Method for identification and integration of design automation tasks in industrial contexts

Current industrial practice does not reflect the opportunities provided by state-of-the-art design automation methods. The limited application of computational methods to support the design process by automating design tasks is caused by the lack of methods for comprehensive design automation task definition. Therefore, potential design automation tasks are not recognized and already deployed solutions lack integration to design practice from a product lifecycle management (PLM) perspective. In response to these shortcomings, this work proposes a method for identification and integration of design automation tasks that features collaborative workshops and enterprise architecture modelling for comprehensive analysis of design processes including its technological environments. The method applies design automation task templates that contextualize the knowledge levels required for design automation task definition and the design process including its technological environments. Evaluation with three industrial cases shows that the method enables efficient identification and integration of potential design automation tasks in a PLM context. The application of knowledge levels in conjunction with enterprise architecture modelling support the identification and validation of the relevant sources of knowledge required for design automation task formalization. Thus, this work contributes by introducing and evaluating a novel method for design automation task definition that brings the opportunities of state-of-the-art design automation methods into line with requirements stemming from design practice and the related PLM.     

Internet-enabled real-time collaborative assembly modeling via an e-Assembly system: status and promise

Collaborative CAD systems enabling collaboration in computer-aided design processes among distributed designers are gaining more and more attention. Yet, such systems, especially in support of collaborative assembly modeling, are hardly achievable. Targeting this gap, this paper addresses an Internet-enabled real-time collaborative assembly modeling system, named e-Assembly. This emerging system allows a group of geographically dispersed designers to jointly build an assembly model in real time over the Internet. In particular, this paper proposes a new assembly representation, called Collaborative Assembly Representation, for Internet-based collaborative assembly modeling. Also, collaborative assembly constraint satisfaction is addressed based on three coordination rules embedded in e-Assembly. Furthermore, the system architecture and realization of e-Assembly are provided. Finally, a prototypic implementation of e-Assembly is presented for demonstration and discussion.     

Survey of collaborative drawing support tools

Along with recent experiments in the design of communication or computer tools for supporting various kinds of group working, the development ofcollaborative drawing systems has emerged as a notable research area within the field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. This paper reports a survey of the experiments in collaborative drawing support tools with an objective of reviewing how the issues of supportingcollaborative design have been addressed by the research prototypes. The survey is presented in three parts: (1) findings from the observations of group interaction in drawing and design activities, (2) a framework for classifying the design issues experimented with by prototypes developers, and (3) a categorisation of the current prototype systems by interrelating the patterns of group use observed with the system features classified. The survey indicates that there are currently at least three different strategies of developing collaborative drawing support tools, which reflect the existence of diversified understanding and technological responses to what and how human collaboration in design may be supported.     

Security architecture for virtual organizations of business web services

Virtual organizations (VO) temporarily aggregate resources of different domains to achieve a common goal. Web services are being positioned as the technological framework for achieving this aggregation in the context of cross-organizational business applications. Numerous architectures have been proposed for securing VOs, mostly for scientific research, such that they do not address all the requirements of business-oriented applications. This paper describes these additional requirements and proposes a novel architecture and approach to managing VO access control policies. Business users can focus on designing business processes, exposing web services and managing their VO partnerships, while the architecture supports and secures the web service interactions involved.     

一种基于空间变换的协同过滤推荐算法

传统的协同过滤推荐算法在实际应用中往往面临着计算可扩展性的问题。为解决此问题,文中在基于物品的协同过滤推荐的框架下,通过融合社交关系信息,提出了一种基于空间变换的协同过滤推荐算法。首先,根据用户社交网络信息,运用社区发现算法将用户划分为不同的类;其次,基于评分信息,根据用户和物品之间的对应关系找到各个用户类所对应的物品类;最后,通过各个物品对每一物品类的隶属关系,将稀疏的高维评分信息矩阵转换为一个低维稠密的物品隶属度矩阵,进而基于该矩阵进行相似度计算并进行协同过滤推荐。在公开数据集上将所提方法与其他算法进行了对比实验分析,结果表明,所提算法能够在保证推荐准确性的同时明显提升计算效率。     

A mashup based framework for multi level healthcare interoperability

Healthcare delivery is evolving from disease-centered to patient-centered care delivery where patients are active participants in their healthcare delivery. This calls for more communication and collaboration among all healthcare actors. There is also an increasing demand for personalized healthcare systems that provide effective information management, facilitate communication and collaboration, and support applications to meet user requirements. To address these challenges, we need to advance the integration and interoperability of healthcare applications in a controlled manner. Drawing upon a conceptual model from a collaborative care case study, we identified a set of interoperability requirements and developed a Mashup based interoperability framework. Our framework allows patients and other healthcare actors to engage in collaborative processes through online applications facilitated by mashups. We then use proof-of-concept implementations to demonstrate how our framework is able to facilitate different types of interoperability. We believe that collaborative technologies such as mashups can implement process interoperability requirements to support collaborative care delivery, particularly for asynchronous care delivery.     

A framework using cluster-based hybrid network architecture for collaborative virtual surgery

Research on collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) opens the opportunity for simulating the cooperative work in surgical operations. It is however a challenging task to implement a high performance collaborative surgical simulation system because of the difficulty in maintaining state consistency with minimum network latencies, especially when sophisticated deformable models and haptics are involved. In this paper, an integrated framework using cluster-based hybrid network architecture is proposed to support collaborative virtual surgery. Multicast transmission is employed to transmit updated information among participants in order to reduce network latencies, while system consistency is maintained by an administrative server. Reliable multicast is implemented using distributed message acknowledgment based on cluster cooperation and sliding window technique. The robustness of the framework is guaranteed by the failure detection chain which enables smooth transition when participants join and leave the collaboration, including normal and involuntary leaving. Communication overhead is further reduced by implementing a number of management approaches such as computational policies and collaborative mechanisms. The feasibility of the proposed framework is demonstrated by successfully extending an existing standalone orthopedic surgery trainer into a collaborative simulation system. A series of experiments have been conducted to evaluate the system performance. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework is capable of supporting collaborative surgical simulation.     

Cloud-based design and manufacturing: A new paradigm in digital manufacturing and design innovation

Cloud-based design manufacturing (CBDM) refers to a service-oriented networked product development model in which service consumers are enabled to configure, select, and utilize customized product realization resources and services ranging from computer-aided engineering software to reconfigurable manufacturing systems. An ongoing debate on CBDM in the research community revolves around several aspects such as definitions, key characteristics, computing architectures, communication and collaboration processes, crowdsourcing processes, information and communication infrastructure, programming models, data storage, and new business models pertaining to CBDM. One question, in particular, has often been raised: is cloud-based design and manufacturing actually a new paradigm, or is it just “old wine in new bottles”? To answer this question, we discuss and compare the existing definitions for CBDM, identify the essential characteristics of CBDM, define a systematic requirements checklist that an idealized CBDM system should satisfy, and compare CBDM to other relevant but more traditional collaborative design and distributed manufacturing systems such as web- and agent-based design and manufacturing systems. To justify the conclusion that CBDM can be considered as a new paradigm that is anticipated to drive digital manufacturing and design innovation, we present the development of a smart delivery drone as an idealized CBDM example scenario and propose a corresponding CBDM system architecture that incorporates CBDM-based design processes, integrated manufacturing services, information and supply chain management in a holistic sense.     

Internet驱动的产品协同装配理论和技术研究*

介绍了Internet驱动的分布式产品协同装配中的关键技术问题,协同装配设计平台的构建、产品模型呈现方法、冲突处理、协同装配信息建模和协同装配设计优化,并分析总结了目前存在的问题。最后构建了一个全面的产品协同装配系统框架。     

Development of an intelligent agent system for collaborative mold production with RFID technology

This paper presents a multi-agents system called agent-based collaborative mold production (ACMP) system. ACMP supports the collaborative and autonomous mold manufacturing outsourcing processes. The mold manufacturing outsourcing processes involve not only many manufacturing sequences but also many collaboration partners. ACMP provides autonomous features to handle three major tasks in outsourcing. They are vendor selection, task selection, and real-time outsourcing task progress tracking. This research applies the analytic hierachy process (AHP) decision models to solve the vendor selection and task selection problems. In addition, radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is adopted to provide a real-time tracking capability for remote collaboration, control and monitoring among outsourcing partners.     

MEMS的协同仿真

仿真是微机电系统(MEMS) 设计的重要手段.目前MEMS中的集成仿真方法对设计人员要求太高从而限制了其使用范围.为了充分发挥仿真在MEMS设计中的作用,把协同设计的思想引入MEMS仿真中,提出了协同仿真的设计方式.构建了MEMES的协同仿真框架,分析了其仿真流程和数据文件的构成,并阐述了节点载荷映射的混合法.最后对一个MEMS器件进行协同仿真并与集成仿真的结果进行了比较,证明了方法的可行性.     

Development of a distributed collaborative design framework within peer-to-peer environment

Distributed collaborative design and manufacture enables manufacturing organizations to maintain competitiveness in the fiercely competitive global industry. This requires that the distributed system not only maintains data consistency across globally-distributed locations seamlessly, but also allows team members to access the storage system and computing resources transparently and securely. Current grid applications mainly based on client-server architecture are inflexible and rigid for fast changing collaborations among manufacturers, especially for small and medium enterprises. In this paper, a distributed collaborative design framework is presented with a hybrid of grid and peer-to-peer technology. In order to access computational resources for design, analysis and process simulation, a meta-scheduler is designed and implemented. It helps in resource discovery and optimal utilization of resources. A test bed is established, based on the framework proposed to demonstrate a distributed collaborative design and manufacturing environment.     

协同分布式应用系统的架构研究

本文首先对于国内外协同分布式应用系统发展作了概要的论述，并总结出协同分布式应用系统架构的一些主要的性能要求。在这些要求的基础上，本文提出了一个基于Agent的架构体系模型，并对这个模型进行了阐述。     

Hybrid client-server architecture and control techniques for collaborative product development using haptic interfaces

In this paper, a collaborative product development and prototyping framework is proposed by using distributed haptic interfaces along with deformable objects modeling. Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is a promising technique for industrial product development and virtual prototyping. Network control problems such as network traffic and network delay in communication have greatly limited collaborative virtual environment applications. The problems become more difficult when high-update-rate haptic interfaces and computation intensive deformable objects modeling are integrated into CVEs for intuitive manipulation and enhanced realism. A hybrid network architecture is proposed to balance the computational burden of haptic rendering and deformable object simulation. Adaptive artificial time compensation is used to reduce the time discrepancy between the server and the client. Interpolation and extrapolation approaches are used to synchronize graphic and haptic data transmitted over the network. The proposed techniques can be used for collaborative product development, virtual assembly, remote product simulation and other collaborative virtual environments where both haptic interfaces and deformable object models are involved.     

A model-driven workflow fragmentation framework for collaborative workflow architectures and systems

This paper focuses on a workflow distribution methodology for rationally deploying workflow models onto a distributed workflow system running on cloud computing environments, and we particularly lay a stress upon that those workflow systems operable on cloud computing environments are dubbed collaborative workflow systems, which are not only built upon the collaborative workflow architectures proposed in the paper, but pursuing the so-called collaborative computing paradigm characterized by focusing collaboration over cloud computing environments. The essential idea of the workflow distribution methodology is about how to fragment a workflow model and how to allocate its fragments to each of the architectural components configuring the underlying collaborative workflow architecture and system. As a reasonable solution to realize the essential idea, the paper proposes a model-driven workflow fragmentation framework, which provides a series of fragmentation algorithms that semantically fragmentate a workflow model by considering the semantic factors - performer, role, control-flow, data-flow, etc. - of the ICN-based workflow model as fragmentation criteria. The algorithms are classified into the vertical fragmentation approach, the horizontal fragmentation approach, and the hybrid approach of both. Conclusively, this paper conceives a possible set of collaborative workflow architectures embedding the collaborative computing paradigm, and describes the detailed formalism of the framework and about how the framework works on those collaborative workflow architectures and systems.     

Exploring different technological platforms for supporting co-located collaborative games in the classroom

Computer Supported Collaborative Learning is a pedagogical approach that can be used for deploying educational games in the classroom. However, there is no clear understanding as to which technological platforms are better suited for deploying co-located collaborative games, nor the general affordances that are required. In this work we explore two different technological platforms for developing collaborative games in the classroom: one based on augmented reality technology and the other based on multiple-mice technology. In both cases, the same game was introduced to teach electrostatics and the results were compared experimentally using a real class.     

A model-driven development method for collaborative modeling tools

Collaborative modeling tools are useful for many tasks within design or learning processes. However, they are difficult to build and are usually domain-specific. In response to this situation, we propose a model-driven method for the development of domain-independent collaborative modeling tools. This method consists of a methodological framework, a conceptual framework and a technological framework. The methodological framework defines the phases to be carried out when applying the method, whilst the conceptual framework is made up of the meta-models used in the method and the transformation processes established between them. Finally, the technological framework consists of the integration of some plug-ins from the Eclipse Modeling Project with some add-ons which provide collaborative functionality. Some case studies that exemplify this development method for specific domains are explained in detail, together with comparisons with similar approaches. Thus, an initial evaluation of this approach is provided and some advantages over those other approaches are identified. A further evaluation process in the form of an empirical study of use has also been carried out. Hence, the method proves to be useful for any user who does not have advanced knowledge of groupware programming and who needs to use a collaborative modeling tool in his/her work. Moreover, each framework implies a contribution that can be used in different contexts.     

A service-oriented framework for agent-based simulations of collaborative supply chains

Current collaborative practices of supply chain management are limited to some known configurations where a dominant member sets the pace for the collaboration extent. Extending collaborative models to supply chains without a dominant member requires defining a fair assessment of costs and benefits and how they are distributed among members. To understand collaborative models and their mechanisms, simulation-based approaches are recommended as they can afford the complexity of real scenarios. However, building ad-hoc simulation models for studying complex supply chain interactions can be prohibitive in terms of both cost and time. Therefore, the availability of simulation frameworks, to be used easily by business managers and facilitating the development of those models, has a strong incentive in the quest of current business efforts to increase their supply chain performance. The objective of this work is to present a systematic and reusable serviceoriented framework for agent based simulation to support the analysis of collaborative interactions in supply chains. Results of a requirement analysis performed to this aim are described, and the fulfillment of identified requirements by the proposed framework, and capabilities thereof, are discussed.     

COWB: A cloud-based framework supporting collaborative knowledge management within biomedical communities

Despite the large acceptance of Semantic Web technologies and their key role in bioinformatics, some concerns begin to emerge about their suitability for supporting the requirements of collaborative environments where a research community shares and creates new knowledge. The paper discusses these concerns and proposes COWB (COllaborative Workspaces in Biomedicine), a framework which supports collaborative knowledge management in the context of biomedical communities. COWB is grounded on a multi-layer ontology-centric model. It harnesses both the semantic knowledge captured from ontologies and the functional knowledge about resources which extend the domain knowledge and support its management. Public and private workspaces provide an accessible representation of the collective knowledge that is incrementally created and allow the knowledge to cross the boundaries of closed local information. The paper presents the deployment of COWB in a cloud platform which severely curtails issues associated with scalability and performance. The paper shows the suitability of the proposed approach and aims to suggest how exploiting the potential of the Semantic Web technologies in the context of emergent technologies including Web 2.0, NoSQL databases and the cloud paradigm.