Modeling 4.0: Conceptual Modeling in a Digital Era

Digitization provides entirely new affordances for our economies and societies. This leads to previously unseen design opportunities and complexities as systems and their boundaries are re-defined, creating a demand for appropriate methods to support design that caters to these new demands. Conceptual modeling is an established means for this, but it needs to be advanced to adequately depict the requirements of digitization. However, unlike the actual deployment of digital technologies in various industries, the domain of conceptual modeling itself has not yet undergone a comprehensive renewal in light of digitization. Therefore, inspired by the notion of Industry 4.0, an overarching concept for digital manufacturing, in this commentary paper, we propose Modeling 4.0 as the notion for conceptual modeling mechanisms in a digital environment. In total, 12 mechanisms of conceptual modeling are distinguished, providing ample guidance for academics and professionals interested in ensuring that modeling techniques and methods continue to fit contemporary and emerging requirements

South American Expert Roundtable : increasing adaptive governance capacity for coping with unintended side effects of digital transformation

This paper presents the main messages of a South American expert roundtable (ERT) on the unintended side effects (unseens) of digital transformation. The input of the ERT comprised 39 propositions from 20 experts representing 11 different perspectives. The two-day ERT discussed the main drivers and challenges as well as vulnerabilities or unseens and provided suggestions for: (i) the mechanisms underlying major unseens; (ii) understanding possible ways in which rebound effects of digital transformation may become the subject of overarching research in three main categories of impact: development factors, society, and individuals; and (iii) a set of potential action domains for transdisciplinary follow-up processes, including a case study in Brazil. A content analysis of the propositions and related mechanisms provided insights in the genesis of unseens by identifying 15 interrelated causal mechanisms related to critical issues/concerns. Additionally, a cluster analysis (CLA) was applied to structure the challenges and critical developments in South America. The discussion elaborated the genesis, dynamics, and impacts of (groups of) unseens such as the digital divide (that affects most countries that are not included in the development of digital business, management, production, etc. tools) or the challenge of restructuring small- and medium-sized enterprises (whose service is digitally substituted by digital devices). We identify specific issues and effects (for most South American countries) such as lack of governmental structure, challenging geographical structures (e.g., inclusion in high-performance transmission power), or the digital readiness of (wide parts) of society. One scientific contribution of the paper is related to the presented methodology that provides insights into the phenomena, the causal chains underlying “wanted/positive” and “unwanted/negative” effects, and the processes and mechanisms of societal changes caused by digitalization

Evaluation of the potential for automation and robot technology, with focus on condition monitoring on static systems for topside offshore facilities.

Master's thesis in Offshore technologyDigitalization has become one of the most important development areas across industries and work processes. We know that this also has high focus in the oil industry today. Therefore, my contribution would be to try to see where the oil and gas industry is today, the trends and what are the potential moving forward. Automation and use of robot technology has developed very rapidly the last years. Technology trends indicates large potential for automated systems in maintenance and condition monitoring. We see that this technology is implemented to a large extent in other industries. The drivers for the oil and gas industry has historically been based on improved safety. We see now a potential for both cost avoidance, reduced downtime and less impact on the environment Maintenance and inspection is a large cost for the oil industry. In addition, these processes often cause shut down of the facilities. Condition monitoring and maintenance is based on the actual status of equipment and systems. Today’s technology makes it possible. In addition, robot technology has a potential for improving safety and reduce cost and downtime by avoiding human interactions. The oil and gas industry has not been a front runner compared to other industries. The conservatism driven by safety and reliability requirements might be one reason to this. At the same time, we see a growing interest and a lot of initiatives and developments. I have chosen to study topside static systems on offshore platforms. This to be able to narrow down the study. But in general, the descriptions, analysis and discussions may also be relevant for other systems

Critique of Architectures for Long-Term Digital Preservation

Evolving technology and fading human memory threaten the long-term intelligibility of many kinds of documents. Furthermore, some records are susceptible to improper alterations that make them untrustworthy. Trusted Digital Repositories (TDRs) and Trustworthy Digital Objects (TDOs) seem to be the only broadly applicable digital preservation methodologies proposed. We argue that the TDR approach has shortfalls as a method for long-term digital preservation of sensitive information. Comparison of TDR and TDO methodologies suggests differentiating near-term preservation measures from what is needed for the long term. TDO methodology addresses these needs, providing for making digital documents durably intelligible. It uses EDP standards for a few file formats and XML structures for text documents. For other information formats, intelligibility is assured by using a virtual computer. To protect sensitive information—content whose inappropriate alteration might mislead its readers, the integrity and authenticity of each TDO is made testable by embedded public-key cryptographic message digests and signatures. Key authenticity is protected recursively in a social hierarchy. The proper focus for long-term preservation technology is signed packages that each combine a record collection with its metadata and that also bind context—Trustworthy Digital Objects.

Rethinking affordance

n/a – Critical survey essay retheorising the concept of 'affordance' in digital media context. Lead article in a special issue on the topic, co-edited by the authors for the journal Media Theory

Temporal behavior and processing of the LiDAR signal in fog

The interest in LiDAR imaging systems has recently increased in outdoor ground-based applications related to computer vision, in fields like autonomous vehicles. However, for the complete settling of the technology, there are still obstacles related to outdoor performance, being its use in adverse weather conditions one of the most challenging. When working in bad weather, data shown in point clouds is unreliable and its temporal behavior is unknown. We have designed, constructed, and tested a scanning-pulsed LiDAR imaging system with outstanding characteristics related to optoelectronic modifications, in particular including digitization capabilities of each of the pulses. The system performance was tested in a macro-scale fog chamber and, using the collected data, two relevant phenomena were identified: the backscattering signal of light that first interacts with the media and false-positive points that appear due to the scattering properties of the media. Digitization of the complete signal can be used to develop algorithms to identify and get rid of them. Our contribution is related to the digitization, analysis, and characterization of the acquired signal when steering to a target under foggy conditions, as well as the proposal of different strategies to improve point clouds generated in these conditions.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) under the project PID2020-119484RB-I00. The first author gratefully acknowledges the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Banco Santander for the financial support of her predoctoral research grant.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Public entities driven robotic innovation in urban areas

Cities present new challenges and needs to satisfy and improve lifestyle for their citizens under the concept “Smart City”. In order to achieve this goal in a global manner, new technologies are required as the robotic one. But Public entities unknown the possibilities offered by this technology to get solutions to their needs. In this paper the development of the Innovative Public Procurement instruments is explained, specifically the process PDTI (Public end Users Driven Technological Innovation) as a driving force of robotic research and development and offering a list of robotic urban challenges proposed by European cities that have participated in such a process. In the next phases of the procedure, this fact will provide novel robotic solutions addressed to public demand that are an example to be followed by other Smart Cities.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Smart digital twin for ZDM-based job-shop scheduling

[EN] The growing digitization of manufacturing processes is revolutionizing the production job-shop by leading it toward the Smart Manufacturing (SM) paradigm. For a process to be smart, it is necessary to combine a given blend of data technologies, information and knowledge that enable it to perceive its environment and to autonomously perform actions that maximize its success possibilities in its assigned tasks. Of all the different ways leading to this transformation, both the generation of virtual replicas of processes and applying artificial intelligence (AI) techniques provide a wide range of possibilities whose exploration is today a far from negligible sources of opportunities to increase industrial companies¿ competitiveness. As a complex manufacturing process, production order scheduling in the job-shop is a necessary scenario to act by implementing these technologies. This research work considers an initial conceptual smart digital twin (SDT) framework for scheduling job-shop orders in a zero-defect manufacturing (ZDM) environment. The SDT virtually replicates the job-shop scheduling issue to simulate it and, based on the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methodology, trains a prescriber agent and a process monitor. This simulation and training setting will facilitate analyses, optimization, defect and failure avoidance and, in short, decision making, to improve job-shop scheduling.The research that led to these results received funding from the European Union H2020 Programme with grant agreement No. 825631 Zero-Defect Manufacturing Platform (ZDMP) and Grant agreement No. 958205 Industrial Data Services for Quality Control in Smart Manufacturing (i4Q), and from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities with Grant Agreement RTI2018-101344-B-I00 "Optimisation of zero-defects production technologies enabling supply chains 4.0 (CADS4.0)"Serrano Ruiz, JC.; Mula, J.; Poler, R. (2021). Smart digital twin for ZDM-based job-shop scheduling. IEEE. 510-515. https://doi.org/10.1109/MetroInd4.0IoT51437.2021.948847351051

Business Case and Technology Analysis for 5G Low Latency Applications

A large number of new consumer and industrial applications are likely to change the classic operator's business models and provide a wide range of new markets to enter. This article analyses the most relevant 5G use cases that require ultra-low latency, from both technical and business perspectives. Low latency services pose challenging requirements to the network, and to fulfill them operators need to invest in costly changes in their network. In this sense, it is not clear whether such investments are going to be amortized with these new business models. In light of this, specific applications and requirements are described and the potential market benefits for operators are analysed. Conclusions show that operators have clear opportunities to add value and position themselves strongly with the increasing number of services to be provided by 5G.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Digital technologies review for manufacturing processes

It is apparent the industrial processes transformations caused by industry 4.0 are in advance in some countries like China, Japan, Germany and United States. But, in return, the developing countries, as the emergent Brazil, seem like to have a long way to achieve digital era. Considering manufacturing processes as the starting point the rise of industry 4.0, this research aims to show a review about the most important technologies used in smart manufacturing, including the main challenges to implement it at Brazil. The papers were collected from Web of Science (WoS), comprising 114 articles and 2 books to underpin this study. This exploratory research resulted in the presentation of some challenges faced by Brazilian industry to join the new industrial era, such as poor technological infrastructure, besides lack of investment in technologies and training of qualified people. Even though the primary motivation of this research was to present a panorama of smart manufacturing for Brazil, this study results contributes to the most of emergent countries, bringing together general concepts and addressing practical applications developed by several researchers from the international academic community