New Shop Floor Control Approaches for Virtual Enterprises

The virtual enterprise paradigm seems a fit response to face market instability and the volatile nature of business opportunities increasing enterprise’s interest in similar forms of networked organisations. The dynamic environment of a virtual enterprise requires that partners in the consortium own reconfigurable shop floors. This paper presents new approaches to shop floor control that meet the requirements of the new industrial paradigms and argues on work re-organization at shop floor level.virtual enterprise; networked organisations

Is Ambient Intelligence a truly Human-Centric Paradigm in Industry? Current Research and Application Scenario

The use of pervasive networked devices is nowadays a reality in the service sector. It impacts almost all aspects of our daily lives, although most times we are not aware of its influence. This is a fundamental characteristic of the concept of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). Ambient Intelligence aims to change the form of human-computer interaction, focusing on the user needs so they can interact in a more seamless way, with emphasis on greater user-friendliness. The idea of recognizing people and their context situation is not new and has been successfully applied with limitations, for instance, in the health and military sectors. However its appearance in the manufacturing industry has been elusive. Could the concept of AmI turn the current shop floor into a truly human centric environment enabling comprehensive reaction to human presence and action? In this article an AmI scenario is presented and detailed with applications in human’s integrity and safety.Ambient Intelligence, networks, human-computer interaction

A high level e-maintenance architecture to support on-site teams

Emergent architectures and paradigms targeting reconfigurable manufacturing systems increasingly rely on intelligent modules to maximize the robustness and responsiveness of modern installations. Although intelligent behaviour significantly minimizes the occurrence of faults and breakdowns it does not exclude them nor can prevent equipment’s normal wear. Adequate maintenance is fundamental to extend equipments’ life cycle. It is of major importance the ability of each intelligent device to take an active role in maintenance support. Further this paradigm shift towards “embedded intelligence”, supported by cross platform technologies, induces relevant organizational and functional changes on local maintenance teams. On the one hand, the possibility of outsourcing maintenance activities, with the warranty of a timely response, through the use of pervasive networking technologies and, on the other hand, the optimization of local maintenance staff are some examples of how IT is changing the scenario in maintenance. The concept of e-maintenance is, in this context, emerging as a new discipline with defined socio-economic challenges. This paper proposes a high level maintenance architecture supporting maintenance teams’ management and offering contextualized operational support. All the functionalities hosted by the architecture are offered to the remaining system as network services. Any intelligent module, implementing the services’ interface, can report diagnostic, prognostic and maintenance recommendations that enable the core of the platform to decide on the best course of action.manufacturing systems, platform technologies, maintenance

Rehabilitation of abandoned villages through tourism: a solution for sustainable heritage development?

Villages which have been abandoned during recent decades as a result of migration from rural areas constitute a serious problem which is all too common in many European countries. The aim of this paper is to examine the problem in Portugal and conduct a comparative study of four villages, set in a range of geographical and socio-economic contexts, which have been rehabilitated. These villages are associated with: different types of vernacular architecture; different types of traditional landscape; contrasting topographic contexts; and different causes of rural abandonment. The findings of this study point to the main requirements for improvement and recommendations are made for suitable developments in terms of the heritage in its broadest sense, including the surrounding landscape. Heritage character is not only important for the preservation of local identity but may also be associated with products and services which are marketed and is thus an essential factor for the socio-economic sustainability of rehabilitated villages.CIDEHUS centre and IIFA institute of Évora University , European Union FEDR, COMPETE and QREN, Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)

An agent-based disturbance handling architecture in manufacturing control

In industrial environments, disturbance handling is a major issue in reconfigurable manufacturing control systems, supporting the fast, effective and efficient response to the occurrence of unexpected disturbances. Those disturbances usually degrade the performance of the system, causing the loss of productivity and business opportunities, which are crucial roles to achieve competitiveness. This paper proposes an agent-based disturbance handling architecture that distributes the disturbance handling functions by several autonomous control units and considers the main types of shop floor disturbances that have impact at planning and scheduling level. The proposed architecture also integrates a prediction component, transforming the traditional “fail and recover” practices into “predict and prevent” practices

El materialismo de Feuerbach. Un estudio de sus escritos.

Sin resume

New Shop Floor Control Approaches for Virtual Enterprises

The virtual enterprise paradigm seems a fit response to face market instability and the volatile nature of business opportunities increasing enterprise’s interest in similar forms of networked organisations. The dynamic environment of a virtual enterprise requires that partners in the consortium own reconfigurable shop floors. This paper presents new approaches to shop floor control that meet the requirements of the new industrial paradigms and argues on work re-organization at shop floor level

Coalition based approach for shop floor agility – a multiagent approach

Dissertation submitted for a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, speciality of Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e TecnologiaThis thesis addresses the problem of shop floor agility. In order to cope with the disturbances and uncertainties that characterise the current business scenarios faced by manufacturing companies, the capability of their shop floors needs to be improved quickly, such that these shop floors may be adapted, changed or become easily modifiable (shop floor reengineering). One of the critical elements in any shop floor reengineering process is the way the control/supervision architecture is changed or modified to accommodate for the new processes and equipment. This thesis, therefore, proposes an architecture to support the fast adaptation or changes in the control/supervision architecture. This architecture postulates that manufacturing systems are no more than compositions of modularised manufacturing components whose interactions when aggregated are governed by contractual mechanisms that favour configuration over reprogramming. A multiagent based reference architecture called Coalition Based Approach for Shop floor Agility – CoBASA, was created to support fast adaptation and changes of shop floor control architectures with minimal effort. The coalitions are composed of agentified manufacturing components (modules), whose relationships within the coalitions are governed by contracts that are configured whenever a coalition is established. Creating and changing a coalition do not involve programming effort because it only requires changes to the contract that regulates it

Métodos de melhoria da disponibilidade e da resiliência a desastres em redes de telecomunicações

In current societies, telecommunication networks are one of its essential components, in which different services depend on. Critical service requires these networks to provide high levels of availability between their nodes and high levels of resilient to large-scale natural disasters, either by avoiding them or quickly recover from them. Different techniques can be used to reach these goals. In this dissertation, it is considered the use of geodiversity routing to reduce the impact of large-scale disasters, with the downside of utilizing longer paths which, in turn, reduces the resulting end-to-end availability. This downside can be corrected if the availability of some network elements are upgraded so that the availability required by critical services is met, while maintaining the geodiversity required to prevent the impact of disasters. In this dissertation, different upgrade strategies are implemented to efficiently identify the network elements required to be upgraded, so that the network can provide critical services with high availability and high resilience to natural disasters.As redes de telecomunicações são um dos componentes essenciais na atual sociedade, no qual vários serviços dependem da sua funcionalidade para operarem eficientemente. O suporte de serviços críticos exige que as redes ofereçam altos níveis de disponibilidade entre os seus nós e sejam altamente resilientes a desastres de larga escala, tais como os provocados por fenómenos naturais (tremores de terra, tsunamis, etc.). Algumas técnicas podem ser implementadas para atingir estes objetivos. Nesta dissertação, considera-se o uso de encaminhamento com geodiversidade para reduzir o impacto de desastres de larga escala, com a desvantagem de exigir percursos de encaminhamento mais longos, reduzindo a disponibilidade resultante entre os nós origem-destino do encaminhamento. Assim, para obter simultaneamente alta disponibilidade e alta resiliência a desastres, é necessário melhorar a disponibilidade em alguns elementos da rede. Nesta dissertação são introduzidas diferentes estratégias para identificar eficazmente os elementos da rede que precisam de ser melhorados em termos de disponibilidade, para que a rede suporte os requisitos de disponibilidade e resiliência a desastres requeridos por serviços críticos.Mestrado em Engenharia Informátic