The exploration of a category theory-based virtual Geometrical product specification system for design and manufacturing

In order to ensure quality of products and to facilitate global outsourcing, almost all the so-called “world-class” manufacturing companies nowadays are applying various tools and methods to maintain the consistency of a product’s characteristics throughout its manufacturing life cycle. Among these, for ensuring the consistency of the geometric characteristics, a tolerancing language − the Geometrical Product Specification (GPS) has been widely adopted to precisely transform the functional requirements from customers into manufactured workpieces expressed as tolerance notes in technical drawings. Although commonly acknowledged by industrial users as one of the most successful efforts in integrating existing manufacturing life-cycle standards, current GPS implementations and software packages suffer from several drawbacks in their practical use, possibly the most significant, the difficulties in inferring the data for the “best” solutions. The problem stemmed from the foundation of data structures and knowledge-based system design. This indicates that there need to be a “new” software system to facilitate GPS applications. The presented thesis introduced an innovative knowledge-based system − the VirtualGPS − that provides an integrated GPS knowledge platform based on a stable and efficient database structure with knowledge generation and accessing facilities. The system focuses on solving the intrinsic product design and production problems by acting as a virtual domain expert through translating GPS standards and rules into the forms of computerized expert advices and warnings. Furthermore, this system can be used as a training tool for young and new engineers to understand the huge amount of GPS standards in a relative “quicker” manner. The thesis started with a detailed discussion of the proposed categorical modelling mechanism, which has been devised based on the Category Theory. It provided a unified mechanism for knowledge acquisition and representation, knowledge-based system design, and database schema modelling. As a core part for assessing this knowledge-based system, the implementation of the categorical Database Management System (DBMS) is also presented in this thesis. The focus then moved on to demonstrate the design and implementation of the proposed VirtualGPS system. The tests and evaluations of this system were illustrated in Chapter 6. Finally, the thesis summarized the contributions to knowledge in Chapter 7. After thoroughly reviewing the project, the conclusions reached construe that the III entire VirtualGPS system was designed and implemented to conform to Category Theory and object-oriented programming rules. The initial tests and performance analyses show that the system facilitates the geometric product manufacturing operations and benefits the manufacturers and engineers alike from function designs, to a manufacturing and verification

Developing a Knowledge-based System for Complex Geometrical Product Specification (GPS) Data Manipulation.

Geometrical product specification and verification (GPS) matrix system is a universal tool for expressing geometrical requirements on product design drawings. It benefits product designers through providing detailed description of functional requirements for geometrical products, and through referring to corresponding manufacturing and verification processes. In order to overcome current implementation problems highlighted in this paper, a GPS knowledge base and a corresponding innovative inference mechanism have been researched, which led to the development of an integrated GPS knowledge-based system to facilitate rapid and flexible manufacturing requirements. This paper starts with a brief introduction of GPS, GPS application problems and the project background. It then moves on to demonstrate a unified knowledge acquisition and representation mechanism based on the category theory (CT) with five selected examples of this project. The paper concludes with a discussion on the future works for this projec

The exploration of a category theory-based virtual geometrical product specification system for design and manufacturing

In order to ensure quality of products and to facilitate global outsourcing, almost all the so-called “world-class” manufacturing companies nowadays are applying various tools and methods to maintain the consistency of a product’s characteristics throughout its manufacturing life cycle. Among these, for ensuring the consistency of the geometric characteristics, a tolerancing language − the Geometrical Product Specification (GPS) has been widely adopted to precisely transform the functional requirements from customers into manufactured workpieces expressed as tolerance notes in technical drawings. Although commonly acknowledged by industrial users as one of the most successful efforts in integrating existing manufacturing life-cycle standards, current GPS implementations and software packages suffer from several drawbacks in their practical use, possibly the most significant, the difficulties in inferring the data for the “best” solutions. The problem stemmed from the foundation of data structures and knowledge-based system design. This indicates that there need to be a “new” software system to facilitate GPS applications. The presented thesis introduced an innovative knowledge-based system − the VirtualGPS − that provides an integrated GPS knowledge platform based on a stable and efficient database structure with knowledge generation and accessing facilities. The system focuses on solving the intrinsic product design and production problems by acting as a virtual domain expert through translating GPS standards and rules into the forms of computerized expert advices and warnings. Furthermore, this system can be used as a training tool for young and new engineers to understand the huge amount of GPS standards in a relative “quicker” manner. The thesis started with a detailed discussion of the proposed categorical modelling mechanism, which has been devised based on the Category Theory. It provided a unified mechanism for knowledge acquisition and representation, knowledge-based system design, and database schema modelling. As a core part for assessing this knowledge-based system, the implementation of the categorical Database Management System (DBMS) is also presented in this thesis. The focus then moved on to demonstrate the design and implementation of the proposed VirtualGPS system. The tests and evaluations of this system were illustrated in Chapter 6. Finally, the thesis summarized the contributions to knowledge in Chapter 7. After thoroughly reviewing the project, the conclusions reached construe that the III entire VirtualGPS system was designed and implemented to conform to Category Theory and object-oriented programming rules. The initial tests and performance analyses show that the system facilitates the geometric product manufacturing operations and benefits the manufacturers and engineers alike from function designs, to a manufacturing and verification.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Rapid approach for cloning bacterial single-genes directly from soils

Obtaining functional genes of bacteria from environmental samples usually depends on library-based approach which is not favored as its large amount of work with small possibility of positive clones. A kind of bacterial single-gene encoding glutamine synthetase (GS) was selected as example to detect the efficiency of cloning strategy in this study. Five GS genes were directly cloned from soils using degenerate primers with two steps of nested polymerase chains reactions. The genes showed 94 to 99% amino acid identities to the homologs in the known database, and encoded proteins affiliated to GS I and GS II families, respectively. All the five genes could rescue the growth of Escherichia coli glutamine auxotroph mutant ET6017 in minimum medium (ammonium chloride was sole nitrogen source in this medium). This study develops one rapid approach for cloning bacterial single-genes directly from soils. Comparing with the conventional strategies for gene cloning from complex environmental samples, this method did not need making genomic library and isolating target genes from large amount of library clones. This approach distinctively demonstrates its advantages of rapidity and effectiveness particularly when it aims at cloning short single-genes that had known homologs in all kinds of nucleic acid databases.Keywords: Gene cloning, soil, glutamine synthetase, nested PCR, single-geneAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(32), pp. 5029-503

A fuzzy neural network based dynamic data allocation model on heterogeneous multi-GPUs for large-scale computations

The parallel computation capabilities of modern GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) processors have attracted increasing attention from researchers and engineers who have been conducting high computational throughput studies. However, current single GPU based engineering solutions are often struggle to fulfill their real-time requirements. Thus, the multi-GPU-based approach has become a popular and cost-effective choice for tackling the demands. In those cases, the computational load balancing over multiple GPU “nodes” is often the key and bottleneck that affect the quality and performance of the runtime system. The existing load balancing approaches are mainly based on the assumption that all GPU nodes in the same computer framework are of equal computational performance, which are often not the case due to cluster design and other legacy issues. This paper presents a novel dynamic load balancing (DLB) model for rapid data division and allocation on heterogeneous GPU nodes based on an innovative fuzzy neural network (FNN). In this research, a 5-state parameter feedback mechanism defining the overall cluster and node performances is proposed. The corresponding FNN-based DLB model will be capable of monitoring and predicting individual node performance under different workload scenarios. A real-time adaptive scheduler has been devised to reorganize the data inputs to each node when necessary to maintain their runtime computational performances. The devised model has been implemented on two dimensional (2D) discrete wavelet transform (DWT) tasks for evaluation. Experiment results show that this DLB model has enabled a high computational throughput while ensuring real-time and precision requirements from complex computational tasks