A Review of “One for the road; Drunk driving since 1900”

Finding locations for locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) has become a major challenge in the United States, and no land uses are more controversial than nuclear weapons research, nuclear waste management, and nuclear power generation. In this research, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), we explore whether U.S. government-owned land already devoted to nuclear uses would provide logical locations for new nuclear activities. We surveyed people living within 50 miles of six existing DOE nuclear weapons sites, asking about their attitudes toward banning additional nuclear activities at these sites and about factors that might influence these attitudes. Although the majority said prohibiting additional nuclear uses at these sites was a high priority, many were willing to entertain the idea. This work suggests ways to make nuclear siting more successful by considering pre-existing sites, and encouraging the DOE to try harder to open communication channels with the public and its representatives.     

Competitive and sustainable manufacturing by means of ultra-efficient factories in urban surroundings

The rapid growth of the world population, the finiteness of resources on our planet Earth and the ongoing tendency towards urbanisation result in the need to question our actions and economic activities, also for industrial enterprises. A paradigm shift to decouple growth and resource utilisation is needed. By means of ultra-efficiency, factories are targeted, whose positive impact to their surrounding is optimised instead of only minimising negative influences. In the contribution, the concept of ultra-efficient factories and first tools for their implementation are introduced. Therefore, the term ultra-efficient factory is defined based on the state of the art. On this definition, spheres of activity for ultra-efficient factories under consideration of urban surroundings are determined. For the spheres of activity, criteria to assess the according maturity of companies are identified and aggregated into a comprehensive maturity model. The maturity model enables the determination of potentials for advancements of companies. To support the industrial application of the theoretic work, industrial best practices are determined and a visual tool is developed.     

模块化机器的安全白皮书

SmartFactory~(KL)工作组1 "智能基础设施"专门处理模块化工业4.0生产设施的安全问题。其旨在提供一种工厂结构,通过模块化等手段确保其灵活性和可变性。本安型模块具有常规的功能安全性。但是,模块间依然存在依赖关系。在支持未知模块的模块化系统中,还需要一个新的安全体系结构。去年,该概念被整合到了工业4.0生产设施中,以实例证明该概念可在当今技术的基础上得以实施。在安全和机器通信的实施中,仅采用了一条单线共存。机器和机器模块可以在运行期间插入生产线或从生产线移除,而不会影响工厂的其它部分。必要的安全相关参数将根据此处导入的安全配置文件自动进行协商、配置和发布。要求如下文所述。     

Robust output regulation by observer-based feedforward control

In this paper, a new method for the design of disturbance and reference feedforward controllers with disturbance observers is presented for systems, where the disturbance input location is unknown. The resulting controller achieves asymptotic tracking in the presence of the disturbances despite plant parameter variations and changing disturbance input locations, and is therefore robust. It is shown that the new controller design method is dual to Davison's approach for the application of the internal model principle. However, different from the latter one, the new design procedure allows a simple and complete prevention of controller windup by driving the disturbance observer with the saturated input. Furthermore, a straightforward separate reference channel design is possible in order to improve the tracking behaviour if the types of the reference and the disturbance signals differ. A simple example demonstrates the advantages of the new design method.