DCPP/POLYGAIT Inventory Control System

This report discusses a proposed system to improve upon inventory management issues experienced in the M&TE Tool room for the PG&E Diablo Canyon Power plant. Effective inventory tracking and management is an important characteristic of any organization handling physical assets, and without the proper system in place, companies may lose expensive items and waste time by not having equipment available when needed. The tool room is experiencing inventory shrinkage of M&TE equipment nearing 100,000 per year largely because of an inefficient checkout system that fails to keep employees accountable for the tools they check out. Even more costly than the shrinkage of inventory is the expense of downtime incurred by not having a tool ready when needed. Two main issues with the current system were identified as the reasons for the shrinkage and lack of accountability: 1 when no tool clerk is on staff, mainly nights and weekends, an unreliable paper-method for checkout is used, and 2, employees are not held responsible for checking their tools back in, resulting in tools being handed-off outside of the tool room. To combat these problems, a self-checkout/check-in system was developed, eliminating the need for the paper system, requiring an employee login for returning tools, and reducing the total number of steps in the process by 36%. PG&E was also interested in using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology to further increase accountability and improve the tracking of tools in and out of the tool room. A working proof-of-concept model was designed, built, and tested at Cal Poly’s POLYGAIT Laboratory along with recommendations for a potential implementation at PG&E. The results of the portal testing indicate that the best RFID tags for larger items include the Confidex Ironside Slim or Xerafy Cargo Trak tags while the Confidex Captura G2XM should be used for cabled probes. In addition, a maximum of six tools should be carried through the portal at a single time. An economic analysis for the proposed RFID system with revised checkout was performed along with two other alternatives: an increase in staffing on nights and weekends with the revised checkout and regular staffing with the revised checkout. All three alternatives were compared to the current state, which includes regular staffing without the revised checkout. The results of the economic analysis suggest that the RFID system paired with the revised checkout provides the lowest total cost solution, with a payback period of 0.046 years and a cumulative four-year return of 1,442,914.00. The second total lowest cost solution, which is the revised checkout method alone without an RFID system or increase in staffing, provides the fastest payback period of all the alternatives, in 0.019 years, but provides less of a return on an investment than when paired with the RFID system

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Privacy of the Internet of Things: A Systematic Literature Review

The Internet of Things’ potential for major privacy invasion is a concern. This paper reports on a systematic literature review of privacy-preserving solutions appearing in the research literature and in the media. We analysed proposed solutions in terms of the techniques they deployed and the extent to which they satisfied core privacy principles. We found that very few solutions satisfied all core privacy principles. We also identified a number of key knowledge gaps in the course of the analysis. In particular, we found that most solution providers assumed that end users would be willing to expend effort to preserve their privacy; that they would be motivated to take action to ensure that their privacy was respected. The validity of this assumption needs to be proved, since it cannot simply be assumed that people would necessarily be willing to engage with privacy-preserving solutions. We suggest this as a topic for future research

An end-to-end bidirectional authentication system for pallet pooling management through blockchain internet of things (BIoT)

Pallet pooling is regarded as a sustainable and cost-effective measure for the industry, but it is challenging to advocate due to weak data and pallet authentication. In order to establish trust between end-users and pallet pooling services, the authors propose an end-to-end, bidirectional authentication system for transmitted data and pallets based on blockchain and internet-of-things (IoT) technologies. In addition, secure data authentication fosters the pallet authenticity in the whole supply chain network, which is achieved by considering the tag, location, and object-specific features. To evaluate the object-specific features, the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) approach is adopted to match key-points and descriptors between two pallet images. According to the case study, it is found that the proposed system provides a low bandwidth blocking rate and a high probability of restoring complete data payloads. Consequently, positive influences on end-user satisfaction, quality of service, operational errors, and pallet traceability are achieved through the deployment of the proposed system