Multimedia networks: issues and challenges

Video on demand, teleconferencing, digital libraries, and remote tutoring systems are just a few of the many distributed multimedia applications that have emerged in recent years. Widespread use of such applications requires networks that can offer transport services to both discrete media (such as text and digital images) and continuous media (such as audio and video). The discussion explores some of the issues involved in the design of such networks     

VANETs路由协议综述

随着车联网VANETs(Vehicular Ad hoc Networks)应用日益受到关注,研究者对VANETs路由协议进行了深入研究.为此,首先总结VANETs的特点及应用,再介绍了基于位置的、基于拓扑以及基于广播路由的概念,并着重分析和总结了近期路由协议的核心思想以及特点,此外,还从应用场景、前提条件、虚拟设备要求、电子地图需求、路由恢复策略以及转发模式六个方面对路由协议进行全面比较,最后,展望了VANETs路由技术的未来研究方向.     

Process analytical technologies and real time process control a review of some spectroscopic issues and challenges

Process analytical technologies (PAT) are increasingly being explored and adopted by pharmaceutical and industrial biotechnology companies for enhanced process understanding, Quality by Design (QbD) and Real Time Release (RTR). To achieve these aspirations there is a critical need to extract the most information, and hence understanding, from complex and often ‘messy’ spectroscopic data. This contribution reviews a number of new approaches that have been shown to overcome the limitations of existing calibration/modelling methodologies and describes a practical system which would enhance robustness of the closed loop process control system and overall ‘control strategy’. Application studies are described of the use of on-line spectroscopy for the monitoring and control of a downstream solvent recovery column, batch cooling crystallization and pharmaceutical fermentation.     

Artificial life and embodied robotics: current issues and future challenges

In this article we explore some of the issues currently facing researchers in the interface between the twin fields of Artificial Life and Robotics, and the challenges and potential synergy of these two areas in the creation of future robotic life forms. There are three strands of research which we feel will be of key importance in the possible development of future embodied artificial life forms. These are the areas of evolutionary robotics and evolutionary humanoid robotics in particular, probabilistic robotics for deliberation, and robot benchmarking with associated metrics and standards. We briefly explore each of these areas in turn, focusing on our current research in each field and what we see as the potential issues and challenges for the future. This work was presented in part at the 13th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 31–February 2, 2008     

Scalable,parallel computers: Alternatives,issues, and challenges

The 1990s will be the era of scalable computers. By giving up uniform memory access, computers can be built that scale over a range of several thousand. These provide highpeak announced performance (PAP), by using powerful, distributed CMOS microprocessor-primary memory pairs interconnected by a high performance switch (network). The parameters that determine these structures and their utility include: whether hardware (a multiprocessor) or software (a multicomputer) is used to maintain a distributed, or shared virtual memory (DSM) environemnt; the power of computing nodes (these improve at 60% per year); the size and scalability of the switch; distributability (the ability to connect to geographically dispersed computers including workstations); and all forms of software to exploit their inherent parallelism. To a great extent, viability is determined by a computer's generality—the ability to efficiently handle a range of work that requires varying processing (from serial to fully parallel), memory, and I/O resources. A taxonomy and evolutionary time line outlines the next decade of computer evolution, included distributed workstations, based on scalability and parallelism. Workstations can be the best scalables.     

Content-based image authentication: current status, issues, and challenges

With today’s global digital environment, the Internet is readily accessible anytime from everywhere, so does the digital image manipulation software; thus, digital data is easy to be tampered without notice. Under this circumstance, integrity verification has become an important issue in the digital world. The aim of this paper is to present an in-depth review and analysis on the methods of detecting image tampering. We introduce the notion of content-based image authentication and the features required to design an effective authentication scheme. We review major algorithms and frequently used security mechanisms found in the open literature. We also analyze and discuss the performance trade-offs and related security issues among existing technologies.     

Digitalisation and the regulation of work: theoretical issues and normative challenges

This paper presents an introductory overview of the main issues that the digitalisation of industrial enterprises known as Industry 4.0 raises for social sciences. First, it will show that this technological transition—which, however, is unfinished and is seen to be in continuity with the so-called “third industrial revolution”—cannot be interpreted with reference to a deterministic approach. It can be analysed more usefully as a range of decisions affecting the industrial policies of national states, the conception and design of machines, their adoption in production processes and finally their use by operators. Second, certain aspects of Industry 4.0 of special concern in terms of organisation of work processes will be analysed on various scales (from inter-company transactions to the specific tasks of individual workers). Finally, we will explain various hypotheses that social and economic research is developing with regard to the new technologies’ controversial effects on employment.     

Manufacturing Enterprise Control and Management System Engineering: paradigms and open issues

Over several decades, control theory has developed its own set of more or less formal modelling techniques designed to automatically control the dynamic behaviour of complicated manufacturing systems and processes. The emerging Internet society is addressing new enterprise control and management integration (ECMI) challenges for agile business to manufacturing (B2M) purposes which enlarge the traditional setting of Automation Engineering to the systems engineering (SE) approach. In order to cope with the increasing complexity of integrating intelligence/information-intensive manufacturing automation within the networked manufacturing enterprise, Automation Engineering should be integrated into the systems engineering approach to achieve a holistic approach that treats in fine the technical operational manufacturing system emerging from the deployment of an ad hoc combination of formal and informal partial models. This paper emphasises that a Holonic Manufacturing Execution System Engineering (HMESE) approach should be a relevant B2M SE approach along with other relevant scientific, industrial and educational areas dealing with information and intelligence control and management issues in agile automation.     

Design issues in adaptive control

An integrated approach to the design of practical adaptive control algorithms is presented. Many existing ideas are brought together, and the effect of various design parameters available to a user is explored. The theory is extended by showing how the problem of stabilizability of the estimated model can be overcome by running parallel estimators. It is shown how asymptotic tracking of deterministic set points can be achieved in the presence of unmodeled dynamics     

Ergonomic issues in quality control

This paper explores the characteristics of the quality control function with a focus on ergonomics design to the production system. The objective is to provide a set of design attributes to aid in the work environment which enhances the quality control function. It is important to recognize the operator as being an important part of the man/machine interface. According to Biberman, “The human part of the system deserves special attention: As a critical part of any man/machine system, the human operator receives information, processes it, and takes some specific action upon the system” (1973, p. 92). The thought of quality usually forms a mental picture consisting of uniformity, the conformity to an established standard, or a degree of consistence in production. Another definition is the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its abilities to satisfy a given need (Stevens 1981).     

Identification and control — Closed-loop issues

An overview is given of some current research activities on the design of high-performance controllers for plants with uncertain dynamics, based on approximate identification and model-based control design. In dealing with the interplay between system identification and robust control design, some recently developed iterative schemes are reviewed and special attention is given to aspects of approximate identification under closed-loop experimental conditions.     

Process diagnostics using trace alignment: Opportunities, issues, and challenges

Business processes leave trails in a variety of data sources (e.g., audit trails, databases, and transaction logs). Hence, every process instance can be described by a trace, i.e., a sequence of events. Process mining techniques are able to extract knowledge from such traces and provide a welcome extension to the repertoire of business process analysis techniques. Recently, process mining techniques have been adopted in various commercial BPM systems (e.g., BPM|one, Futura Reflect, ARIS PPM, Fujitsu Interstage, Businesscape, Iontas PDF, and QPR PA). Unfortunately, traditional process discovery algorithms have problems dealing with less structured processes. The resulting models are difficult to comprehend or even misleading. Therefore, we propose a new approach based on trace alignment. The goal is to align traces in such a way that event logs can be explored easily. Trace alignment can be used to explore the process in the early stages of analysis and to answer specific questions in later stages of analysis. Hence, it complements existing process mining techniques focusing on discovery and conformance checking. The proposed techniques have been implemented as plugins in the ProM framework. We report the results of trace alignment on one synthetic and two real-life event logs, and show that trace alignment has significant promise in process diagnostic efforts.