252 research outputs found
The BG News May 2, 1978
The BGSU campus student newspaper May 2, 1978. Volume 62 - Issue 93https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/4489/thumbnail.jp
The New Hampshire, Vol. 71, No. 36 (Feb. 27, 1981)
The student publication of the University of New Hampshire
A System for Controlling, Monitoring and Programming the Home
As technology becomes ever more pervasive, the challenges of home automation are increasingly apparent. Seamless home control, home monitoring and home programming by the end user have yet to enter the mainstream. This could be attributed to the challenge of developing a fully autonomous and extensible home system that can support devices and technologies of differing protocols and functionalities.
In order to offer programming facilities to the user, the underlying rule system must be fully independent, allowing support for current and future devices. Additional challenges arise from the need to detect and handle conflicts that may arise among user rules and yield undesirable results. Non-technical individuals typically struggle when faced with a programming task. It is therefore vital to encourage and ease the process of programming the home.
This thesis presents Homer, a home system that has been developed to support three key features of a home system: control, monitoring and programming. Homer supports any third-party hardware or software service that can expose its functionality through Java and conform to the Homer interface. Stand-alone end user interfaces can be written by developers to offer any of Homer's functionality.
Where policies (i.e. rules) for the home are concerned, Homer offers a fully independent policy system. The thesis presents a custom policy language, Homeric, that has been designed specifically for writing home rules. The Homer policy system detects overlaps and conflicts among rules using constraint satisfaction and the effect on environment variables.
The thesis also introduces the notion of perspectives to ease user interactivity. These have been integrated into Homer to accommodate the range of ways in which a user may think about different aspects and features of their home. These perspectives include location, device type, time and people-oriented points of view. Design guidelines are also discussed to aid end user programming of the home.
The work presented in this thesis demonstrates a system that supports control, monitoring and programming of the home. Developers can quickly and easily add functionality to the home through components. Conflicts can be detected amongst rules within the home. Finally, design guidelines and a prototype interface have been developed to allow both technically minded and non-technical people to program their home
Formal functional testing of graphical user interfaces.
SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DX177960 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
Applications integration for manufacturing control systems with particular reference to software interoperability issues
The introduction and adoption of contemporary computer aided manufacturing control
systems (MCS) can help rationalise and improve the productivity of manufacturing related
activities. Such activities include product design, process planning and production
management with CAD, CAPP and CAPM. However, they tend to be domain specific and
would generally have been designed as stand-alone systems where there is a serious lack of
consideration for integration requirements with other manufacturing activities outside the area
of immediate concern. As a result, "islands of computerisation" exist which exhibit
deficiencies and constraints that inhibit or complicate subsequent interoperation among typical
MCS components. As a result of these interoperability constraints, contemporary forms of
MCS typically yield sub-optimal benefits and do not promote synergy on an enterprise-wide
basis.
The move towards more integrated manufacturing systems, which requires advances in
software interoperability, is becoming a strategic issue. Here the primary aim is to realise
greater functional synergy between software components which span engineering, production
and management activities and systems. Hence information of global interest needs to be
shared across conventional functional boundaries between enterprise functions.
The main thrust of this research study is to derive a new generation of MCS in which
software components can "functionally interact" and share common information through
accessing distributed data repositories in an efficient, highly flexible and standardised
manner. It addresses problems of information fragmentation and the lack of formalism, as
well as issues relating to flexibly structuring interactions between threads of functionality
embedded within the various components. The emphasis is on the:
• definition of generic information models which underpin the sharing of common
data among production planning, product design, finite capacity scheduling and cell
control systems.
• development of an effective framework to manage functional interaction between
MCS components, thereby coordinating their combined activities.
• "soft" or flexible integration of the MCS activities over an integrating infrastructure
in order to (i) help simplify typical integration problems found when using
contemporary interconnection methods for applications integration; and (ii) enable
their reconfiguration and incremental development. In order to facilitate adaptability in response to changing needs, these systems must also be
engineered to enable reconfigurability over their life cycle. Thus within the scope of this
research study a new methodology and software toolset have been developed to formally
structure and support implementation, run-time and change processes. The tool set combines
the use of IDEFO (for activity based or functional modelling), IDEFIX (for entity-attribute
relationship modelling), and EXPRESS (for information modelling).
This research includes a pragmatic but effective means of dealing with legacyl software,
which often may be a vital source of readily available information which supports the
operation of the manufacturing enterprise. The pragmatism and medium term relevance of the
research study has promoted particular interest and collaboration from software manufacturers
and industrial practitioners. Proof of concept studies have been carried out to implement and
evaluate the developed mechanisms and software toolset
Vol. 96, No. 2 | Spring 2021
THE NEXT CHAPTER: Illuminating the Wayhttps://digitalcommons.bridgewater.edu/bridgewater_magazine/1349/thumbnail.jp
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