Process Performance Analysis in Large-Scale Systems Integrating Different Sources of Information

Process auditing using historical data can identify causes for poor performance and reveal opportunities to improve process operation. To date, the data used has been limited to process measurements; however other sources hold complementary information about the process behavior. This paper proposes a new approach to root-cause diagnosis, which also takes advantage of the information in utility, mechanical and electrical data, alarms and diagrams. Its benefit is demonstrated in an industrial case study, by tackling an important challenge in root-cause analysis: large-scale systems. This paper also defines specifications for a semi-automated tool to implement the proposed approach. © 2012 IFAC

The Requirements for Ontologies in Medical Data Integration: A Case Study

Evidence-based medicine is critically dependent on three sources of information: a medical knowledge base, the patients medical record and knowledge of available resources, including where appropriate, clinical protocols. Patient data is often scattered in a variety of databases and may, in a distributed model, be held across several disparate repositories. Consequently addressing the needs of an evidence-based medicine community presents issues of biomedical data integration, clinical interpretation and knowledge management. This paper outlines how the Health-e-Child project has approached the challenge of requirements specification for (bio-) medical data integration, from the level of cellular data, through disease to that of patient and population. The approach is illuminated through the requirements elicitation and analysis of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA), one of three diseases being studied in the EC-funded Health-e-Child project.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. Presented at the 11th International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium (Ideas2007). Banff, Canada September 200

A framework for effective management of condition based maintenance programs in the context of industrial development of E-Maintenance strategies

CBM (Condition Based Maintenance) solutions are increasingly present in industrial systems due to two main circumstances: rapid evolution, without precedents, in the capture and analysis of data and significant cost reduction of supporting technologies. CBM programs in industrial systems can become extremely complex, especially when considering the effective introduction of new capabilities provided by PHM (Prognostics and Health Management) and E-maintenance disciplines. In this scenario, any CBM solution involves the management of numerous technical aspects, that the maintenance manager needs to understand, in order to be implemented properly and effectively, according to the company’s strategy. This paper provides a comprehensive representation of the key components of a generic CBM solution, this is presented using a framework or supporting structure for an effective management of the CBM programs. The concept “symptom of failure”, its corresponding analysis techniques (introduced by ISO 13379-1 and linked with RCM/FMEA analysis), and other international standard for CBM open-software application development (for instance, ISO 13374 and OSA-CBM), are used in the paper for the development of the framework. An original template has been developed, adopting the formal structure of RCM analysis templates, to integrate the information of the PHM techniques used to capture the failure mode behaviour and to manage maintenance. Finally, a case study describes the framework using the referred template.Gobierno de Andalucía P11-TEP-7303 M

Semantic Integration of Cervical Cancer Data Repositories to Facilitate Multicenter Association Studies: The ASSIST Approach

The current work addresses the unifi cation of Electronic Health Records related to cervical cancer into a single medical knowledge source, in the context of the EU-funded ASSIST research project. The project aims to facilitate the research for cervical precancer and cancer through a system that virtually unifi es multiple patient record repositories, physically located in different medical centers/hospitals, thus, increasing fl exibility by allowing the formation of study groups “on demand” and by recycling patient records in new studies. To this end, ASSIST uses semantic technologies to translate all medical entities (such as patient examination results, history, habits, genetic profi le) and represent them in a common form, encoded in the ASSIST Cervical Cancer Ontology. The current paper presents the knowledge elicitation approach followed, towards the defi nition and representation of the disease’s medical concepts and rules that constitute the basis for the ASSIST Cervical Cancer Ontology. The proposed approach constitutes a paradigm for semantic integration of heterogeneous clinical data that may be applicable to other biomedical application domains

Building information modelling (BIM) implementation and remote construction projects: issues, challenges, and critiques.

The construction industry has been facing a paradigm shift to (i) increase productivity, efficiency, infrastructure value; quality and sustainability (ii) reduce lifecycle costs, lead times and duplications via effective collaboration and communication of stakeholders in construction projects. This paradigm shift is becoming more critical with remote construction projects, which reveals unique and even more complicated challenging problems in relation to communication and management due to the remoteness of the construction sites. On the other hand, Building Informational Modelling (BIM) is offered by some as the panacea to addressing the interdisciplinary inefficiencies in construction projects. Although in many cases the adoption of BIM has numerous potential benefits, it also raises interesting challenges with regards to how BIM integrates the business processes of individual practices. This paper aims to show how BIM adoption for an architectural company helps to mitigate the management and communication problems in remote construction project. The paper adopts a case study methodology, which is a UK Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project of BIM adoption between the University of Salford, UK and John McCall Architects (JMA), in which the BIM use between the architectural company and the main contractor for a remote construction project is elaborated and justified. Research showed that the key management and communication problems such as poor quality of construction works, unavailability of materials, and ineffective planning and scheduling can largely be mitigated by adopting BIM at the design stage

Practical applications of multi-agent systems in electric power systems

The transformation of energy networks from passive to active systems requires the embedding of intelligence within the network. One suitable approach to integrating distributed intelligent systems is multi-agent systems technology, where components of functionality run as autonomous agents capable of interaction through messaging. This provides loose coupling between components that can benefit the complex systems envisioned for the smart grid. This paper reviews the key milestones of demonstrated agent systems in the power industry and considers which aspects of agent design must still be addressed for widespread application of agent technology to occur