Active-Code Replacement in the OODIDA Data Analytics Platform

OODIDA (On-board/Off-board Distributed Data Analytics) is a platform for distributing and executing concurrent data analytics tasks. It targets fleets of reference vehicles in the automotive industry and has a particular focus on rapid prototyping. Its underlying message-passing infrastructure has been implemented in Erlang/OTP. External Python applications perform data analytics tasks. Most work is performed by clients (on-board). A central cloud server performs supplementary tasks (off-board). OODIDA can be automatically packaged and deployed, which necessitates restarting parts of the system, or all of it. This is potentially disruptive. To address this issue, we added the ability to execute user-defined Python modules on clients as well as the server. These modules can be replaced without restarting any part of the system and they can even be replaced between iterations of an ongoing assignment. This facilitates use cases such as iterative A/B testing of machine learning algorithms or modifying experimental algorithms on-the-fly.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures; Published in Euro-Par 2019: Parallel Processing Workshops proceedings; DOI was added to the PDF. There is also an extended version of this paper, cf. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1903.0947

Modeling industrial engineering change processes using the design structure matrix for sequence analysis: a comparison of multiple projects

The problem at hand is that vast amount of data on industrial changes is captured and stored; yet the present challenge is to systematically retrieve and use them in a purposeful way. This paper presents an industrial case study where complex product development processes are modeled using the design structure matrix (DSM) to analyze engineering change requests sequences. Engineering change requests are documents used to initiate a change process to enhance a product. Due to the amount of changes made in different projects, engineers want to be able to analyze these change processes to identify patterns and propose the best practices. The previous work has not specifically explored modeling engineering change requests in a DSM to holistically analyze sequences. This case study analyzes engineering change request sequences from four recent industrial product development projects and compares patterns among them. In the end, this research can help to identify and guide process improvement work within projects

S-RASTER: Contraction Clustering for Evolving Data Streams

Contraction Clustering (RASTER) is a single-pass algorithm for density-based clustering of 2D data. It can process arbitrary amounts of data in linear time and in constant memory, quickly identifying approximate clusters. It also exhibits good scalability in the presence of multiple CPU cores. RASTER exhibits very competitive performance compared to standard clustering algorithms, but at the cost of decreased precision. Yet, RASTER is limited to batch processing and unable to identify clusters that only exist temporarily. In contrast, S-RASTER is an adaptation of RASTER to the stream processing paradigm that is able to identify clusters in evolving data streams. This algorithm retains the main benefits of its parent algorithm, i.e. single-pass linear time cost and constant memory requirements for each discrete time step within a sliding window. The sliding window is efficiently pruned, and clustering is still performed in linear time. Like RASTER, S-RASTER trades off an often negligible amount of precision for speed. Our evaluation shows that competing algorithms are at least 50% slower. Furthermore, S-RASTER shows good qualitative results, based on standard metrics. It is very well suited to real-world scenarios where clustering does not happen continually but only periodically.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

Natural language processing methods for knowledge management - Applying document clustering for fast search and grouping of engineering documents

Product development companies collect data in form of Engineering Change Requests for logged design issues, tests, and product iterations. These documents are rich in unstructured data (e.g. free text). Previous research affirms that product developers find that current IT systems lack capabilities to accurately retrieve relevant documents with unstructured data. In this research, we demonstrate a method using Natural Language Processing and document clustering algorithms to find structurally or contextually related documents from databases containing Engineering Change Request documents. The aim is to radically decrease the time needed to effectively search for related engineering documents, organize search results, and create labeled clusters from these documents by utilizing Natural Language Processing algorithms. A domain knowledge expert at the case company evaluated the results and confirmed that the algorithms we applied managed to find relevant document clusters given the queries tested

Supporting Knowledge Re-Use with Effective Searches of Related Engineering Documents - A Comparison of Search Engine and Natural Language-Based Processing Algorithms

Product development companies are collecting data in form of Engineering Change Requests for logged design issues and Design Guidelines to accumulate best practices. These documents are rich in unstructured data (e.g., free text) and previous research has pointed out that product developers find current it systems lacking capabilities to accurately retrieve relevant documents with unstructured data. In this research we compare the performance of Search Engine & Natural Language Processing algorithms in order to find fast related documents from two databases with Engineering Change Request and Design Guideline documents. The aim is to turn hours of manual documents searching into seconds by utilizing such algorithms to effectively search for related engineering documents and rank them in order of significance. Domain knowledge experts evaluated the results and it \ua0shows that the models applied managed to find relevant documents with up to 90% accuracy of the cases tested. But accuracy varies based on selected algorithm and length of query

ggtranscript: an R package for the visualization and interpretation of transcript isoforms using ggplot2

MOTIVATION: The advent of long-read sequencing technologies has increased demand for the visualisation and interpretation of transcripts. However, tools that perform such visualizations remain inflexible and lack the ability to easily identify differences between transcript structures. Here, we introduce ggtranscript, an R package that provides a fast and flexible method to visualize and compare transcripts. As a ggplot2 extension, ggtranscript inherits the functionality and familiarity of ggplot2 making it easy to use. AVAILABILITY: ggtranscript is an R package available at https://github.com/dzhang32/ggtranscript (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6374061) via an open-source MIT license. Further is available at https://dzhang32.github.io/ggtranscript/. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

Online geometry assurance in individualized production by feedback control and model calibration of digital twins

In this paper, we consider online calibration of a Digital Twin and its use for control and optimization in the assembly process of sheet metal parts. This calibration is done based on a feedback signal received by calculating the quality of the simulated assemblies as compared to the prediction made by the Digital Twin. We develop a Kalman filter-based approach for online calibration of the Digital Twin, which in turn is used by a one-step look-ahead optimizer to define an online control scheme. This control scheme balances directly predicted quality gains against reduced uncertainty whose purpose is to enable long-term quality gains. The usage of a calibrated model in a one-step look-ahead optimizer as a controller allows to incorporate the benefits of the usage of Digital Twins for individualized control, where the control parameters of a production cell are optimized in a Digital Twin based on measured properties of the production inputs, over nominal control, where control parameters are set with respect to some reference production inputs, in an approach which is able to use measured final production quality for feedback control. The proposed approach is evaluated by computer simulations of two industrial product assembly use cases. In the first case, it demonstrates significant gains in quality of the produced assemblies, while in the second case it shows negligible to small improvements. The second case is, however, rather insensitive to miscalibration, which enables only small gains