Human-Centered Aviation Automation: Principles and Guidelines

This document presents principles and guidelines for human-centered automation in aircraft and in the aviation system. Drawing upon operational experience with highly automated aircraft, it describes classes of problems that have occurred in these vehicles, the effects of advanced automation on the human operators of the aviation system, and ways in which these problems may be avoided in the design of future aircraft and air traffic management automation. Many incidents and a few serious accidents suggest that these problems are related to automation complexity, autonomy, coupling, and opacity, or inadequate feedback to operators. An automation philosophy that emphasizes improved communication, coordination and cooperation between the human and machine elements of this complex, distributed system is required to improve the safety and efficiency of aviation operations in the future

Data-Driven Application Maintenance: Views from the Trenches

In this paper we present our experience during design, development, and pilot deployments of a data-driven machine learning based application maintenance solution. We implemented a proof of concept to address a spectrum of interrelated problems encountered in application maintenance projects including duplicate incident ticket identification, assignee recommendation, theme mining, and mapping of incidents to business processes. In the context of IT services, these problems are frequently encountered, yet there is a gap in bringing automation and optimization. Despite long-standing research around mining and analysis of software repositories, such research outputs are not adopted well in practice due to the constraints these solutions impose on the users. We discuss need for designing pragmatic solutions with low barriers to adoption and addressing right level of complexity of problems with respect to underlying business constraints and nature of data.Comment: Earlier version of paper appearing in proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practice (SER&IP), IEEE Press, pp. 48-54, 201

Optimized Industrial Automation Network for Efficient Productivity Using Quality of Service Policy Mechanism (QPM)

In this paper, the complexity of industrial automation network when compared to the traditional IT corporate organization network or campus network, was first described. The challenges and components of industrial automation network have been highlighted. Hence, in order to overcome the challenges in the industrial automation network, the network was optimized by incorporating Quality of Service (QoS) Policy Mechanism (QPM) model in the network design. Existing mechanisms such as transmission control protocol (TCP) to deal with these problems, and the limitations of relying only on TCP were then discussed. The potential to improve the industrial automation network in the perspective of industrial internet of things (IIoT) has been reported in this paper as a further investigation in the future works. Simulation results were presented which showed that the optimized industrial automation network using QoS Policy Mechanism model gives higher performance throughput than the congestion control algorithm of the conventional TCP and the traditional network

DESIGN OF A HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM USING ARDUINO WITH WIRELESS CONTROL

The rapid growth of technology has drastically changed the living standards of modern society. Seeing the increasing number of electronic devices being made in a household, an automated home control system has become an increasing useful feature. Current systems, however, have problems with complexity, high costs, non-open sources and multiple incompatible standards; resulting in the limited venture of the home automation into the homes of the rich or hobbyists. This project intends to design an open source, affordable and easy to use home automation system, which will be done by interfacing the open source Arduino microcontroller with web browser; creating a simple, easy-to-use system to control home appliances. The project was carried out in several stages. The Arduino is first setup for Wi-Fi connection and web browser interfacing. Next, the system is made to work with appliances in a home model. Last of all, a simple user interface is created using HTML to make the system user friendly, completing the home automation system design. The home automation system design was successfully implemented. Using web browser on laptop and smartphone, connection was made to Arduino through wireless network, allowing for control of the appliances in the home model

Artificial Intelligence for Automated Design of Elevator Systems

Configuration and design of complex products represents a challenge in many application fields. The designer must take into account many different aspects and make decisions typically driven by experience while taking into account performance constraints and costs. Methods and tools for design automation represents a viable solution to such complex decision problems, giving also the possibility to optimize the performance of the final product on particular context-driven aspects. Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can help in dealing with complexity and enhance the current tools by supplying solutions in feasible time. My research is concerned with the development and testing of different artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to automate the design of elevators. Elevator design is a problem with many interesting aspects like the need to deal with a hybrid search state space (continuous and discrete variables) constrained by design requirements and safety regulations. The study, design and integration of AI techniques in this particular application field can provide the end user with design automation tools that output feasible solutions within acceptable computation times. My research considered AI techniques such as special-purpose heuristic search, genetic algorithms and constraint satisfaction to solve elevator configuration problems. I tested them considering different setups and parts of the whole design process. I have also implemented a tool L IFT C REATE , available as a web application. L IFT C REATE leverages the findings of my research to automate the design of elevators and, to the best of my knowledge, there is currently no similar tool publicly available from either academia or industry that provides the same level of design automation

Pretrial Case Management Under the Amended Rules: Too Many Words for a Good Idea

To cope with the increasing complexity of embedded and cyber-physical system design, different system-level design approaches are proposed which start from abstract models and implement them using design flows with high degrees of automation. However, creating models of such systems and also formulating the mathematical problems arising in these design flows are themselves challenging tasks. A promising approach is the composable construction of these models and problems from more basic entities. Unfortunately, it is non-trivial to propose such compositional formulations today because the current practice in the electronic design automation domain tends to be on using imperative languages and frameworks due to legacy and performance-oriented reasons. This thesis addresses the system design complexity by first promoting proper formalisms and frameworks for capturing models and formulating design-space exploration problems for electronic system-level design in a declarative style; and second, propose realizations based on the industrially accepted languages and frameworks which hold the interesting properties such as composability and parallelism. For modeling, ForSyDe, a denotational system-level modeling formalism for heterogeneous embedded systems is chosen, extended with timed domains to make it more appropriate for capturing cyber-physical systems, and mapped on top of the IEEE standard system design language SystemC. The realized modeling framework, called ForSyDe-SystemC, can be used for modeling systems of heterogeneous nature and their composition to form more sophisticated systems and also conducting parallel and distributed simulation for boosting the simulation speed. Another extension to ForSyDe, named wrapper processes, introduces the ability to compose formal ForSyDe models with legacy IP blocks running in external execution environments to perform a heterogeneous co-simulation. In platform-based design flows, the correct and optimal mapping of an application model onto a flexible platform involves solving a hard problem, named design space exploration. This work proposes Tahmuras, a constraint- based framework to construct generic design space exploration problems as the composition of three individual sub-problems: the application, the platform, and the mapping and scheduling problems. In this way, the model of the design space exploration problem in Tahmuras is automatically generated for each combination of application semantics, target platform, and mapping and scheduling policy simply by composing their respective problems. Using constraint programming, problems can be modeled in a declarative style, while they can be solved in a variety of different styles, including imperative solving heuristics commonly used to solve difficult problems. Efficient parallel solvers exists for constraint programming. Den ökande komplexiteten är en stor utmaning för konstruktionen av framtida inbyggda system. För att möta utmaningen utvecklas nu konstruktionsmetoder som har som mål att starta från en abstrakt modell och att generera en implementering genom ett konstruktionsflöde med hög automatiseringsgrad. Dessvärre är dock skapandet av abstrakta systemmodeller och formaliseringen av de relaterade matematiska problemen i sig ett mycket utmanande problem. Konstruktion genom komposition av basenheter är en lovande idé, men tyvärr är det väldigt svårt att introducera metoden i dagens industriella konstruktionsflöden på grund av imperativa programmeringsspråk och ett gammalt arv i form av existerande kodbas och äldre konstruktioner. Avhandlingen adresserar komplexiten inom systemkonstruktion genom att föreslå passande formalismer för att uttrycka modeller i en deklarativ stil och angripa problemet att hitta en passande implementering. Dessutom visar avhandlingen hur dessa formalismer kan realiseras i en form som kan användas i ett industriellt sammanhang utan att förlora formalismens viktiga grundläggande egenskaper som komposition och parallelism. Modelleringen använder och utökar ForSyDe, en konstruktionsmetod för heterogena inbyggda system. Tilläggen består av en modelleringsmodell som kan fånga specifika egenskaper hos heterogena inbyggda system, samt en implementering av ForSyDe i SystemC, ett industriellt modelleringsspråk som är standardiserat av IEEE. Den nya utvecklingsmiljön, ForSyDe-SystemC, kan användas för att modellera inbyggda system, komponera systemmodeller till större system, samt möjliggör genomförandet av parallella och distribuerade simuleringar med medföljande hög simuleringshastighet. Avhandlingen introducerar också “wrapper”-konceptet i ForSyDe som möjliggör integrationen av existerande modeller och system som en del av en formell ForSyDe-modell och deras co-simulering. ForSyDe-SystemC har använts inom EU-projekt av industriella partner för modellering av egna system. Att hitta en korrekt och effektiv implementering av en abstrakt systemmodell är målet inom aktiviteten “design space exploration” (DSE) som är ett svårt problem för parametriserbara och flexibla plattformar. Avhandlingen presenterar två generationer av Tahmuras, som är baserade på villkorsprogrammering och har som mål att konstruera DSE-problemet som en komposition av tre olika delproblem: applikation, plattform, och bindning. Ett integrerat DSE-problem kan sedan automatiskt genereras genom en kombination av dessa delproblem. Olika metoder, från heuristisk till komplett sökning, kan användas inom villkorsprogrammering för att lösa DSE-problemet. För att visa Tahmuras potential har DSE-metoden validerats med hjälp av olika systemapplikationer av skilda tidsegenskaper och olika plattformar. QC 20141117</p

An Action Design Research

This master’s thesis focuses on studying how modularity can be applied in designing robotic process automation (RPA) solutions and what effects it has to the RPA implementations. Past research has found several benefits of increasing modularity in designing, coordinating, and managing complex systems and many kinds of design problems have been solved with it. This thesis examines how the principles of modularity resonate with RPA. The study follows the Action Design Research method to examine a case in real-life context and to enable the participation of practitioners and end users in the case organization. It describes in detail how a modular RPA solution was created for automating an entity consisting of several different tasks in the case organization. The solution can be viewed as an artifact that can be utilized to calibrate an organization’s RPA journey by adding efficiency in RPA projects. This is achieved by enhancing the scalability and reusability of the RPA components. The results of this study suggest that RPA solutions can be viewed as complex systems into which modularity principles can be adapted, generating a variety of benefits from the viewpoints of automation development and administration. The main benefits include decreased implementation time and cost, enhanced error management, increased control of automation, increased capability to respond to versatile automation demand, and enhanced automation complexity management

An integrated framework for office information systems design and management

Information Technologies are complex and this is true even in the smallest piece of equipment. But this kind of complexity is nothing comparejwith the one that arises when this technology interact with society. Office Automation has been traditionally considered as a technical field but there is no way to find solutions from a technical point of view when the problems are primarily social in their origin. Technology management has to change its focus from a pure technical perspective to a sociotechnical point of view. To facilitate this change, we propose a model that allows a better understanding between the managerial and the technical world, offering a coherent, complete and integrated perspective of both. The base for this model is an unfolding of the complexity found in information Technologies and a matching of these complexities with several levels considered within the Office, Office Automation and Human Factors dimensions. Each one of these domains is studied trough a set of distinctions that create a new and powerful understanding of its reality. Using this model we build up a map of Office Automation to be use^not only by managers but also by technicians because the primaty advantage of such a framework is that it allows a comprehensive evaluation of technology without requhing extensive technical knowledge. Thus, the model can be seen as principle for design and diagnosis of Office Automation and as a common reference for managers and specialist avoiding the severe limitations arising from the language used by the las