Continuous Improvement Through Knowledge-Guided Analysis in Experience Feedback

Continuous improvement in industrial processes is increasingly a key element of competitiveness for industrial systems. The management of experience feedback in this framework is designed to build, analyze and facilitate the knowledge sharing among problem solving practitioners of an organization in order to improve processes and products achievement. During Problem Solving Processes, the intellectual investment of experts is often considerable and the opportunities for expert knowledge exploitation are numerous: decision making, problem solving under uncertainty, and expert configuration. In this paper, our contribution relates to the structuring of a cognitive experience feedback framework, which allows a flexible exploitation of expert knowledge during Problem Solving Processes and a reuse such collected experience. To that purpose, the proposed approach uses the general principles of root cause analysis for identifying the root causes of problems or events, the conceptual graphs formalism for the semantic conceptualization of the domain vocabulary and the Transferable Belief Model for the fusion of information from different sources. The underlying formal reasoning mechanisms (logic-based semantics) in conceptual graphs enable intelligent information retrieval for the effective exploitation of lessons learned from past projects. An example will illustrate the application of the proposed approach of experience feedback processes formalization in the transport industry sector

Characterisation of macrogel composition from industrial natural rubber samples: Influence of proteins on the macrogel crosslink density

The insoluble (macrogel) and soluble fractions of 11 commercial natural rubber (NR) samples (Technically specified rubber) were separated. Nitrogen titrations and lipid extractions enabled a quantitative assessment of the proteins and extractable lipids in each fraction. Swelling was measured in tetrahydrofuran in order to evaluate the crosslink density (Mc –1) of each macrogel. While the soluble fraction had a high lipid concentration, the majority of non-isoprene compounds of the macrogel were found to be proteins, which accounted for 4.6 to 50.8% (w/w) of the macrogel. Indeed, the macrogels contained less than 0.5% (w/w) extractable lipids. However, our results showed that the soluble fraction contained large quantities of proteins (16–66% of the nitrogen content of the raw NR sample), probably structuring microaggregates. An exponential correlation (R2 > 0.96) was found between the crosslink density and the protein concentration of macrogel, suggesting that proteins are involved in the majority of crosslinks in macrogel. (Résumé d'auteur