An automation approach based on workflows and software agents for Industrial Product-Service Systems

Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS2) fulfil specific customer needs. This often implies the flexible reaction to changing requirements, impacting the adaption effort for the IPS2 provider. Additionally the modelling of individual business processes for the IPS2 delivery imposes a challenge to the provider. A great variety of process types, ranging from production to maintenance process, has to be covered in order to ensure a smooth and economically feasible IPS2 operation. Therefore, an approach for the modelling and automation of IPS2 delivery processes is of specific interest. In this paper an IPS2 automation approach will be presented that allows the modelling and deployment of the specific business processes and enables the integration of service shares into the automation solution of the product share. The presented approach allows for an easy adaption of the product share configuration. To achieve this goal, a workflow management system represents the backbone of all customer provider relationships that distributes the tasks and responsibilities to the IPS2 network partners according to the IPS2 business model. For machine-oriented service shares the workflow management system interacts with an implemented Java-based software agent system by means of web services. Lastly, an application example of a prototypical IPS2 in the micro production domain will be given. The control system architecture and its implementation will be described and the application use case of manufacturing in the area of micro milling machine tools as a service share will be presented. An outlook of further work and future potential will complete the paper

Condition monitoring in the cloud

Due to the very high demands on availability and efficiency of production systems and industrial systems, condition-based maintenance is becoming increasingly important. The use of condition monitoring approaches to increase the machine availability and reduce the maintenance costs, as well as to enhance the process quality, has increased over the last years. The installation of industrial sensors for condition monitoring reasons is complex and cost-intensive. Moreover, the condition monitoring systems available on the market are application specific and expensive. The aim of this paper is to present the concept of a wireless sensor network using Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems – MEMS sensors and Raspberry Pi 2 for data acquisition and signal processing and classification. Moreover, its use for condition monitoring applications and the selected and implemented algorithm will be introduced. This concept realized by Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology IPK, can be used to detect faults in wear-susceptible rotating components in production systems. It can be easily adapted to different specific applications because of decentralized data preprocessing on the sensor nodes and pool of data and services in the cloud. A concrete example for an industrial application of this concept will be represented. This will include the visualization of results which were achieved. Finally, the evaluation and testing of this concept including. implemented algorithms on an axis test rig at different operation parameters will be illustrated

The protein structures that shape caspase activity, specificity, activation and inhibition

The death morphology commonly known as apoptosis results from a post-translational pathway driven largely by specific limited proteolysis. In the last decade the structural basis for apoptosis regulation has moved from nothing to ‘quite good’, and we now know the fundamental structures of examples from the initiator phase, the pre-mitochondrial regulator phase, the executioner phase, inhibitors and their antagonists, and even the structures of some substrates. The field is as well advanced as the best known of proteolytic pathways, the coagulation cascade. Fundamentally new mechanisms in protease regulation have been disclosed. Structural evidence suggests that caspases have an unusual catalytic mechanism, and that they are activated by apparently unrelated events, depending on which position in the apoptotic pathway they occupy. Some naturally occurring caspase inhibitors have adopted classic inhibition strategies, but other have revealed completely novel mechanisms. All of the structural and mechanistic information can, and is, being applied to drive therapeutic strategies to combat overactivation of apoptosis in degenerative disease, and underactivation in neoplasia. We present a comprehensive review of the caspases, their regulators and inhibitors from a structural and mechanistic point of view, and with an aim to consolidate the many threads that define the rapid growth of this field