Robotic ubiquitous cognitive ecology for smart homes

Robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to perform complex tasks. While their potential makes them increasingly popular, one fundamental problem is how to make them both autonomous and adaptive, so as to reduce the amount of preparation, pre-programming and human supervision that they require in real world applications. The project RUBICON develops learning solutions which yield cheaper, adaptive and efficient coordination of robotic ecologies. The approach we pursue builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics, machine learning, planning and agent- based control, and wireless sensor networks. This paper illustrates the innovations advanced by RUBICON in each of these fronts before describing how the resulting techniques have been integrated and applied to a smart home scenario. The resulting system is able to provide useful services and pro-actively assist the users in their activities. RUBICON learns through an incremental and progressive approach driven by the feed- back received from its own activities and from the user, while also self-organizing the manner in which it uses available sensors, actuators and other functional components in the process. This paper summarises some of the lessons learned by adopting such an approach and outlines promising directions for future work

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table

A microservice architecture for predictive analytics in manufacturing

Abstract This paper discusses on the design, development and deployment of a flexible and modular platform supporting smart predictive maintenance operations, enabled by microservices architecture and virtualization technologies. Virtualization allows the platform to be deployed in a multi-tenant environment, while facilitating resource isolation and independency from specific technologies or services. Moreover, the proposed platform supports scalable data storage supporting an effective and efficient management of large volume of Industry 4.0 data. Methodologies of data-driven predictive maintenance are provided to the user as-a-service, facilitating offline training and online execution of pre-trained analytics models, while the connection of the raw data to contextual information support their understanding and interpretation, while guaranteeing interoperability across heterogeneous systems. A use case related to the predictive maintenance operations of a robotic manipulator is examined to demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed platform

Predictive Maintenance in Industry 4.0

In the context of Industry 4.0, the manufacturing-related processes have shifted from conventional processes within one organization to collaborative processes cross different organizations, for example, product design processes, manufacturing processes, and maintenance processes across different factories and enterprises. The development and application of the Internet of things, i.e. smart devices and sensors increases the availability and collection of diverse data. With new technologies, such as advanced data analytics and cloud computing provide new opportunities for flexible collaborations as well as effective optimizing manufacturing-related processes, e.g. predictive maintenance. Predictive maintenance provides a detailed examination of the detection, location and diagnosis of faults in related machinery using various analyses. RAMI4.0 is a framework for thinking about the various efforts that constitute Industry 4.0. It spans the entire product life cycle & value stream axis, hierarchical structure axis and functional classification axis. The Industrial Data Space (now International Data Space) is a virtual data space using standards and common governance models to facilitate the secure exchange and easy linkage of data in business ecosystems. It thereby provides a basis for creating and using smart services and innovative business processes, while at the same time ensuring digital sovereignty of data owners. This paper looks at how to support predictive maintenance in the context of Industry 4.0. Especially, applying RAMI4.0 architecture supports the predictive maintenance using the FIWARE framework, which leads to deal with data exchanging among different organizations with different security requirements as well as modularizing of related functions

Predictive Maintenance in Industry 4.0

In the context of Industry 4.0, the manufacturing-related processes have shifted from conventional processes within one organization to collaborative processes cross different organizations, for example, product design processes, manufacturing processes, and maintenance processes across different factories and enterprises. The development and application of the Internet of things, i.e. smart devices and sensors increases the availability and collection of diverse data. With new technologies, such as advanced data analytics and cloud computing provide new opportunities for flexible collaborations as well as effective optimizing manufacturing-related processes, e.g. predictive maintenance. Predictive maintenance provides a detailed examination of the detection, location and diagnosis of faults in related machinery using various analyses. RAMI4.0 is a framework for thinking about the various efforts that constitute Industry 4.0. It spans the entire product life cycle & value stream axis, hierarchical structure axis and functional classification axis. The Industrial Data Space (now International Data Space) is a virtual data space using standards and common governance models to facilitate the secure exchange and easy linkage of data in business ecosystems. It thereby provides a basis for creating and using smart services and innovative business processes, while at the same time ensuring digital sovereignty of data owners. This paper looks at how to support predictive maintenance in the context of Industry 4.0. Especially, applying RAMI4.0 architecture supports the predictive maintenance using the FIWARE framework, which leads to deal with data exchanging among different organizations with different security requirements as well as modularizing of related functions

Online on-board optimization of cutting parameter for energy efficient CNC milling

Energy efficiency is one of the main drivers for achieving sustainable manufacturing. Advances in machine tool design have reduced the energy consumption of such equipment, but still machine tools remain one of the most energy demanding equipment in a workshop. This study presents a novel approach aimed to improve the energy efficiency of machine tools through the online optimization of cutting conditions. The study is based on an industrial CNC controller with smart algorithms optimizing the cutting parameters to reduce the overall machining time while at the same time minimizing the peak energy consumption