Technology,work and culture

Conclusion There has been no attempt in this introduction to put forward a particular method for dealing with these challenges nor to assess the full contribution of the articles in this issue. This outline and discussion has been intended merely to stimulate interdisciplinary debate and provide some of the background to assist in making this possible. A full account would at least have involved a broader review of the background of McLoughlin and Aicholzer and Schienstock in developments within the industrial sociology or industrial relations discipline. Their contributions do, however, provide a good introduction to the traditions within which they are working and so it is not necessary to provide more information here. It is nevertheless important to note in McLoughlin's case that his analysis of technological systems and system architectures is based on earlier work by McLoughlin and his colleagues, cited in the article, on the complex nature of engineering systems and the importance of taking this complexity into account in any discussion of the impact of technology on organisation. If the result of this issue is the stimulation of system designers to read further in such areas or the encouragement of industrial sociologists to become more involved in research directed towards human-oriented system design then it will have served its purpose.     

Increasing the availability of FMS with multimedia-supported diagnostic expert systems

This paper summarizes some of the results in the field of diagnostic expert systems of the EUREKA MAINE EU 744 project FMSMAINT System. Methods and software have been developed to increase the lower-than-expected availability of expensive flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). In the work described in this paper a special emphasis has been put on efficiently integrating automatic data acquisition, data analysis supported by multimedia, and expert-system-based diagnostics. The software described has been installed in the industrial pilots participating in the project, and the modules have already also been taken to a commercial level.     

The UJI Online Robot: An Education and Training Experience

This paper describes a complete vision-based online robot system that allows controlling both an educational and an industrial robot via web. We address some of the limitations of current similar systems particularly concerning the user interface. Some of its novel features are: its adjustable autonomy, so that the user can decide the right level of interaction from high-level voice commands down to mouse clicks, reducing in this way the cognitive fatigue resulting from remote operation; the interface is predictive, by using a 3D virtual environment endowed with augmented reality capabilities, the user can predict the results of the actions before sending the command to the real robot. Thus, network bandwidth is saved and off-line task specification is possible. This high level interaction is possible thanks to some built-in modules for performing basic tasks such as automatic object recognition, image processing, autonomous grasp determination and speech recognition. Finally, the system has been tested by means of an application in the Education and Training domain. One hundred undergraduate students have been using the web-based interface in order to program Pick and Place operations with the system. The results show performance, statistics, connection rates, and the students' opinions, as a way of evaluating the convenience and usability of the user interface.     

Exoskeletons for industrial application and their potential effects on physical work load

The aim of this review was to provide an overview of assistive exoskeletons that have specifically been developed for industrial purposes and to assess the potential effect of these exoskeletons on reduction of physical loading on the body. The search resulted in 40 papers describing 26 different industrial exoskeletons, of which 19 were active (actuated) and 7 were passive (non-actuated). For 13 exoskeletons, the effect on physical loading has been evaluated, mainly in terms of muscle activity. All passive exoskeletons retrieved were aimed to support the low back. Ten-forty per cent reductions in back muscle activity during dynamic lifting and static holding have been reported. Both lower body, trunk and upper body regions could benefit from active exoskeletons. Muscle activity reductions up to 80% have been reported as an effect of active exoskeletons. Exoskeletons have the potential to considerably reduce the underlying factors associated with work-related musculoskeletal injury.

Practitioner Summary:

Worldwide, a significant interest in industrial exoskeletons does exist, but a lack of specific safety standards and several technical issues hinder mainstay practical use of exoskeletons in industry. Specific issues include discomfort (for passive and active exoskeletons), weight of device, alignment with human anatomy and kinematics, and detection of human intention to enable smooth movement (for active exoskeletons).     

Software engineering and production monitoring systems

Software that is to be designed and written for operation in the factory environment is especially difficult to conceptualize, design and successfully install. This paper focuses on some aspects of software engineering that apply to this situation and may prove useful to others involved in this profession. The particular problem that is considered in the paper is that of a Real-time Production Monitoring System although any industrial system could have been used. Monitoring industrial processes and displaying meaning ful data in real-time is extremely difficult, mainly because each component, although complementary, is functionally, electrically and temporally quite different. It is therefore difficult to design a standard factory data structure or always to find elegant processing mechanisms. In order to integrate data from these disparate sources, the system must be carefully architected, using consistent and sound software engineering principles.The paper included practical aspects of the implementation of this particular information system, which is a growing component in the management process of a typical computer-integrated manufacturing facility. The paper contains sections on human-factors engineering, fault detection and system recovery. The selection of the operating system platform is critical, and software engineering professionals should appreciate the sections devoted to the system components. Some material is based on the author's own practical experience gained in the design and implementation of several such systems.     

Tangible products: redressing the balance between appearance and action

Over the past decade, our group has approached interaction design from an industrial design point of view. In doing so, we focus on a branch of design called formgiving. Traditionally, formgiving has been concerned with such aspects of objects as form, colour, texture and material. In the context of interaction design, we have come to see formgiving as the way in which objects appeal to our senses and motor skills. In this paper, we first describe our approach to interaction design of electronic products. We start with how we have been first inspired and then disappointed by the Gibsonian perception movement [1], how we have come to see both appearance and actions as carriers of meaning, and how we see usability and aesthetics as inextricably linked. We then show a number of interaction concepts for consumer electronics with both our initial thinking and what we learnt from them. Finally, we discuss the relevance of all this for tangible interaction. We argue that, in addition to a data-centred view, it is also possible to take a perceptual-motor-centred view on tangible interaction. In this view, it is the rich opportunities for differentiation in appearance and action possibilities that make physical objects open up new avenues to meaning and aesthetics in interaction design.     

A robust a posteriori error estimate for the Fortin-Soulie finite-element method

The subject of a posteriori error estimation is widely studied, and a variety of such error estimates have been used for elasticity problems in recent years. Of particular interest is the work carried out in ^{1. and 2.}. In this paper, we derive a new a posteriori error estimator for the quadratic nonconforming Fortin-Soulie element for the error in an energy-like norm. Then, we illustrate the new error bound by presenting some numerical examples, and show an example of a sequence of adaptively refined meshes.     

A commercial perspective on universal access and assistive technology: towards implementation

This paper presents one companys perspective on the implementation and provision of universal access (UA) and assistive technology in an industrial setting. The paper addresses the need to provide accessible work-places and also accessible customer services, from legal, commercial and ethical standpoints. The company in question, Royal Mail, is one of the UKs largest employers and service providers and so has been able to gather employee and customer data often unavailable to smaller organisations.     

Analysis of an Industrial System

Studying industrial systems by simulation enables the designer to study their dynamic behaviour and to determine characteristics of the system. Unfortunately, simulation also has some disadvantages. These can be overcome by using formal methods. Formal methods allow a thorough analysis of the possible behaviours of a system, parameterised system analysis and a modular approach to the analysis of systems. We present a case study in which a model of an industrial system is studied in a formal way. For this purpose, the model is first specified and simulated using the CSP-based executable specification language . The model is translated into a model in the process algebra CRL. This enables us to give a correctness proof of the parameterised model and to study the model in isolation.     

Learning Structure from Data and Its Application to Ozone Prediction

In this paper we propose an algorithm for structure learning in predictive expert systems based on a probabilistic network representation. The idea is to have the simplest structure (minimum number of links) with acceptable predictive capability. The algorithm starts by building a tree structure based on measuring mutual information between pairs of variables, and then it adds links as necessary to obtain certain predictive performance. We have applied this method for ozone prediction in México City, where the ozone level is used as a global indicator for the air quality in different parts of the city. It is important to predict the ozone level a day, or at least several hours in advance, to reduce the health hazards and industrial losses that occur when the ozone reaches emergency levels. We obtained as a first approximation a tree-structured dependency model for predicting ozone in one part of the city. We observe that even with only three parameters, its estimations are acceptable.A causal network representation and the structure learning techniques produced some very interesting results for the ozone prediction problem. Firstly, we got some insight into the dependence structure of the phenomena. Secondly, we got an indication of which are the important and not so important variables for ozone forecasting. Taking this into account, the measurement and computational costs for ozone prediction could be reduced. And thirdly, we have obtained satisfactory short term ozone predictions based on a small set of the most important parameters.     

The Emotional Wardrobe

Since the industrial revolution, fashion and technology have been linked through the textile and manufacturing industries, a relationship that has propelled technical innovation and aesthetic and social change. Today, a new alliance is emerging through the integration of electronic technology and smart materials on the body. This study addresses the integration of technology with clothing from a fashion perspective, and examines its expressive and interactive potential. It proposes the concept of The Emotional Wardrobe: clothing that represents and stimulates emotional response through the interface of technology. It asks if fashion can offer a more personal and provocative definition of self, which actively involves the wearer in a mutable aesthetic identity. A multi-disciplinary framework combines fashion, material science and the real-time, affective computing platform, called AffectiveWare. By merging technology and fashion, The Emotional Wardrobe becomes a poetic interface, shifting emphasis from human–computer interaction to computer-aided, human–human communication.     

A simplified fuzzy multivariable structure in a manufacturing environment

Applications of fuzzy control to industrial processes are mainly of multivariable structure. Using the traditional Zadeh principle would require a multidimensional relation to be developed representing a fuzzy model of the system. Such a multidimensional relation would result in memory overload to most industrial computers. Moreover, it would result in a highly complex compositional rule of inference to achieve the final output(s) of the system. This paper proposes a new simplified technique that avoids such complexity as well as memory overload for multivariable structure. Section 2 describes the proposed simplified multivariable technique to avoid memory overload. Section 3 demonstrates these techniques in the form of a robotic welding example where the objective is to control the speed of a robotic arm following an irregular path of weld. The speed value is dependent on the cavity size and determined by the cavity width and cavity depth as inputs. Section 4 describes an experimental application of the technique applied to an industrial process in the manufacture of force transducers termed as the cornering process. This application is composed of a two-inputs-two-outputs system.     

Analysing industrial district performances: A structured approach

The goals of an organization of data and information collected from the European industrial systems and concerning networks of enterprises, mainly small-mid enterprises (SMEs), are many:

(a)

to offer an intelligent support system (ISS) to industrial analysers when they try to understand if a SME network, either cluster or industrial district, could be enforced by proper financing, or it cannot give sufficient assurance for a new development;

(b)

to offer to political people a support in understanding the dynamics of these SME networks, in order to be able to take decisions about public politics;

(c)

to give tools for analysing the performance of these industrial bodies to industrial people, mainly technicians and managers, such to be able to apply new strategies for their improvement;

(d)

to give information and data to researchers operating in university and RTD centers, such to be able to improve their knowledge about these so important industrial bodies.

To reach this goal, the aim of the EU-funded CODESNET (COllaborative DEmand & Supply NETwork) project is to give new ideas and concepts sufficient to drive the attention of the above-mentioned different types of people towards the SME networks and districts. To this aim, a crucial problem must be approached and solved: which model of a SME network should be stated and used as the basis for developing a clear and useful ISS, that is, able to collect information and data from existing SME networks and transfer such data into standard formats, easy to be read by both industrial people and scientific researchers. The present paper describes the theoretical methodology on which the data organization and interpretation adopted in the CODESNET project is based. The application of an original meta-model of SME network, developed in the mentioned project, is detailed according to the following steps. After the meta-model formulation (in Section 2), it is shown how the variables to be measured (such to have a clear understanding of the network status), have to be selected, and how the main issues concerning the design and management of the network has to be classified (Section 3). Then, it will be shown how the archive of both data/information from existing SME networks (for purpose of comparison-based analysis) and the catalogue of technical/scientific reports (for purpose of justifying the analysis considerations) has been organized in an integrated form. The scope is to give at disposal of industrial people the mentioned ISS which allow them to approach some main issues concerning the network design and management (Section 4). An example of ISS application in an Italian industrial district will be presented, such to illustrate the CODESNET results’ usefulness.     

Protocol performance measurements in a heterogeneous network environment

Reported are comparisons of TCP-, XTP¹- and UDP throughout measurements over an ATM inhouse network, the STM based part of the BERKOM^{, 2} B-ISDN and a CSMA/CD LAN. The impact of concurrent processes on the throughput performance was observed. XTP has been found to perform as well as and in some situations better than TCP/IP. Both XTP and TCP achieved about 8 Mb/s over Ethernet (ftp ˜ 8.7 Mb/s) and more than 17 Mb/s over a 140 Mb/s STM-channel of the BERKOM B-ISDN network (ftp up to 16 Mb/s). TCP/IP throughput performance on the basis of the latest Fore ATM system release available (SBA200 series) revealed a substantial increase in performance compared to previous releases of the Fore ATM network adapter. Experiments have shown that average throughput rates of up to 59 Mb/s are achievable with a SPARCstation 10 based ATM endsystem.     

Flexible Support and Management of Adaptive Workflow Processes

Workflow management and support has always been a constant challenge for workflow administrators in industry. This is characterized by the need to balance two conflicting goals—the need for control, and the need to provide sufficient flexibility for workflows to adapt to constantly changing business conditions. The traditional centralized and rigid model of workflow no longer suffices provide this balance. What is needed is an approach that provides sufficient flexibility while simultaneously providing an assurance of control for workflow administrators.In this paper, we present such an approach. Our approach is based on two bodies of research work. The first one is the OpenWater approach, wherein workflows meant to be discovered on the fly as workflow participants themselves define and execute the workflows. The second one is our earlier work on adaptive workflow, where we have developed a 3-tier architecture that supports adaptive workflow. In our paper, we enhance our 3-tier architecture with some of the OpenWater ideas, in order to develop what we have called a flexible workflow support and management architecture. We also demonstrate it on a real-life example in insurance claims processing.     

The stability problem of broadcast packet switching computer networks

Summary Certain computer networks have been implemented using a radio broadcast frequency over which a large set of terminals are allowed to transmit packets of bits; one such example is the ALOHA computer network [1]. In such systems, a basic problem is that of the blocking of terminals whose transmission of a packet has overlapped in time with transmission by some other terminal. In this paper we consider a slotted ALOHA packet transmission scheme with an infinite set of terminals each transmitting at an infinitesimally small rate. We present a probabilistic model of such a system to show that the slotted ALOHA system with an infinite population is inherently unstable. This paper confirms the simulations and results of Kleinrock and Lam [8].     

Autarky Pruning in Propositional Model Elimination Reduces Failure Redundancy

Goal-sensitive resolution methods, such as Model Elimination, have been observed to have a higher degree of search redundancy than model-search methods. Therefore, resolution methods have not been seen in high-performance propositional satisfiability testers. A method to reduce search redundancy in goal-sensitive resolution methods is introduced. The idea at the heart of the method is to attempt to construct a refutation and a model simultaneously and incrementally, based on subsearch outcomes. The method exploits the concept of autarky, which can be informally described as a self-sufficient model for some clauses, but which does not affect the remaining clauses of the formula. Incorporating this method into Model Elimination leads to an algorithm called Modoc. Modoc is shown, both analytically and experimentally, to be faster than Model Elimination by an exponential factor. Modoc, unlike Model Elimination, is able to find a model if it fails to find a refutation, essentially by combining autarkies. Unlike the pruning strategies of most refinements of resolution, autarky-related pruning does not prune any successful refutation; it only prunes attempts that ultimately will be unsuccessful; consequently, it will not force the underlying Modoc search to find an unnecessarily long refutation. To prove correctness and other properties, a game characterization of refutation search is introduced, which demonstrates some symmetries in the search for a refutation and the search for a model. Experimental data is presented on a variety of formula classes, comparing Modoc with Model Elimination and model-search algorithms. On random formulas, model-search methods are faster than Modoc, whereas Modoc is faster on structured formulas, including those derived from a circuit-testing application. Considerations for first-order refutation methods are discussed briefly.     

Heavy-Tailed Phenomena in Satisfiability and Constraint Satisfaction Problems

We study the runtime distributions of backtrack procedures for propositional satisfiability and constraint satisfaction. Such procedures often exhibit a large variability in performance. Our study reveals some intriguing properties of such distributions: They are often characterized by very long tails or heavy tails. We will show that these distributions are best characterized by a general class of distributions that can have infinite moments (i.e., an infinite mean, variance, etc.). Such nonstandard distributions have recently been observed in areas as diverse as economics, statistical physics, and geophysics. They are closely related to fractal phenomena, whose study was introduced by Mandelbrot. We also show how random restarts can effectively eliminate heavy-tailed behavior. Furthermore, for harder problem instances, we observe long tails on the left-hand side of the distribution, which is indicative of a non-negligible fraction of relatively short, successful runs. A rapid restart strategy eliminates heavy-tailed behavior and takes advantage of short runs, significantly reducing expected solution time. We demonstrate speedups of up to two orders of magnitude on SAT and CSP encodings of hard problems in planning, scheduling, and circuit synthesis.