CARES research: product and process digitalization for design and manufacturing of prefabricated cardboard panels

Building prefabrication is facing the challenge to reduce the life-cycle impact of construction, enhance material circularity, and increase the quality of building products and processes. The paper presents the first phase of the research CARES - CArdboard RElocatable School developed with the Italian brand Archicart by Area S.r.l with the aim to prototype a temporary school unit. The work presented is focused on the industrialization of a prefabricated building technology based on the use of cardboard panels (PACOTECTM Stre-Wall panels). Cardboard is a circular and environmentally sustainable material but currently the design and manufacturing process lacks digital integration, resulting in poor quality control, limited adaptability, and lack of material optimization. To address sustainability goals, the work implemented a “file-to-factory” approach to redesign the design-manufacturing process of prefabricated cardboard panels, integrating industry 4.0 paradigms in manufacturing (automation, high-precision manufacturing) and the use of BIM tools for design to achieve better product-process quality and predictability. The redesigned workflow allows achieving sustainability goals, such as reduction of errors, reduction of material wastes, cost and time predictability, product customization, and adaptability. The workflow will be verified and tested in the design and manufacturing of prefabricated cardboard panels to build a temporary school unit.

A real-time on-chip network architecture for mixed criticality aerospace systems

ABSTRACTIntegrated Modular Avionics enables applications of different criticality levels to share the same hardware platform with an established temporal and spatial isolation. On-chip communication systems for such platforms must support different bandwidth and latency requirements of applications while preserving time predictability. In this paper, our concern is a time-predictable on-chip network architecture for targeting applications in mixed-criticality aerospace systems. The proposed architecture introduces a mixed, priority-based and time-division-multiplexed arbitration scheme to accommodate different bandwidth and latency in the same network while preserving worst-case time predictability for end-to-end communication without packet loss. Furthermore, as isolation of erroneous transmission by a faulty application is a key aspect of contingency management, the communication system should support isolation mechanisms to prevent interference. For this reason, a sampling port and isolated sampling buffer-based approach is proposed with a transmission authorisation control mechanism, guaranteeing spatial and temporal isolation between communicating systems.

Modelling and Simulating Airport Surface Operations with Gate Conflicts

ABSTRACTThe Surface Operations Simulator and Scheduler (SOSS) is a fast-time simulation of the airport surface used to rapidly develop and test new surface scheduling concepts. Gate conflicts present a challenge for surface scheduling. A late departure pushback or early arrival sharing the same gate can cause a gate conflict, which if left unmanaged, can lead to surface gridlock. Surface scheduling concepts that meter departures at their gates can increase the likelihood of gate conflicts. In real operations, hardstand areas are used to temporality park aircraft out of the way to avoid gate conflicts. New SOSS models and functionality for hardstand operations were developed to simulate gate conflict management approaches using hardstands to temporarily park either the arrival or departure out of the way of the other. Four gate conflict management approaches were simulated with surface scheduling and their effects on surface operations were compared. The four gate conflict management approaches each allowed a unique subset of resolution actions including early departure pushback, sending the departure to the hardstand, and sending the arrival to the hardstand. The gate conflict management approaches allowing arrivals to be sent to the hardstand were found to be most successful in resolving the gate conflicts and maintaining scheduler performance measured by takeoff time predictability.