research projects, this paper proposes that such projects can be facilitated by recognising the iterative and tightly-coupled nature of research and tool development, and by attempting to minimise the effort of solution prototyping within this process. Our approach is enabled by a software platform which can be rapidly configured to implement many conceivable modelling approaches. This configurability is complemented by an emerging library of modelling and analysis approaches tailored to explore design process systems. The platform-based approach enables any mix of modelling concepts to be easily created. We propose it could thus help researchers to explore a wide range of questions without being constrained to existing conventions for modelling – or for model integration