A case of implementing RFID-based real-time shop-floor material management for household electrical appliance manufacturers

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies provide automatic and accurate object data capturing capability and enable real-time object visibility and traceability. Potential benefits have been widely reported for improving manufacturing shop-floor management. However, reports on how such potentials come true in real-life shop-floor daily operations are very limited. As a result, skeptics overwhelm enthusiasm. This paper contributes to the re-vitalization of RFID efforts in manufacturing industries by presenting a real-life case study of applying RFID for managing material distribution in a complex assembly shop-floor at a large air conditioner manufacturer. The case study discusses how technical, social and organizational issues have been addressed throughout the project within the company. It is hoped that insights and lessons gained be generalized for future efforts across household electrical appliance manufacturers that share similar shop-floor. © 2010 The Author(s).published_or_final_versionSpringer Open Choice, 21 Feb 201

Technology Directions for the 21st Century

New technologies will unleash the huge capacity of fiber-optic cable to meet growing demands for bandwidth. Companies will continue to replace private networks with public network bandwidth-on-demand. Although asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is the transmission technology favored by many, its penetration will be slower than anticipated. Hybrid networks - e.g., a mix of ATM, frame relay, and fast Ethernet - may predominate, both as interim and long-term solutions, based on factors such as availability, interoperability, and cost. Telecommunications equipment and services prices will decrease further due to increased supply and more competition. Explosive Internet growth will continue, requiring additional backbone transmission capacity and enhanced protocols, but it is not clear who will fund the upgrade. Within ten years, space-based constellations of satellites in Low Earth orbit (LEO) will serve mobile users employing small, low-power terminals. 'Little LEO's' will provide packet transmission services and geo-position determination. 'Big LEO's' will function as global cellular telephone networks, with some planning to offer video and interactive multimedia services. Geosynchronous satellites also are proposed for mobile voice grade links and high-bandwidth services. NASA may benefit from resulting cost reductions in components, space hardware, launch services, and telecommunications services

Taking advantage of distributed multicast video to deliver and manipulate television

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (p. 57-60).Protocols exist to scalably multicast data to any number of clients. Scalability problems exist because some systems unacceptably increase the load on the server as more clients are added. Scalability can be achieved by hierarchically partitioning the network and by handling error correction between clients. One application for network multicasting is the distribution of video in the same way that television is delivered, replacing the standard antenna or cable service with a digital network using IP. However, clients using multicast implementations, such as the Scalable Media Delivery System, are not equipped to handle display of video in real time. Flaws in the current multicast implementation are identified, and methods of optimization are explored and tested for effectiveness. These optimizations will allow video to be displayed in real time over a network and to appear to the end-user to act like a cable TV system. Accessing the video on clients is done with an innovative interface that allows the user to "carry" the video with him as he travels to different physical locations in the network.by Constantine Kleomenis Christakos.S.M

Development and application of synchronized wide-area power grid measurement

Phasor measurement units (PMUs) provide an innovative technology for real-time monitoring of the operational state of entire power systems and significantly improve power grid dynamic observability. This dissertation focuses on development and application of synchronized power grid measurements. The contributions of this dissertation are as followed:First, a novel method for successive approximation register analog to digital converter control in PMUs is developed to compensate for the sampling time error caused by the division remainder between the desirable sampling rate and the oscillator frequency. A variable sampling interval control method is presented by interlacing two integers under a proposed criterion. The frequency of the onboard oscillator is monitored in using the PPS from GPS.Second, the prevalence of GPS signal loss (GSL) on PMUs is first investigated using real PMU data. The correlation between GSL and time, spatial location, solar activity are explored via comprehensive statistical analysis. Furthermore, the impact of GSL on phasor measurement accuracy has been studied via experiments. Several potential solutions to mitigate the impact of GSL on PMUs are discussed and compared.Third, PMU integrated the novel sensors are presented. First, two innovative designs for non-contact PMUs presented. Compared with conventional synchrophasors, non-contact PMUs are more flexible and have lower costs. Moreover, to address nonlinear issues in conventional CT and PT, an optical sensor is used for signal acquisition in PMU. This is the first time the utilization of an optical sensor in PMUs has ever been reported.Fourth, the development of power grid phasor measurement function on an Android based mobile device is developed. The proposed device has the advantages of flexibility, easy installation, lower cost, data visualization and built-in communication channels, compared with conventional PMUs.Fifth, an identification method combining a wavelet-based signature extraction and artificial neural network based machine learning, is presented to identify the location of unsourced measurements. Experiments at multiple geographic scales are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method using ambient frequency measurements. Identification accuracy is presented and the factors that affect identification performance are discussed

Supporting distributed computation over wide area gigabit networks

The advent of high bandwidth fibre optic links that may be used over very large distances has lead to much research and development in the field of wide area gigabit networking. One problem that needs to be addressed is how loosely coupled distributed systems may be built over these links, allowing many computers worldwide to take part in complex calculations in order to solve "Grand Challenge" problems. The research conducted as part of this PhD has looked at the practicality of implementing a communication mechanism proposed by Craig Partridge called Late-binding Remote Procedure Calls (LbRPC). LbRPC is intended to export both code and data over the network to remote machines for evaluation, as opposed to traditional RPC mechanisms that only send parameters to pre-existing remote procedures. The ability to send code as well as data means that LbRPC requests can overcome one of the biggest problems in Wide Area Distributed Computer Systems (WADCS): the fixed latency due to the speed of light. As machines get faster, the fixed multi-millisecond round trip delay equates to ever increasing numbers of CPU cycles. For a WADCS to be efficient, programs should minimise the number of network transits they incur. By allowing the application programmer to export arbitrary code to the remote machine, this may be achieved. This research has looked at the feasibility of supporting secure exportation of arbitrary code and data in heterogeneous, loosely coupled, distributed computing environments. It has investigated techniques for making placement decisions for the code in cases where there are a large number of widely dispersed remote servers that could be used. The latter has resulted in the development of a novel prototype LbRPC using multicast IP for implicit placement and a sequenced, multi-packet saturation multicast transport protocol. These prototypes show that it is possible to export code and data to multiple remote hosts, thereby removing the need to perform complex and error prone explicit process placement decisions

An energy-aware scheduling approach for resource-intensive jobs using smart mobile devices as resource providers

The ever-growing adoption of smart mobile devices is a worldwide phenomenon that positions smart-phones and tablets as primary devices for communication and Internet access. In addition to this, the computing capabilities of such devices, often underutilized by their owners, are in continuous improvement. Today, smart mobile devices have multi-core CPUs, several gigabytes of RAM, and ability to communicate through several wireless networking technologies. These facts caught the attention of researchers who have proposed to leverage smart mobile devices aggregated computing capabilities for running resource intensive software. However, such idea is conditioned by key features, named singularities in the context of this thesis, that characterize resource provision with smart mobile devices.These are the ability of devices to change location (user mobility), the shared or non-dedicated nature of resources provided (lack of ownership) and the limited operation time given by the finite energy source (exhaustible resources).Existing proposals materializing this idea differ in the singularities combinations they target and the way they address each singularity, which make them suitable for distinct goals and resource exploitation opportunities. The latter are represented by real life situations where resources provided by groups of smart mobile devices can be exploited, which in turn are characterized by a social context and a networking support used to link and coordinate devices. The behavior of people in a given social context configure a special availability level of resources, while the underlying networking support imposes restrictionson how information flows, computational tasks are distributed and results are collected. The latter constitutes one fundamental difference of proposals mainly because each networking support ?i.e., ad-hoc and infrastructure based? has its own application scenarios. Aside from the singularities addressed and the networking support utilized, the weakest point of most of the proposals is their practical applicability. The performance achieved heavily relies on the accuracy with which task information, including execution time and/or energy required for execution, is provided to feed the resource allocator.The expanded usage of wireless communication infrastructure in public and private buildings, e.g., shoppings, work offices, university campuses and so on, constitutes a networking support that can be naturally re-utilized for leveraging smart mobile devices computational capabilities. In this context, this thesisproposal aims to contribute with an easy-to-implement  scheduling approach for running CPU-bound applications on a cluster of smart mobile devices. The approach is aware of the finite nature of smart mobile devices energy, and it does not depend on tasks information to operate. By contrast, it allocatescomputational resources to incoming tasks using a node ranking-based strategy. The ranking weights nodes combining static and dynamic parameters, including benchmark results, battery level, number of queued tasks, among others. This node ranking-based task assignment, or first allocation phase, is complemented with a re-balancing phase using job stealing techniques. The second allocation phase is an aid to the unbalanced load provoked as consequence of the non-dedicated nature of smart mobile devices CPU usage, i.e., the effect of the owner interaction, tasks heterogeneity, and lack of up-to-dateand accurate information of remaining energy estimations. The evaluation of the scheduling approach is through an in-vitro simulation. A novel simulator which exploits energy consumption profiles of real smart mobile devices, as well as, fluctuating CPU usage built upon empirical models, derived from real users interaction data, is another major contribution. Tests that validate the simulation tool are provided and the approach is evaluated in scenarios varying the composition of nodes, tasks and nodes characteristics including different tasks arrival rates, tasks requirements and different levels of nodes resource utilization.Fil: Hirsch Jofré, Matías Eberardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; Argentin

Crowdsourcing Just in Time Knowledge at Workplace

The use of technology across a number of domains and facets is widespread. It is predicted by Forrester that almost half (42%) of the entire world’s population, by the end of 2015, will own a smart phone. Furthermore, during the last ten years, there has been much development in the communication arena as a direct result of smart mobile technologies, including within the work setting, thus facilitating a greater degree of communication and information-sharing capacity in work communities. Nonetheless, it remains that not all the features and tools offered by this technology are utilised, which predominantly is owing to the lack of insight and understanding of users. Accordingly, we argue that people sharing knowledge in the workplace are sharing all the knowledge they are aware of in the most effective way, because it is shared in the situation where they naturally experience problems -at the workplace. Owing to the universal nature inherent in this technology, it is considered pivotal that smart phone technology goes hand-in-hand with intrinsic support. Importantly, however, if not altogether lacking, this is very often inadequate. However, adopting mobile technology within the workplace setting can give rise to challenges that impact user behaviour and performance. Four studies were conducted with the aim of examining how employees address and manage problems on a smart mobile device (SMD) and accordingly aim at overcoming the issue. The first three studies considered provides valuable input for the researcher that was recognised as required in the fourth research. The third study was carried out amongst 90 participants located in two countries, using internet connectivity, as a case study. Confidence and frustration have previously been connected with technology competence, but this was not applied to a workplace scenario during problem-solving, when users are assigned an unfamiliar smart mobile device. This research focuses on identifying the link between workplace users’ levels of confidence and frustration when seeking to independently solve problems whilst completing familiar tasks on new smart mobile devices. A detailed video analysis of users’ attitudes and behaviour during problem- solving was conducted, highlighting a correlation between attitudes and behaviour towards completing a task. When reviewing and considering the findings from the first researches, the criteria for a universal crowdsourcing solution were identified. In the final of the studies, users across different levels of technology experiences and from varying job roles in different departments in a firm were brought together to form a collaborative community referred to as YourSpace designed and implemented for this thesis. To this end, the subjects were grouped across three progressive levels of a knowledge management framework devised for this specific study, namely Pedagogy (engagement), Andragogy (cultivation) and Heutagogy (realisation) levels. The employees of Malta International Airport were permitted to utilise YourSpace for a one- week period, during which time there was an assessment of its adoption within the work setting. Methodology validation in this thesis was carried out through the considered design of a tablet-based research instrument that encompassed a characteristic facilitating knowledge-capture. This was achieved through taking YourSpace and accordingly utilising its peer-to-peer support communities. An innovative method is introduced through improving modern-day global technology in a number of ways: firstly, by further expanding works carried out in the social media domain, specifically by capturing Just in Time knowledge when seeking to overcome obstacles in the work environment; secondly, by providing a crowdsourcing instrument with the capacity to capture Just in Time knowledge in an organic work setting through gaining insight into individuals’ characteristics and their within-community interactions throughout the process; and thirdly, by examining the behaviours and perspectives of users when seeking to overcome common issues experienced when utilising an unfamiliar device. The results highlighted provide a crowdsourced Just in Time support solution, which could prove pivotal in overcoming problems through the provision of a collaborative framework that supports the gathering of knowledge that is not dependent on technology experience

Future benefits and applications of intelligent on-board processing to VSAT services

The trends and roles of VSAT services in the year 2010 time frame are examined based on an overall network and service model for that period. An estimate of the VSAT traffic is then made and the service and general network requirements are identified. In order to accommodate these traffic needs, four satellite VSAT architectures based on the use of fixed or scanning multibeam antennas in conjunction with IF switching or onboard regeneration and baseband processing are suggested. The performance of each of these architectures is assessed and the key enabling technologies are identified

Potential markets for advanced satellite communications

This report identifies trends in the volume and type of traffic offered to the U.S. domestic communications infrastructure and extrapolates these trends through the year 2011. To describe how telecommunications service providers are adapting to the identified trends, this report assesses the status, plans, and capacity of the domestic communications infrastructure. Cable, satellite, and radio components of the infrastructure are examined separately. The report also assesses the following major applications making use of the infrastructure: (1) Broadband services, including Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (BISDN), Switched Multimegabit Data Service (SMDS), and frame relay; (2) mobile services, including voice, location, and paging; (3) Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSAT), including mesh VSAT; and (4) Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) for audio and video. The report associates satellite implementation of specific applications with market segments appropriate to their features and capabilities. The volume and dollar value of these market segments are estimated. For the satellite applications able to address the needs of significant market segments, the report also examines the potential of each satellite-based application to capture business from alternative technologies