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