Knowledge Management for Plant Shutdown in Collaborative Virtual Reality

International audienceOil refineries run nearly continuously twenty-four hours a day. The process of doing routine maintenance, adding or rebuilding refinery process rigs and powering down is referred to as "shutdown". Refineries are extraordinarily complicated and shutdowns are therefore very problematic and expensive. Poorly planned or executed shutdown can result in loss of life and millions of dollars of lost productivity. There is also an important collaborative and knowledge management aspect in that all shutdowns involve many people and are executed by temporary contractors who are often unfamiliar with the details of the plant they are shutting down.Commonly, text and two dimensional drawings are used in preparation for a plant shutdown and exchanging of information. However, with the advent of new technologies it is now possible to also exchange knowledge three dimensionally including multimedia and dynamic files. One technology that enhances the knowledge exchanging and management is Collaborative Virtual Reality Environment (CVRE). CVREs allow users to interact with a computer-simulated environment, be it a real or imagined while using the Internet to collaborate and interact with possibly many other users that may be spread over large distances.Virtual Reality has been widely applied in various forms to plant shutdown planning but the knowledge management aspect of the process is not being addressed by these technologies. In this paper we describe the early use and underlying details of an innovation implantation of a Collaborative Virtual Whiteboard (CVW) inside of an CVR

Revision Recognition for Scientific Computing: Theory and Application

Scientific computing applications are rarely equipped with high quality graphic user interfaces (GUIs), in part because the interfaces cannot be revised quickly enough to keep pace with rapid changes in the underlying application. A critical step in user interface maintenance is revision recognition: the process of determining, given two versions of a program, which parts of the original program have been changed, deleted or preserved. For large, highly complex scientific applications this problem is a significant barrier to interface maintenance. In this paper we present the "reticent programmer model" which transforms the revision recognition problem into an optimization problem. The solutions obtained using this model are exact for small applications and are high quality estimates for medium to large applications. An example of how these solutions can be used to facilitate user interface maintenance is also presented

Teaching Marketing Through a Micro-Economy In Virtual Reality

Teaching retailing principles to students is a challenge because although real-world wholesale and retail decision making very heavily depends on dynamic conditions, classroom exercises are limited to abstract discussions and role-playing. This article describes two interlocking class projects taught using the virtual reality of secondlife.com, which allowed students to use their recently gained skills in wholesaling and retailing. The exercises provided students with unique educational experiences without the need of bricks and mortar product development, wholesale, or retail spaces. This spurred students\u27 creativity and entrepreneurship. Students described the simulations as fun and interesting. Students also reported a greater depth of learning as a result of participating in the virtual simulation. This article describes the interdisciplinary team efforts to develop educational experiences for students. It also uses previous research in virtual reality implementation for classroom use to provide a framework for assessing the credibility of the set of assignments. © The Author(s) 2011

A Lower Bound on Greedy Embedding in Euclidean Plane

Greedy embedding is the key of geometric greedy routing in p2p networks. It embeds a graph (the topological structure of the p2p network) in a metric space such that between any source-destination pair, there is a distance decreasing path for message delivery. It is known that any graph can be greedily embedded in the hyperbolic plane with using O(logn) bits for each node\u27s coordinates [7]. Interestingly, on greedy embedding in the Euclidean plane, existing embedding algorithms result in coordinates with Ω(��). It was recently proved that Ω(��) is a lower bound of the coordinates\u27 bit length if one uses Cartesian or polar coordinate system and preserves the planar embedding of a planar graph when greedily embedding it in the Euclidean plan [2]. In this paper we strengthen this result by further proving that Ω(��) is still a lower bound even if the graph is allowed to take free embedding in the plane