51,277 research outputs found
VELOS : a VR platform for ship-evacuation analysis
Virtual Environment for Life On Ships (VELOS) is a multi-user Virtual Reality (VR) system that aims to support designers to assess (early in the design process) passenger and crew activities on a ship for both normal and hectic conditions of operations and to improve ship design accordingly. This article focuses on presenting the novel features of VELOS related to both its VR and evacuation-specific functionalities. These features include: (i) capability of multiple users’ immersion and active participation in the evacuation process, (ii) real-time interactivity and capability for making on-the-fly alterations of environment events and crowd-behavior parameters, (iii) capability of agents and avatars to move continuously on decks, (iv) integrated framework for both the simplified and advanced method of analysis according to the IMO/MSC 1033 Circular, (v) enrichment of the ship geometrical model with a topological model suitable for evacuation analysis, (vi) efficient interfaces for the dynamic specification and handling of the required heterogeneous input data, and (vii) post-processing of the calculated agent trajectories for extracting useful information for the evacuation process. VELOS evacuation functionality is illustrated using three evacuation test cases for a ro–ro passenger ship
BPM, Agile, and Virtualization Combine to Create Effective Solutions
The rate of change in business and government is accelerating. A number of
techniques for addressing that change have emerged independently to provide for
automated solutions in this environment. This paper will examine three of the
most popular of these technologies-business process management, the agile
software development movement, and infrastructure virtualization-to expose the
commonalities in these approaches and how, when used together, their combined
effect results in rapidly deployed, more successful solutions
A new test framework for communications-critical large scale systems
None of today’s large scale systems could function without the reliable availability of a varied range of network communications capabilities. Whilst software, hardware and communications technologies have been advancing throughout the past two decades, the methods commonly used by industry for testing large scale systems which incorporate critical communications interfaces have not kept pace. This paper argues for the need for a specifically tailored framework to achieve effective and precise testing of communications-critical large scale systems (CCLSSs). The paper briefly discusses how generic test approaches are leading to inefficient and costly test activities in industry. The paper then outlines the features of an alternative CCLSS domain-specific test framework, and then provides an example based on a real case study. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the benefits observed during the case study and an outline of the available evidence that such benefits can be realized with other comparable systems
Realising the open virtual commissioning of modular automation systems
To address the challenges in the automotive industry posed by the need to rapidly manufacture more
product variants, and the resultant need for more adaptable production systems, radical changes are
now required in the way in which such systems are developed and implemented. In this context, two
enabling approaches for achieving more agile manufacturing, namely modular automation systems
and virtual commissioning, are briefly reviewed in this contribution. Ongoing research conducted at
Loughborough University which aims to provide a modular approach to automation systems design
coupled with a virtual engineering toolset for the (re)configuration of such manufacturing
automation systems is reported. The problems faced in the virtual commissioning of modular
automation systems are outlined. AutomationML - an emerging neutral data format which has
potential to address integration problems is discussed. The paper proposes and illustrates a
collaborative framework in which AutomationML is adopted for the data exchange and data
representation of related models to enable efficient open virtual prototype construction and virtual
commissioning of modular automation systems. A case study is provided to show how to create the
data model based on AutomationML for describing a modular automation system
A new approach to collaborative frameworks using shared objects
Multi-user graphical applications currently require the creation of a set of interface objects to maintain each participating display. The concept of shared objects allows a single object instance to be used in multiple contexts concurrently. This provides a novel way of reducing collaborative overheads by requiring the maintenance of only a single set of interface objects. The paper presents the concept of a shared-object collaborative framework and illustrates how the concept can be incorporated into an existing object-oriented toolkit
GeantV: Results from the prototype of concurrent vector particle transport simulation in HEP
Full detector simulation was among the largest CPU consumer in all CERN
experiment software stacks for the first two runs of the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC). In the early 2010's, the projections were that simulation demands would
scale linearly with luminosity increase, compensated only partially by an
increase of computing resources. The extension of fast simulation approaches to
more use cases, covering a larger fraction of the simulation budget, is only
part of the solution due to intrinsic precision limitations. The remainder
corresponds to speeding-up the simulation software by several factors, which is
out of reach using simple optimizations on the current code base. In this
context, the GeantV R&D project was launched, aiming to redesign the legacy
particle transport codes in order to make them benefit from fine-grained
parallelism features such as vectorization, but also from increased code and
data locality. This paper presents extensively the results and achievements of
this R&D, as well as the conclusions and lessons learnt from the beta
prototype.Comment: 34 pages, 26 figures, 24 table
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