Decision-making problems in industrial control tasks

This paper considers the design of industrial control tasks with regard to the human operator's decision-making skills and limitations. Four control tasks are described to provide illustrative material for a number of typical problems. The problems discussed are the need for memory and planning aids, the choice between on-line and off-line control, workload peaking, conflicting objectives, and the introduction of computer aids. Practical approaches towards minimising the difficulties and improving the performance of the human operator are discussed.     

A successful application of a Test-Driven Development strategy in the industrial environment

Unit Test-Driven Development (UTDD) and Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) are software development techniques to incrementally develop software where the test cases, unit or acceptance tests respectively, are specified before the functional code. There are little empirical evidences supporting or refuting the utility of these techniques in an industrial context. Just a few case studies can be found in literature within the industrial environment and they show conflicting results (positive, negative and neutral). In this report, we present a successful application of UTDD in combination with ATDD in a commercial project. By successful we mean that the project goals are reached without an extra economic cost. All the UTDD and ATDD implementations are based on the same basic concepts, but they may differ in specific adaptations to each project or team. In the implementation presented here, the business requirements are specified by means of executable acceptance tests, which then are the input of a development process where the functional code is written in response to specific unit tests. Our goal is to share our successful experience in a specific project from an empirical point of view. We highlight the advantages and disadvantages of adopting UTDD and ATDD and identify some conditions that facilitate success. The main conclusions we draw from this project are that ATDD contributes to clearly capture and validate the business requirements, but it requires an extensive cooperation from the customer; and that UTDD has not a significant impact neither on productivity nor on software quality. These results cannot be generalized, but they point out that under some circumstances a test-driven development strategy can be a possible option to take into account by software professionals.     

工控领域技术与应用发展动态

介绍了工控领域技术发展及有代表性的厂家,倡导发展工控领域民族企业自主品牌.     

Creating personalized assessments based on learner knowledge and objectives in a hypermedia Web testing application

This paper presents an adaptive Web testing system where the adaptation of the testing procedure relies on the performance, the prior knowledge and the goals and preferences of the test participants. The main aim of the paper is to discuss the utility of the adaptive assessment tool. Therefore, the paper presents the authoring process of a number of adaptive assessments, where the educators utilized different adaptive rules to create summative and formative assessments. The paper presents the employed adaptive rules and summarizes the key points of the pilot study.     

Tlib—a library to support programming with hierarchical multi-processor tasks

The paper considers the modular programming with hierarchically structured multi-processor tasks on top of SPMD tasks for distributed memory machines. The parallel execution requires a corresponding decomposition of the set of processors into a hierarchical group structure onto which the tasks are mapped. The result is a multi-level group SPMD computation model with varying processor group structures. The advantage of this kind of mixed task and data parallelism is a potential to reduce the communication overhead and to increase scalability. We present a runtime library to support the coordination of hierarchically structured multi-processor tasks. The library exploits an extended parallel group SPMD programming model and manages the entire task execution including the dynamic hierarchy of processor groups. The library is built on top of MPI, has an easy-to-use interface, and leads to only a marginal overhead while allowing static planning and dynamic restructuring.     

Learning and transfer effects in simulated industrial information processing tasks

Practice and alternation among a set of jobs are the characteristics of any jobbing industry. Learning and transfer of learning, which are the main human factors issues in practice and alternation, were investigated through laboratory simulation of two typical industrial information processing tasks. In the first experiment a location task was examined while a search task was investigated in experiment two. In both experiments two levels of task complexity, two groups of subjects, and two positions were combined in a 2 × 2 latin square formation with 800 trials in each task level. The results show that learning pattern appears to be task dependent, with quicker learning in location tasks than in search tasks. Learning also transfers differently for the tasks considered. Implications for the industrial training program for assembly tasks are discussed.     

Using a phenomenographic approach in evaluating hypermedia stories

This paper builds on research into using multimedia and hypermedia as creative writing tools and reports on a study in using a hypermedia authoring program with middle-years students at an Australian secondary school. The study explored a classroom where collaborative work built on the technical facilities and expertise of young people.     

支持向量机在工业过程中的应用

支持向量机(SVM)是一种基于统计学习理论,针对小样本学习问题的通用学习算法,它采用结构风险最小化(Structural risk minimization,SRM)准则,大大提高了模型的泛化能力,成功地解决了神经网络的过学习问题。目前主要应用在模式识别领域,在工业过程中的应用相对较少。本文首先从理论研究、算法结构、参数选择和扩展SVM4个方面详细介绍了近些年来支持向量机的研究进展;然后对SVM在工业过程中的应用现状进行分析,指出进一步研究的方向。     

Experience-based optimization of universal manipulation strategies for industrial assembly tasks

The trend towards smaller lot sizes and shorter product life cycles requires automation solutions with higher flexibility. Today’s robotic systems often are uneconomical for frequently changing boundary conditions and varying tasks due to high engineering costs needed for a well-defined supply of parts and pallets. At the same time, even small inaccuracies due to shape deviations in parts or pallets often cause high downtime. This work contributes to the robustness of industrial assembly processes with high inaccuracy concurrent to narrow tolerances. Therefore, contact-based manipulation strategies are defined, which are model-free and object-independent and solve common industrial tasks as palletizing, packaging and machine feeding. While the strategies are robust to inaccuracy up to 5 mm/5° due to localization uncertainty or object displacement, they handle usual industrial assembly tolerance of far below 1mm. The necessary flexibility and reusability for new tasks is guaranteed by hierarchical decomposition into atomic sub-strategies. In order to accelerate the execution, the manipulation strategies are customized to each specific task by unsupervised experience-based learning. The flexibility of the manipulation strategies and the progress in cycle time during the execution are shown on common industrial tasks with varying objects, tolerances and inaccuracies.     

Agent-based platform to support the execution of parallel tasks

Parallel computing has been radically evolving in the recent years from the supercomputer multi-processor centralised point of view to the modern distributed approaches such as grid computing. The availability of relatively obsolete or underused hardware and the increasing LAN and WAN interconnection speed have motivated the success of those new paradigms. In this paper, we propose the use of agent technology to improve the management, flexibility and reusability of grid-like parallel computing architectures. We present a general purpose agent-based architecture which is able to manage and execute independent parallel tasks through one or several heterogeneous computer networks – or even Internet nodes – exploiting state of the art agent mobility capabilities. A particular application of the proposed architecture to support the execution of a complex knowledge acquisition task is also introduced, showing a high scalability and a very low overhead.     

An exploratory study into whether to or not to include users in the development of industrial hypermedia applications

While there is agreement among both information system (IS) practitioners and IS researchers as to the value of user participation in IS development, the correlation between user participation and actual use or user satisfaction (surrogate measures of IS success) has been equivocal. A possible reason for the contradictory findings could be that user participation is being utilised, regardless of the levels of complexity of either the system or the task. This paper describes two exploratory case studies to test this hypothesis. Industrial hypermedia applications (IHA) were developed and qualitative data collected, through usability trials, to see the effect of user participation on user perception (extrinsic motivations of use) of the system, rather than IS success. The findings show that users should participate in the development when both the IS and the task are complex. On the other hand, when both the system and the task are not complex, user participation can be kept to a minimum. Furthermore, it is recommended that user participation should not be evaluated against IS success, but against system features.

Evaluation of a hypermedia document as a learning tool

This paper describes a classroom‐based experimental evaluation of an electronic history 'book' presented in a hypermedia environment. It was compared with a paper‐based version of the same material. Observations of children's activities and interactions revealed that they had few problems using the hypermedia document as an information source and also rated it more positively, in terms of ease of use, than those children using the paper‐based version. However, no significant differences were found between the two groups in the number of questions children completed and answered correctly, their interest in the material, and task difficulty. The implications of these findings and the role of evaluation in determining the educational value of computer‐based activities are discussed.     

Validation of an industrial analytical sensor procedure realized with a SAW-based sensor system

Mass-sensitive sensors based on surface acoustic waves (Suface Acoustic Wave Devices, SAWs) can be used for qualitative as well as for quantitative determination of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). An analytical procedure for a SAW-based sensor system used for on-line process control of VOCs in pharmaceutical industry was developed. Analytical procedures applied in pharmaceutical development and production have to meet the requirements of good manufacturing practice (GMP) and therefore a validation in compliance with the International Conference on Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH)-guidelines had to be performed. It is shown that these procedures can be successfully validated as non-chromatographic procedures according to ICH-guidelines. As a typical example, the on-line control of a HPLC gradient former was investigated. In this particular case, the sensor system has to determine the actual composition of the mobile phase and furthermore it has to discriminate possible avoidance. The following analytical performance parameters are investigated to prove the validation of the analytical procedure: Specificity, Linearity, Limit of Detection and Quantitation, Accuracy, Precision, and Robustness.     

Mobility as involvement: on the role of involvement in the design of mobile support systems for industrial application

Traditional human–computer interaction (HCI) allowed researchers and practitioners to share and rely on the ‘five E’s’ of usability, the principle that interactive systems should be designed to be effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, and easy to learn. A recent trend in HCI, however, is that academic researchers as well as practitioners are becoming increasingly interested in user experiences, i.e., understanding and designing for relationships between users and artifacts that are for instance affective, engaging, fun, playable, sociable, creative, involving, meaningful, exciting, ambiguous, and curious. In this paper, it is argued that built into this shift in perspective there is a concurrent shift in accountability that is drawing attention to a number of ethical, moral, social, cultural, and political issues that have been traditionally de-emphasized in a field of research guided by usability concerns. Not surprisingly, this shift in accountability has also received scarce attention in HCI. To be able to find any answers to the question of what makes a good user experience, the field of HCI needs to develop a philosophy of technology. One building block for such a philosophy of technology in HCI is presented. Albert Borgmann argues that we need to be cautious and rethink the relationship as well as the often-assumed correspondence between what we consider useful and what we think of as good in technology. This junction—that some technologies may be both useful and good, while some technologies that are useful for some purposes might also be harmful, less good, in a broader context—is at the heart of Borgmann’s understanding of technology. Borgmann’s notion of the device paradigm is a valuable contribution to HCI as it points out that we are increasingly experiencing the world with, through, and by information technologies and that most of these technologies tend to be designed to provide commodities that effortlessly grant our wishes without demanding anything in return, such as patience, skills, or effort. This paper argues that Borgmann’s work is relevant and makes a valuable contribution to HCI in at least two ways: first, as a different way of seeing that raises important social, cultural, ethical, and moral issues from which contemporary HCI cannot escape; and second, as providing guidance as to how specific values might be incorporated into the design of interactive systems that foster engagement with reality.     

The implementation of grammar in a hypermedia system for language learning

In this paper an interactive video system for language learning will be discussed. The various parts and media contained in the system are connected by a multitude of links which lend themselves to explorative learning. Particular attention is given to the way the grammar section is incorporated and how it is accessed.Signe Marie Sanne is associate professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Bergen. Since 1989 she has developed interactive video systems for language learning in Italian, Norwegian as a second language, English, French and Spanish. Her research interests are related to instructional design.     

Investigation of decision making process: a hypermedia approach

Research in decision making has concentrated mainly on the decision outcome (choice) rather than on the process of the decision making. This pattern is primarily due to the lack of an acceptable unobtrusive tool for investigation of the decision process. Further, the lack of a consistent decision aid in empirical works has hindered the comparison of results. The purpose of this paper is to present a flexible and adaptable computer-based system for empirical examination of information processing. The main thrust of the proposed system is to provide guidelines to the restrictive/channeling approach to system design. This system can be easily modified to suit different experimental research requirements. It should support more realistic decision tasks, which often are criticized in decision experiments. Furthermore, availability of this system should encourage more research work on the process of decision making. The nature of this support system is linked to the literature, and specifications and components of the system are provided.     

Factors influencing analysis of complex cognitive tasks: a framework and example from industrial process control

We propose that considering four categories of task factors can facilitate knowledge elicitation efforts in the analysis of complex cognitive tasks: materials, strategies, knowledge characteristics, and goals. A study was conducted to examine the effects of altering aspects of two of these task categories on problem-solving behavior across skill levels: materials and goals. Two versions of an applied engineering problem were presented to expert, intermediate, and novice participants. Participants were to minimize the cost of running a steam generation facility by adjusting steam generation levels and flows. One version was cast in the form of a dynamic, computer-based simulation that provided immediate feedback on flows, costs, and constraint violations, thus incorporating key variable dynamics of the problem context. The other version was cast as a static computer-based model, with no dynamic components, cost feedback, or constraint checking. Experts performed better than the other groups across material conditions, and, when required, the presentation of the goal assisted the experts more than the other groups. The static group generated richer protocols than the dynamic group, but the dynamic group solved the problem in significantly less time. Little effect of feedback was found for intermediates, and none for novices. We conclude that demonstrating differences in performance in this task requires different materials than explicating underlying knowledge that leads to performance. We also conclude that substantial knowledge is required to exploit the information yielded by the dynamic form of the task or the explicit solution goal. This simple model can help to identify the contextual factors that influence elicitation and specification of knowledge, which is essential in the engineering of joint cognitive systems.     

Development of a comprehensive industrial work design model

An overview of the conceptual, theoretical, and interdisciplinary approaches to industrial work design is presented. Five existing models in the area of industrial work design are reviewed. A thorough understanding of the various factors affecting industrial work design is necessary for improving worker productivity, job satisfaction, safety, health, and well-being. With this objective in mind, a comprehensive model of industrial work design is developed. The model depicts the relationship among a great many factors that affect the design of industrial work: human, machine, job, workspace, and work design factors—social, psychological, physical/physiological, organizational, and economical. The subfactors are also identified. The model shows the expected work design attributes and outcomes. Hitherto, no other work design model has included so many relevant factors/subfactors as possible into a single model. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.