Tool Condition Monitoring and Metrology Demonstrations

Date: April 8, 2008

Time: 8:30 AM-10:30 AM; 11:00 AM-1:00 PM; 1:30 PM-3:30 PM

Tool Conditioning Monitoring: Tool Condition Monitoring helps you save tooling, reduce your scrap and machine downtimes. Typical savings varies between 10% and 40% reduction in costs

Machine Tool Metrology: Machine Tool Metrology will help to identify and correct geometric and dynamic errors in the machine tools.

The session will incorporate live demonstrations of the technologies on the smart machine test bed. These two-hour sessions at TechSolve, Cincinnati are open to any executive, but each session is limited to 15 attendees. There is no fee for this event, but pre-registration is required.

Degradation Rate Modeling of Ohio State Bridges

The Ohio Department of Transportation Bridge Management System (BMS) currently uses Organizational Performance Indices (OPI) to track bridge performance each year. Currently, ODOT makes decisions based on four OPI ratings. The goal is to keep bridge deficiency levels below specified levels for OPI ratings, on which the bridge performance is evaluated. First, the historical data from disparate sources is extracted, cleaned and transformed taking into consideration data quality issues. A suitable schema is implemented to construct a data warehouse. Secondly, a stochastic Markov chain model is built to study the effect of geographical location, bridge type material and age on the degradation rate of over 45,000 bridges. The results give an insight into bridge performance issues, ability to study bridge performance with time and degradation rates. Bridges in northern and southern districts and bridges with concrete and steel material have different degradation rates. Three age groups of new, middle and old aged bridges exhibit different degradation rates (three piece-wise stationary) indicating age is an important factor that affects degradation. The bridge prediction and performance model developed will facilitate inspection scheduling, cost analysis and budget optimization. This will aid in management and decision making activities.

Author: Nirupama Zambre

Complete article available as a PDF file.

Smart Machine Supervisory System: Concept, Definition and Application

In today’s competitive world, manufacturers have realized that they need to embrace automation as their mantra to success. However, the impact of automation primarily concerns with the effectiveness of process monitoring and control systems. There is a need for a closed loop supervisory system, which integrates and coordinates individual process modules for real-time adjustment, conflict resolution and priority assignment. Monitoring and control of multiple process modules will result in higher productivity, better quality and prognostics for near-zero breakdown performance.
In this paper, we define the supervisory system as open architecture system that integrates and coordinates individual process monitoring and control modules such that a real-time globally optimal machining solution is delivered for maximum productivity. The Smart Machine Platform Initiative (SMPI) is currently being managed by TechSolve in support with Coalition on Manufacturing Technology Infrastructure. SMPI efforts at TechSolve concentrate on six thrust areas including the supervisory system. We then proceed to explain the technical and functional requirements, benefits and architectural details with emphasis on the knowledge system. A prototype supervisory system application is explained with objectives, setup, technologies identified and results.
We conclude with further insights into issues and implications for successful realization of a smart machine supervisory system.

Reference: Smart Machine Supervisory System: Concept, Definition and Application, Atluru S, Deshpande A. Proceedings of 62nd MFPT conference, May 6-8, 2008, Virginia Beach, VA

Exponential Growth of Open Source

Software development is undergoing a major change away from a fully closed software process towards a process that incorporates open source software in products and services. Just how significant is that change? To answer this question we need to look at the overall growth of open source as well as its growth rate. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the growth of more than 5000 active and popular open source software projects. We show that the total amount of source code as well as the total number of open source projects is growing at an exponential rate. Previous research showed linear and quadratic growth in lines of source code of individual open source projects. Our work shows that open source is expanding into new domains and applications at an exponential rate.

Authors: Amit Deshpande, Dirk Riehle

Reference: The Total Growth of Open Source; Deshpande A., Riehle D.; The Fourth International Conference on Open Source Systems, Sep 2008, Milan, Italy.

Continuous Integration in Open Source Software Development

Commercial software firms are increasingly using and contributing to open source software. Thus, they need to understand and work with open source software development processes. This paper investigates whether the practice of continuous integration of agile software development methods has had an impact on open source software projects. Using fine-granular data from more than 5000 active open source software projects we analyze the size of code contributions over a project’s life-span. Code contribution size has stayed flat. We interpret this to mean that open source software development has not changed its code integration practices. In particular, within the limits of this study, we claim that the practice of continuous integration has not yet significantly influenced the behavior of open source software developers.

Reference: Continuous Integration in Open Source Software Development; Deshpande A., Riehle D.; IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 2008, Volume 275/2008, 273-280, DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-09684-1_23

First Look IE 8

For a past three days I am using evaluating the new Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 version. The first thing you will notice is that the domain highlight feature in IE 8. The exact domain name is highlighted excluding the other address parameters.

IE 8 comes with many other features for web developers and web designers. The ‘Activities’ allow you to map an address on webpage directly to Yahoo or MSN (not Google) maps. The map opens up in small interactive window without forcing the user to leave the current window. Other useful Activities currently supported include eBay product search, Facebook and StumbleUpon. The Webslices, developer tools and Ajax features empower the user to use the web in better and intelligent way. Check out the Ajax navigation features which stores the browser state using Ajax (especially useful when browsing a map). The developer tools allow the easy debugging of the applications within the IE eliminating the need to download auxiliary applications.

Yahoo mail is still not compatible with IE8. I had to switch back to mail Classic to access my email. Also my iGoogle personal homepage also gave some error with IE 8. However this should be temporary and resolved shortly. Anyway I will better use Firefox for time being but will certainly keep an 'open' eye on IE8 development.