RDCAPP: A real-time dynamic CAPP system for an FMS

Computer-aided process planning (CAPP) systems need to consider the uncertain nature of the shop-floor prior to the identification of job routes and processing sequences. This paper describes the design and development of a prototype, real-time dynamic CAPP (RDCAPP) system for a multimachining-centre flexible manufacturing system (FMS). Concepts relevant to this research include CAPP, profile input using group technology (GT), artificial-intelligence-based expert systems, and FMSs.RDCAPP considers facility characteristics, machine capacity and the current shop-floor conditions prior to developing a process plan Input to the system is through a GT code and additional auxiliary interactive inputs. RDCAPP uses uncertainty management techniques to keep track of and adapt to changes in shop-floor status. The paper discusses the architecture of RDCAPP in detail. The system was tested rigorously and its outputs validated. Ideas for future research are presented.     

Antihyperglycaemic efficacy of kombucha in streptozotocin-induced rats

Kombucha is a fermented tea beverage produced by fermenting sugared black tea with kombucha mat (consists of bacteria and yeast strains). Diabetes mellitus is group of metabolic disorders characterized by hyperglycaemia resulting from defects in insulin secretion, action or both. The present study was aimed to delineate the antihyperglycaemic effect of lyophilized extract of kombucha in streptozotocin-induced experimental rats. After the experimental period of 45 days we observed that kombucha supplementation with 6 mg/kg bw significantly decreased glycosylated haemoglobin (HbA_1c) and increased the levels of plasma insulin, haemoglobin and tissue glycogen which was decreased up on streptozotocin (STZ) treatment and also significantly reversed the altered activities of gluconeogenic enzymes such as glucose-6-phosphatase, fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase and glycolytic enzymes such as hexokinase in the tissues of experimental rats. Thus, our results substantiate that kombucha found to exert hypoglycaemic effect in STZ-induced diabetic rats. These findings suggest that kombucha may be considered as a potential functional food candidate for future applications as functional food supplement for the treatment and prevention of diabetes.     

Minimizing makespan in a flow shop with two batch-processing machines using simulated annealing

This paper aims at minimizing the makespan of two batch-processing machines in a flow shop. The processing times and the sizes of the jobs are known and non-identical. The machines can process a batch as long as its capacity is not exceeded. The processing time of a batch is the longest processing time among all the jobs in that batch. The problem under study is NP-hard for makespan objective. Consequently, a heuristic based on Johnson's algorithm and a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm is proposed. Random instances were generated to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. The results obtained from SA were compared with the proposed heuristic and a commercial solver. The SA outperformed both the heuristic and the commercial solver. On larger problem instances, the heuristic outperformed the commercial solver.     

Evaluating legacy assets in the context of migration to SOA

A key activity in the introduction of service oriented architecture (SOA) for an organization is to evaluate the suitability of existing assets for service orientation. We identify the core principles of SOA as the guide lines in evaluating the suitability of the existing assets. The existing metrics and guidelines that could be helpful in evaluating these principles are surveyed. This would benefit an organization in understanding the effort needed for migration and also to build proper services from the existing assets.

Control structure for interpreting handwritten addresses

Describes the control structure for an intelligent handwritten address interpretation system. The system takes a grey-level address image, segments the address into lines and words, parses the address into meaningful syntactic categories, recognizes words using dynamically generated lexicons, and determines the destination code with the aid of postal directories     

A review of petri-net applications in manufacturing

Petri-nets (PNs) can model concurrent and synchronous activities in a manufacturing system at various levels of abstraction. They have been used for modelling manufacturing systems, knowledge representation on the shop floor, process-planning applications, decisionsupport tasks, etc. PNs are being used in a growing variety of application areas. This paper focuses on PN applications in manufacturing. A comprehensive review of research is provided. The paper also describes the design and application of PNs in the modelling of a manufacturing cell, the representation of the working of the cell at various levels of abstraction, and the inferences that can be drawn through PN use. Ideas for future research are presented.     

A probabilistic theory of model-based diagnosis

Diagnosis of a malfunctioning physical system is the task of identifying those component parts whose failures are responsible for discrepancies between observed and correct system behavior. The result of diagnosis is to enable system repair by replacement of failed parts.The model-based approach to diagnosis has emerged as a strong alternative to both symptom-based and fault-model-based approaches. Hypothesis generation and hypothesis discrimination (action selection) are two major subtasks of model-based diagnosis. Hypothesis generation has been partially resolved by symbolic reasoning using a subjective notion of parsimony such as non-redundancy. Action selection has only been studied for special cases, e.g. probes with equal cost. Little formal work has been done on repair selection and verification.This paper presents a probabilistic theory for model-based diagnosis. An objective measure is used to rank hypotheses, viz., posterior probabilities, instead of subjective parsimony. Fault hypotheses are generated in decreasing probability order. The theory provides an estimate of the expected diagnosis cost of an action. The result of the minimal cost action is used to adjust hypothesis probabilities and to select further actions.The major contributions of this paper are the incorporation of probabilistic reasoning into model-based diagnosis and the integration of repair as part of diagnosis. The integration of diagnosis and repair makes it possible to troubleshoot failures effectively in complex systems.