Smart control of the assembly process with a fuzzy control system in the context of Industry 4.0

Assembly line balancing is important for the efficiency of the assembly process, however, a wide range of disruptions can break the current workload balance. Some researchers explored the task assignment plan for the assembly line balancing problem with the assumption that the assembly process is smooth with no disruption. Other researchers considered the impacts of disruptions, but they only explored the task re-assignment solutions for the assembly line re-balancing problem with the assumption that the re-balancing decision has been made already. There is limited literature exploring on-line adjustment solutions (layout adjustment and production rate adjustment) for an assembly line in a dynamic environment. This is because real-time monitoring of an assembly process was impossible in the past, and it is difficult to incorporate uncertainty factors into the balancing process because of the randomness and non-linearity of these factors. However, Industry 4.0 breaks the information barriers between different parts of an assembly line, since smart, connected products, which are enabled by advanced information and communication technology, can intelligently interact and communicate with each other and collect, process and produce information. Smart control of an assembly line becomes possible with the large amounts of real-time production data in the era of Industry 4.0, but there is little literature considering this new context. In this study, a fuzzy control system is developed to analyze the real-time information of an assembly line, with two types of fuzzy controllers in the fuzzy system. Type 1 fuzzy controller is used to determine whether the assembly line should be re-balanced to satisfy the demand, and type 2 fuzzy controller is used to adjust the production rate of each workstation in time to eliminate blockage and starvation, and increase the utilization of machines. Compared with three assembly lines without the proposed fuzzy control system, the assembly line with the fuzzy control system performs better, in terms of blockage ratio, starvation ratio and buffer level. Additionally, with the improvement of information transparency, the performance of an assembly line will be better. The research findings shed light on the smart control of the assembly process, and provide insights into the impacts of Industry 4.0 on assembly line balancing.     

Occurrence and diversity of Listeria spp. in seafood processing plant environments

Listeria contamination in processing plant environments is a major issue for the seafood industry worldwide; faster and more reliable results are therefore desired for early detection and monitoring of environmental Listeria spp. This study aimed to gain a better understanding of the prevalence and diversity of Listeria spp., and to evaluate a rapid detection method, the 3M Molecular Detection Assay (MDA) Listeria, for its ability to detect Listeria spp. in environmental samples from seafood processing plants. Duplicate environmental sponge samples (n = 444) were collected from 152 different sites within three seafood processing plants, and analyzed for Listeria spp. by the MDA method (after 26 and 48 h of enrichment) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Bacteriological Analytical Manual method. Overall, detection of Listeria spp. by the two methods did not differ significantly (p > 0.05); 11 (4.9%) and 13 (5.9%) samples were positive for Listeria spp. by the MDA and FDA-BAM method, respectively. The sensitivity of the MDS was 87.0% (95% CI: 77.4–96.6%), specificity was 97.6% (95% CI: 95.5–99.7%), accuracy was 95.3%, and the positive predictive value was 89.4% (95% CI: 80.5–98.2%). Classification of 19 Listeria isolates by partial SigB sequencing analysis identified three allelic types. Twelve of these isolates were ATs 58 and 60 which were classified as Listeria monocytogenes lineage I and serotypes 1/2b, 3b, 4b, 4d, 4e, by multiplex-PCR serotyping. Six Listeria isolates were classified as Listeria innocua (AT31). Our data show that the 3M Molecular Detection Assay Listeria provides rapid and reliable results for detection and monitoring of Listeria spp., which are important for seafood processing plants. Effective Listeria monitoring programs will allow for improved development of Listeria control measures in order to minimize cross-contamination in finished products.     

A distributed energy system integrating SOFC-MGT with mid-and-low temperature solar thermochemical hydrogen fuel production

Solar thermochemical hydrogen production with energy level upgraded from solar thermal to chemical energy shows great potential. By integrating mid-and-low temperature solar thermochemistry and solid oxide fuel cells, in this paper, a new distributed energy system combining power, cooling, and heating is proposed and analyzed from thermodynamic, energy and exergy viewpoints. Different from the high temperature solar thermochemistry (above 1073.15 K), the mid-and-low temperature solar thermochemistry utilizes concentrated solar thermal (473.15–573.15 K) to drive methanol decomposition reaction, reducing irreversible heat collection loss. The produced hydrogen-rich fuel is converted into power through solid oxide fuel cells and micro gas turbines successively, realizing the cascaded utilization of fuel and solar energy. Numerical simulation is conducted to investigate the system thermodynamic performances under design and off-design conditions. Promising results reveal that solar-to-hydrogen and net solar-to-electricity efficiencies reach 66.26% and 40.93%, respectively. With the solar thermochemical conversion and hydrogen-rich fuel cascade utilization, the system exergy and overall energy efficiencies reach 59.76% and 80.74%, respectively. This research may provide a pathway for efficient hydrogen-rich fuel production and power generation.     

Survey on Passivity Based Control of Induction Machine

Induction machines (IM) constitute a theoretically interesting and practically important class of nonlinear systems. They are frequently used as wind generators for their power/cost ratio. They are described by a fifth‐order nonlinear differential equation with two inputs and only three state variables available for measurement. The control task is further complicated by the fact that IM are subject to unknown (load) disturbances and the parameters can be of great uncertainty. One is then faced with the challenging problem of controlling a highly nonlinear system, with unknown time‐varying parameters, where the regulated output, besides being unmeasurable, is perturbed by an unknown additive signal. Passivity‐based control (PBC) is a well‐established structure‐preserving design methodology which has shown to be very powerful to design robust controllers for physical systems described by Euler‐Lagrange equations of motion. PBCs provide a natural procedure to "shape" the potential energy yielding controllers with a clear physical interpretation in terms of interconnection of the system with its environment and are robust vis á vis to unmodeled dissipative effects. One recent approach of PBC is the Interconnection and Damping Assignment Passivity‐Based Control (IDA‐PBC) which is a very useful technique to control nonlinear systems assigning a desired (Port‐Controlled Hamiltonian) structure to the closed‐loop. The aim of this paper is to give a survey on different PBC of IM. The originality of this work is that the author proves that the well known field oriented control of IM is a particular case of the IDA‐PBC with disturbance.     

A design of a robust discrete-time controller

In this paper, we proposed a robust discrete-time controller. This control system, which is derived from the idea of the normalized plant, does not include plant parameters. Thus, we obtain a control system independent of plant parameters and that has the same structure as a conventional optimal servo control system. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method is fairly robust to plant parameter variations and external disturbances.     

Convergence analysis of the alternating RGLS algorithm for the identification of the reduced complexity Volterra model

In this paper we provide a convergence analysis of the alternating RGLS (Recursive Generalized Least Square) algorithm used for the identification of the reduced complexity Volterra model describing stochastic non-linear systems. The reduced Volterra model used is the 3rd order SVD-PARAFC-Volterra model provided using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and the Parallel Factor (PARAFAC) tensor decomposition of the quadratic and the cubic kernels respectively of the classical Volterra model. The Alternating RGLS (ARGLS) algorithm consists on the execution of the classical RGLS algorithm in alternating way. The ARGLS convergence was proved using the Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) method. It is noted that the algorithm convergence canno׳t be ensured when the disturbance acting on the system to be identified has specific features. The ARGLS algorithm is tested in simulations on a numerical example by satisfying the determined convergence conditions. To raise the elegies of the proposed algorithm, we proceed to its comparison with the classical Alternating Recursive Least Squares (ARLS) presented in the literature. The comparison has been built on a non-linear satellite channel and a benchmark system CSTR (Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor). Moreover the efficiency of the proposed identification approach is proved on an experimental Communicating Two Tank system (CTTS).     

浅析火力发电厂汽水系统中内径管与外径管的设计选择

按照管道加工工艺的不同,管道可分为内径控制管和外径控制管。通过热轧工艺生产的外径控制无缝钢管,可满足火力发电厂汽水系统中绝大部分管道的使用要求。对于超(超)临界机组的主蒸汽和高温再热蒸汽管道采用的P91/P92材质的大口径厚壁无缝钢管,由于对材料性能和加工工艺有特殊要求,因此宜采用内径控制管。     

煤矿工业场地道路照明接地系统问题探讨

文章简要介绍了煤矿工业场地的特点和低压配电系统接地方式分类,从安全性、经济性的角度分析了TN接地系统和TT接地系统在道路照明回路中的优缺点。通过对比TN-S系统与TT系统的接地故障电流差异、TN-S接地系统用于道路照明的等电位联结困难程度,总结出煤矿工业场地的道路照明配电系统适宜采用TT接地方式。并且详细阐述了TT接地系统剩余电流动作保护器保护整定方法和灵敏度校验方法,列举了煤矿工业场地道路照明选用TT系统时需要注意的中性线不可重复接地的问题。     

Learning fuzzy controllers in mobile robotics with embedded preprocessing

The automatic design of controllers for mobile robots usually requires two stages. In the first stage, sensorial data are preprocessed or transformed into high level and meaningful values of variables which are usually defined from expert knowledge. In the second stage, a machine learning technique is applied to obtain a controller that maps these high level variables to the control commands that are actually sent to the robot. This paper describes an algorithm that is able to embed the preprocessing stage into the learning stage in order to get controllers directly starting from sensorial raw data with no expert knowledge involved. Due to the high dimensionality of the sensorial data, this approach uses Quantified Fuzzy Rules (QFRs), that are able to transform low-level input variables into high-level input variables, reducing the dimensionality through summarization. The proposed learning algorithm, called Iterative Quantified Fuzzy Rule Learning (IQFRL), is based on genetic programming. IQFRL is able to learn rules with different structures, and can manage linguistic variables with multiple granularities. The algorithm has been tested with the implementation of the wall-following behavior both in several realistic simulated environments with different complexity and on a Pioneer 3-AT robot in two real environments. Results have been compared with several well-known learning algorithms combined with different data preprocessing techniques, showing that IQFRL exhibits a better and statistically significant performance. Moreover, three real world applications for which IQFRL plays a central role are also presented: path and object tracking with static and moving obstacles avoidance.