The Need for a Component-Based Approach to Automation Systems for Agile Manufacturing

Volume 2 ◽  
2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Szer Ming Lee ◽  
Min Huey Ong ◽  
Robert Harrison ◽  
Andrew A. West

Manufacturing enterprises are facing new challenges caused by unprecedented changes due to volatile market demands. Such changes have direct impact to the design, implementation and operation of automation systems in the domain of automotive production. An in-depth study in the activities of building and operating automation systems in the domain of automation manufacturing has revealed weaknesses in current practices and in particular an inability to cope effectively with production changes. It is envisaged that a component-based approach will enable an automation system to be designed, implemented and modified quickly and effectively, thereby increasing the agility, responsiveness and changeability of the system. This paper investigates the impact of market demands on the lifecycle of automation systems in the automotive manufacturing and proposes a novel component-based approach suitable for automation system design and implementation.

2012 ◽  
Vol 591-593 ◽  
pp. 1371-1375
Author(s):  
Joseph Polden ◽  
Zeng Xi Pan ◽  
Nathan Larkin ◽  
Stephen van Duin

In order to achieve higher productivity and flexibility, manufacturing industry is turning increasingly to robotics based lean automation systems. This lean approach presents a series of new challenges for the control, operation and programming of robotic hardware implemented to carry out a range of manufacturing processes. This paper reviews relevant path planning methodologies alongside a specific set of requirements for a manipulator operating in a lean automation workcell. Then, new challenges to path planning for a lean automation system are presented. Finally, a framework for a new path planner is developed and its performance is compared to existing methods.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-14
Author(s):  
Nafi’u Maharazu ◽  
Suleiman Hamisu Malumfashi

This study attempted to explore the gradual advancement of modern technology in libraries, it distinguished old and new innovations, creative efforts of librarians and information technologists through the various generations of automation revolution. The study also identify various components of the Integrated Library System (ILS) or Library Management System (LMS) which are used or being used in Umaru Musa Yar’adua University (UMYU) library as well as the services automated by the system. The study also identifies the exact reasons for adopting KOHA in UMYU library. It also explains the impact, challenges associated with the University library automation system. The study adopted quantitative approach as research paradigm; with survey as research methods. Questionnaires were the instrument used for data collection. The population of 42 library staff was used for the study. The data for the study were analyzed using tables and frequencies. From the findings of the study the two main services fully automated were the Circulation and Cataloguing, the library adopted the use of the KOHA ILS as it was a free open source and secondly for greater opportunities and innovation. However, retrospective conversion and Low Level of Literacy were the major challenges and a setback for the KOHA ILS implementation in the library understudy. The study recommended the need for the increase investment in the automation project to speed up the implementation of automation systems.


Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (8) ◽  
pp. 2660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iván Froiz-Míguez ◽  
Tiago Fernández-Caramés ◽  
Paula Fraga-Lamas ◽  
Luis Castedo

In recent years, the improvement of wireless protocols, the development of cloud services and the lower cost of hardware have started a new era for smart homes. One such enabling technologies is fog computing, which extends cloud computing to the edge of a network allowing for developing novel Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services. Under the IoT fog computing paradigm, IoT gateways are usually utilized to exchange messages with IoT nodes and a cloud. WiFi and ZigBee stand out as preferred communication technologies for smart homes. WiFi has become very popular, but it has a limited application due to its high energy consumption and the lack of standard mesh networking capabilities for low-power devices. For such reasons, ZigBee was selected by many manufacturers for developing wireless home automation devices. As a consequence, these technologies may coexist in the 2.4 GHz band, which leads to collisions, lower speed rates and increased communications latencies. This article presents ZiWi, a distributed fog computing Home Automation System (HAS) that allows for carrying out seamless communications among ZigBee and WiFi devices. This approach diverges from traditional home automation systems, which often rely on expensive central controllers. In addition, to ease the platform’s building process, whenever possible, the system makes use of open-source software (all the code of the nodes is available on GitHub) and Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware. The initial results, which were obtained in a number of representative home scenarios, show that the developed fog services respond several times faster than the evaluated cloud services, and that cross-interference has to be taken seriously to prevent collisions. In addition, the current consumption of ZiWi’s nodes was measured, showing the impact of encryption mechanisms.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 310
Author(s):  
Shantanu Kumar ◽  
Ahmed Abu-Siada ◽  
Narottam Das ◽  
Syed Islam

With the global trend to digitalize substation automation systems, International Electro technical Commission 61850, a communication protocol defined by the International Electrotechnical Commission, has been given much attention to ensure consistent communication and integration of substation high-voltage primary plant assets such as instrument transformers, circuit breakers and power transformers with various intelligent electronic devices into a hierarchical level. Along with this transition, equipment of primary plants in the switchyard, such as non-conventional instrument transformers, and a secondary system including merging units are expected to play critical roles due to their fast-transient response over a wide bandwidth. While a non-conventional instrument transformer has advantages when compared with the conventional one, extensive and detailed performance investigation and feasibility studies are still required for its full implementation at a large scale within utilities, industries, smart grids and digital substations. This paper is taking one step forward with respect to this aim by employing an optimized network engineering tool to evaluate the performance of an Ethernet-based network and to validate the overall process bus design requirement of a high-voltage non-conventional instrument transformer. Furthermore, the impact of communication delay on the substation automation system during peak traffic is investigated through a detailed simulation analysis.


BMC Genomics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhenyang Liao ◽  
Xunxiao Zhang ◽  
Shengcheng Zhang ◽  
Zhicong Lin ◽  
Xingtan Zhang ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Structural variations (SVs) are a type of mutations that have not been widely detected in plant genomes and studies in animals have shown their role in the process of domestication. An in-depth study of SVs will help us to further understand the impact of SVs on the phenotype and environmental adaptability during papaya domestication and provide genomic resources for the development of molecular markers. Results We detected a total of 8083 SVs, including 5260 deletions, 552 tandem duplications and 2271 insertions with deletion being the predominant, indicating the universality of deletion in the evolution of papaya genome. The distribution of these SVs is non-random in each chromosome. A total of 1794 genes overlaps with SV, of which 1350 genes are expressed in at least one tissue. The weighted correlation network analysis (WGCNA) of these expressed genes reveals co-expression relationship between SVs-genes and different tissues, and functional enrichment analysis shows their role in biological growth and environmental responses. We also identified some domesticated SVs genes related to environmental adaptability, sexual reproduction, and important agronomic traits during the domestication of papaya. Analysis of artificially selected copy number variant genes (CNV-genes) also revealed genes associated with plant growth and environmental stress. Conclusions SVs played an indispensable role in the process of papaya domestication, especially in the reproduction traits of hermaphrodite plants. The detection of genome-wide SVs and CNV-genes between cultivated gynodioecious populations and wild dioecious populations provides a reference for further understanding of the evolution process from male to hermaphrodite in papaya.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 75-81
Author(s):  
Ahad Mirza Baig ◽  
Alkida Balliu ◽  
Peter Davies ◽  
Michal Dory

Rachid Guerraoui was the rst keynote speaker, and he got things o to a great start by discussing the broad relevance of the research done in our community relative to both industry and academia. He rst argued that, in some sense, the fact that distributed computing is so pervasive nowadays could end up sti ing progress in our community by inducing people to work on marginal problems, and becoming isolated. His rst suggestion was to try to understand and incorporate new ideas coming from applied elds into our research, and argued that this has been historically very successful. He illustrated this point via the distributed payment problem, which appears in the context of blockchains, in particular Bitcoin, but then turned out to be very theoretically interesting; furthermore, the theoretical understanding of the problem inspired new practical protocols. He then went further to discuss new directions in distributed computing, such as the COVID tracing problem, and new challenges in Byzantine-resilient distributed machine learning. Another source of innovation Rachid suggested was hardware innovations, which he illustrated with work studying the impact of RDMA-based primitives on fundamental problems in distributed computing. The talk concluded with a very lively discussion.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 561-570
Author(s):  
Khoa Dang ◽  
Igor Trotskii

AbstractEver growing building energy consumption requires advanced automation and monitoring solutions in order to improve building energy efficiency. Furthermore, aggregation of building automation data, similarly to industrial scenarios allows for condition monitoring and fault diagnostics of the Heating, Ventilations and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system. For existing buildings, the commissioned SCADA solutions provide historical trends, alarms management and setpoint curve adjustments, which are essential features for facility management personnel. The development in Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0, as well as software microservices enables higher system integration, data analytics and rich visualization to be integrated into the existing infrastructure. This paper presents the implementation of a technology stack, which can be used as a framework for improving existing and new building automation systems by increasing interconnection and integrating data analytics solutions. The implementation solution is realized and evaluated for a nearly zero energy building, as a case study.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-56
Author(s):  
Mouna Abidi ◽  
Md Saidur Rahman ◽  
Moses Openja ◽  
Foutse Khomh

Nowadays, modern applications are developed using components written in different programming languages and technologies. The cost benefits of reuse and the advantages of each programming language are two main incentives behind the proliferation of such systems. However, as the number of languages increases, so do the challenges related to the development and maintenance of these systems. In such situations, developers may introduce design smells (i.e., anti-patterns and code smells) which are symptoms of poor design and implementation choices. Design smells are defined as poor design and coding choices that can negatively impact the quality of a software program despite satisfying functional requirements. Studies on mono-language systems suggest that the presence of design smells may indicate a higher risk of future bugs and affects code comprehension, thus making systems harder to maintain. However, the impact of multi-language design smells on software quality such as fault-proneness is yet to be investigated. In this article, we present an approach to detect multi-language design smells in the context of JNI systems. We then investigate the prevalence of those design smells and their impacts on fault-proneness. Specifically, we detect 15 design smells in 98 releases of 9 open-source JNI projects. Our results show that the design smells are prevalent in the selected projects and persist throughout the releases of the systems. We observe that, in the analyzed systems, 33.95% of the files involving communications between Java and C/C++ contain occurrences of multi-language design smells. Some kinds of smells are more prevalent than others, e.g., Unused Parameters , Too Much Scattering , and Unused Method Declaration . Our results suggest that files with multi-language design smells can often be more associated with bugs than files without these smells, and that specific smells are more correlated to fault-proneness than others. From analyzing fault-inducing commit messages, we also extracted activities that are more likely to introduce bugs in smelly files. We believe that our findings are important for practitioners as it can help them prioritize design smells during the maintenance of multi-language systems.


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