140 research outputs found
Outsourcing labour to the cloud
Various forms of open sourcing to the online population are establishing themselves as cheap, effective methods of getting work done. These have revolutionised the traditional methods for innovation and have contributed to the enrichment of the concept of 'open innovation'. To date, the literature concerning this emerging topic has been spread across a diverse number of media, disciplines and academic journals. This paper attempts for the first time to survey the emerging phenomenon of open outsourcing of work to the internet using 'cloud computing'. The paper describes the volunteer origins and recent commercialisation of this business service. It then surveys the current platforms, applications and academic literature. Based on this, a generic classification for crowdsourcing tasks and a number of performance metrics are proposed. After discussing strengths and limitations, the paper concludes with an agenda for academic research in this new area
Manufacturing-Operation Planning Versus AI Planning
Although AI planning techniques can potentially be useful in several
manufacturing domains, this potential remains largely unrealized.
Many of the issues important to manufacturing engineers have now seemed
interesting to AI researchers -- but, in order to adapt AI planning
techniques to manufacturing, it is important to address these issues
in a realistic and robust manner. Furthermore, by investigating
these issues, AI researchers may be able to discover principles that
are relevant for AI planning in general.
As an example, in this paper we describe the techniques for manufacturing-
operation planning used in IMACS (Interactive Manufacturability Analysis
and Critiquing System). We compare and contrast them with the techniques
used in classical AI planning systems, and point out that some of the
techniques used in IMACS may also be useful in other kinds of planning
problems.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-3
Feature Recognition for Interactive Applications: Exploiting Distributed Resources
The availability of low-cost computational power is a driving
force behind the growing sophistication of CAD software. Tools designed
to reduce time-consuming build-test-redesign iterations are essential
for increasing engineering quality and productivity. However, automation
of the design process poses many difficult computational problems. As
more downstream engineering activities are being considered during the
design phase, guaranteeing reasonable response times within design
systems becomes problematic. Design is an interactive process and speed
is a critical factor in systems that enable designers to explore and
experiment with alternative ideas during the design phase. Achieving
interactivity requires an increasingly sophisticated allocation
of computational resources in order to perform realistic design analyses
and generate feedback in real time.
This paper presents our initial efforts to develop techniques to
apply distributed algorithms to the problem of recognizing machining
features from solid models. Existing work on recognition of features has
focused exclusively on serial computer architectures. Our objective is to
show that distributed algorithms can be employed on realistic parts
with large numbers of features and many geometric and topological
entities to obtain significant improvements in computation time using
existing hardware and software tools. Migrating solid modeling applications
toward a distributed computing framework enables interconnection of many of
the autonomous and geographically diverse software tools used in the
modern manufacturing enterprise.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-94-126.1
Manufacturing Feature Instances: Which Ones to Recognize?
Manufacturing features and feature-based representations have
become an integral part of research on manufacturing systems, largely
due to their ability to model correspondences between design
information and manufacturing operations. However, several research
challenges still must be addressed in order to place feature technologies
into a solid scientific and mathematical framework. One challenge
is the issue of alternatives in feature-based planning.
Even after one has decided upon an abstract set of features to
use for representing manufacturing operations, the set of feature
instances used to represent a complex part is by no means
unique. For a complex part, many (sometimes infinitely many) different
manufacturing operations can potentially be used to manufacture various
portions of the partand thus many different feature instances can be
used to represent these portions of the part. Some of these feature
instances will appear in useful manufacturing plans, and others will not.
If the latter feature instances can be discarded at the outset, this will
reduce the number of alternative manufacturing plans to be examined in
order to find a useful one. Thus, what is required is a systematic means of
specifying wllich feature instances are of interest.
This paper addresses the issue of alternatives by introducing the
notion of primary feature instances, which we contend are sufficient to
generate all manufacturing plans of interest. To substantiate our
argument, we describe how various instances in the primary feature set
can be used to produce the desired plans. Furthermore, we discuss how
this formulation overcomes computational difficulties faced by previous
work, and present some complexity results for this approach in the
domain of machined parts.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-94-127
Integrating DFM with CAD through Design Critiquing
The increasing focus on design for manufacturability (DFM) in
research in concurrent engineering and engineering design is expanding
the scope of traditional design activities in order to identify and
eliminate manufacturing problems during the design stage. Manufacturing a
product generally involves many different kinds of manufacturing
activities, each having different characteristics. A design that is good
for one kind of activity may not be good for another, for example, a
design that is easy to assemble may not be easy to machine. One obstacle
to DFM is the difficulty involved in building a single system that can
handle the various manufacturing domains relevant to a design.
In this paper we propose an architecture for integrating CAD
with DFM. As the designer creates a design multiple critiquing systems
analyze its manufacturability with respect to different manufacturing
domains such as machining, fixturing, assembly, and inspection. Using
this analysis, each critiquing system offers
advice about potential ways of improving the design and an integration
module mediates conflicts among the different critiquing systems in order
to provide feedback to improve the overall design.
We anticipate that this approach can be used to build a
multi-domain environment that will allow designers to create
higher-quality products that can be more economically manufactured. This
will reduce the need for redesign and reduce product cost and lead time.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-94-96
Stochastic microgeometry for displacement mapping
Proceedings of Shape Modeling International 2005, June 2005, pp. 164-173. Retrieved 3/16/2006 from http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~david/Papers/schroeder_SMI05.pdf.Creating surfaces with intricate small-scale features (microgeometry)
and detail is an important task in geometric
modeling and computer graphics. We present a model
processing method capable of producing a wide variety of
complex surface features based on displacement mapping
and stochastic geometry. The latter is a branch of mathematics
that analyzes and characterizes the statistical properties
of spatial structures. The technique has been incorporated
into an interactive modeling environment that supports
the design of stochastic microgeometries. Additionally
a tool has been developed that provides random exploration
of the technique's entire parameter space by generating
sample microgeometry over a broad range of values.
We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique by creating
diverse, complex surface structures for a variety of geometric
models, e.g. arrowheads, candy bars, busts, planets
and coral
TOWARDS A FORMAT REGISTRY FOR ENGINEERING DATA
ABSTRACT There has been a great deal of interest recently in the problem of long term archiving of digital data. This is especially so in engineering design, where the CAD software tools evolve rapidly but the manufactured products themselves have much longer lifetimes whose support requires archived design data in a usable form. The ISO Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) Reference Model is a widely used standard for digital archiving, with an essential piece of this model being a file format registry. A file format registry is a system for housing information about file formats that allows for correct interpretation, rendering, storage, and translation of digital files. Currently there exists no file format registry specifically for CAD file formats. This paper explains the purpose of a file format registry for CAD in the greater context of digital archiving, and then presents our approach to creating a CAD file format registry using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) language of the Semantic Web. By creating our file format registry in RDF, we allow archival systems to perform automated reasoning on the stored files. We hope that this paper will increase awareness of this element of engineering design repositories in the research community of this conference
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