Industrial Case: Blockchain on Aircraft’s Parts Supply Chain Management

With the growth of aviation domain across the world, there has been steep demand in aircrafts. In this domain, avionic machines and hardware are shipped to single assembly hubs, located globally. All parts come with certain life expectancy, specific requirements and inevitable need for maintenance. In this paper, we will take an industrial scenario of aviation’s industries’ supply chain management, and demonstrate the necessitation of having decentralized system like Blockchain, not only assisting to maintain inventory of the aircraft’s individual segments but also to monitor the performance, usage, etc. This will help to achieve a transparent network of aircraft’s part’s supply and will reduce the risk of availability of aircraft segments in black market and will help the analysts to analyze the supply, demands, source of availability of aviation parts and method to procure them from the right sources

Mechano-electric heterogeneity of the myocardium as a paradigm of its function

Myocardial heterogeneity is well appreciated and widely documented, from sub-cellular to organ levels. This paper reviews significant achievements of the group, led by Professor Vladimir S. Markhasin, Russia, who was one of the pioneers in studying and interpreting the relevance of cardiac functional heterogeneity

Telerobotic Surgery: An Intelligent Systems Approach to Mitigate the Adverse Effects of Communication Delay

An extremely innovative approach has been presented, which is to have the surgeon operate through a simulator running in real-time enhanced with an intelligent controller component to enhance the safety and efficiency of a remotely conducted operation. The use of a simulator enables the surgeon to operate in a virtual environment free from the impediments of telecommunication delay. The simulator functions as a predictor and periodically the simulator state is corrected with truth data. Three major research areas must be explored in order to ensure achieving the objectives. They are: simulator as predictor, image processing, and intelligent control. Each is equally necessary for success of the project and each of these involves a significant intelligent component in it. These are diverse, interdisciplinary areas of investigation, thereby requiring a highly coordinated effort by all the members of our team, to ensure an integrated system. The following is a brief discussion of those areas. Simulator as a predictor: The delays encountered in remote robotic surgery will be greater than any encountered in human-machine systems analysis, with the possible exception of remote operations in space. Therefore, novel compensation techniques will be developed. Included will be the development of the real-time simulator, which is at the heart of our approach. The simulator will present real-time, stereoscopic images and artificial haptic stimuli to the surgeon. Image processing: Because of the delay and the possibility of insufficient bandwidth a high level of novel image processing is necessary. This image processing will include several innovative aspects, including image interpretation, video to graphical conversion, texture extraction, geometric processing, image compression and image generation at the surgeon station. Intelligent control: Since the approach we propose is in a sense predictor based, albeit a very sophisticated predictor, a controller, which not only optimizes end effector trajectory but also avoids error, is essential. We propose to investigate two different approaches to the controller design. One approach employs an optimal controller based on modern control theory; the other one involves soft computing techniques, i.e. fuzzy logic, neural networks, genetic algorithms and hybrids of these

Anomalously large oxygen-ordering contribution to the thermal expansion of untwinned YBa2Cu3O6.95 single crystals: a glass-like transition near room temperature

We present high-resolution capacitance dilatometry studies from 5 - 500 K of untwinned YBa2Cu3Ox (Y123) single crystals for x ~ 6.95 and x = 7.0. Large contributions to the thermal expansivities due to O-ordering are found for x ~ 6.95, which disappear below a kinetic glass-like transition near room temperature. The kinetics at this glass transition is governed by an energy barrier of 0.98 +- 0.07 eV, in very good agreement with other O-ordering studies. Using thermodynamic arguments, we show that O-ordering in the Y123 system is particularly sensitive to uniaxial pressure (stress) along the chain axis and that the lack of well-ordered chains in Nd123 and La123 is most likely a consequence of a chemical-pressure effect.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to PR

Unveiling cryptic species of the bumblebee subgenus Bombus s. str. worldwide with COI barcodes (Hymenoptera: Apidae)

Bumblebees of the subgenus Bombus s. str. dominate (or used to dominate) many north temperate pollinator assemblages and include most of the commercial bumblebee pollinator species. Several species are now in serious decline, so conservationists need to know precisely which ones are involved. The problem is that many Bombus s. str. species are cryptic, so that species identification from morphology may be impossible for some individuals and is frequently misleading according to recent molecular studies. This is the first review of the entire subgenus to: (1) avoid fixed a priori assumptions concerning the limits of the problematic species; and (2) sample multiple sites from across the entire geographic ranges of all of the principal named taxa worldwide; and (3) fit an explicit model for how characters change within an evolutionary framework; and (4) apply explicit and consistent criteria within this evolutionary framework for recognising species. We analyse easily-obtained DNA (COI-barcode) data for 559 sequences from 279 localities in 33 countries using general mixed Yule-coalescent (GMYC) models, assuming only the morphologically distinctive species B. affinis Cresson, B. franklini (Frison), B. ignitus Smith and B. tunicatus Smith, and then recognise other comparable COI-barcode groups as putative species. These species correspond to modified concepts of the taxa B. cryptarum (Fabricius), B. hypocrita Pérez, B. jacobsoni Skorikov, B. lantschouensis Vogt n. stat., B. longipennis Friese, B. lucorum (Linnaeus), B. magnus Vogt, B. minshanensis Bischoff n. stat., B. occidentalis Greene, B. patagiatus Nylander, B. sporadicus Nylander, B. terrestris (Linnaeus) and B. terricola Kirby (a total of 17 species). Seven lectotypes are designated. Our results allow us for the first time to diagnose all of the putative species throughout their global ranges and to map the extent of these geographic ranges