Forgotten pioneers of color order. Part I: Gaspard Grégoire (1751–1846)

Some 100 years before Albert Munsell developed his color order system, French silk merchant and inventor of a technology for producing works of art in silk velours, Gaspard Grégoire, introduced a color order system based on the color attributes hue, (relative) chroma, and lightness. Conceived in the mid‐1780s, an atlas with 1350 samples was produced before 1813 and found use in French Royal manufacturing operations and educational institutions. It was followed a few years later by one with 343 samples. Grégoire's work was subsequently overshadowed by Michel‐Eugene Chevreul's more complicated and less intuitive hemispherical system of 1839. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 33, 5–9, 2008     

Breakdown of oil films and formation of residual films

The breakdown processes of oil films under quasi-static loading have been investigated by using a newly developed steel-oil-mercury system. The relationship between the thickness and breakdown ratio of a hexadecane film is represented by a single master curve independently of the indentation speed, indentation load, and temperature. The master curve shows that the breakdown process of hexadecane includes two stages; one is the decrement of the thickness without breakdown and the other is the decrement of the thickness with a drastic progress of breakdown. By solving a small amount of fatty acid in hexadecane, the thickness increases and the breakdown ratio decreases noticeably; a multilayer residual film supporting normal load is formed between two metal surfaces. Experiments at different temperatures reveal a negative relationship between the temperature and thickness of residual film, which indicates that the residual film is organized by physical interaction rather than chemical interaction. At least under a lower concentration, the residual film appears to consist of not only fatty acid molecules but also hexadecane molecules.     

Innovation in construction: a sociology of technology approach

An alternative approach to understanding innovation is made using two intersecting ideas. The first is that successful innovation requires consideration of the social and organizational contexts in which it is located. The complex context of construction work is characterized by inter-organizational collaboration, a project-based approach and power distributed amongst collaborating organizations. The second is that innovations can be divided into two modes: 'bounded', where the implications of innovation are restricted within a single, coherent sphere of influence, and 'unbounded', where the effects of implementation spill over beyond this. Bounded innovations are adequately explained within the construction literature. However, less discussed are unbounded innovations, where many firms' collaboration is required for successful implementation, even though many innovations can be considered unbounded within construction's inter-organizational context. It is argued that unbounded innovations require an approach to understand and facilitate the interactions both within a range of actors and between the actors and technological artefacts. The insights from a sociology of technology approach can be applied to the multiplicity of negotiations and alignments that constitute the implementation of unbounded innovation. The utility of concepts from the sociology of technology, including 'system building' and 'heterogeneous engineering', is demonstrated by applying them to an empirical study of an unbounded innovation on a major construction project (the new terminal at Heathrow Airport, London, UK). This study suggests that 'system building' contains outcomes that are not only transformations of practices, processes and systems, but also the potential transformation of technologies themselves.     

Average consensus in networks of dynamic agents with switching topologies and multiple time-varying delays

In this paper, we discuss average consensus problem in undirected networks of dynamic agents with fixed and switching topologies as well as multiple time-varying communication delays. By employing a linear matrix inequality method, we prove that all the nodes in the network achieve average consensus asymptotically for appropriate communication delays if the network topology is connected. Particularly, several feasible linear matrix inequalities are established to determine the maximal allowable upper bound of time-varying communication delays. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and the sharpness of the theoretical results.     

Optimal and self‐tuning fusion Kalman filters for discrete‐time stochastic singular systems

Based on the optimal fusion estimation algorithm weighted by scalars in the linear minimum variance sense, a distributed optimal fusion Kalman filter weighted by scalars is presented for discrete‐time stochastic singular systems with multiple sensors and correlated noises. A cross‐covariance matrix of filtering errors between any two sensors is derived. When the noise statistical information is unknown, a distributed identification approach is presented based on correlation functions and the weighted average method. Further, a distributed self‐tuning fusion filter is given, which includes two stage fusions where the first‐stage fusion is used to identify the noise covariance and the second‐stage fusion is used to obtain the fusion state filter. A simulation verifies the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

SUPMAX500系统在锅炉控制系统中的应用

针对动力厂35t/h锅炉的工艺控制要求，选用SUPMAX500集散控制系统。介绍了系统的软、硬件构成及其具体实施方法。     

Using classification techniques for informal requirements in the requirements analysis-supporting system

In order to efficiently develop large-scale and complicated software, it is important for system engineers to correctly understand users’ requirements. Most requirements in large-scale projects are collected from various stakeholders located in various regions, and they are generally written in natural language. Therefore, the initial collected requirements must be classified into various topics prior to analysis phases in order to be usable as input in several requirements analysis methods. If this classification process is manually done by analysts, it becomes a time-consuming task. To solve this problem, we propose a new bootstrapping method which can automatically classify requirements sentences into each topic category using only topic words as the representative of the analysts’ views. The proposed method is verified through experiments using two requirements data sets: one written in English and the other in Korean. The significant performances were achieved in the experiments: the 84.28 and 87.91 F1 scores for the English and Korean data sets, respectively. As a result, the proposed method can provide an effective function for an Internet-based requirements analysis-supporting system so as to efficiently gather and analyze requirements from various and distributed stakeholders by using the Internet.     

浅谈炼钢车间的自动控制系统

介绍了天津钢铁工业结构调整改造后的新钢铁企业炼钢车间的自动控制系统，系统的配置、主要功能，并对系统做出评价。     

制造业跟踪系统解决方案剖析

NetLinx技术的发展，使得跟踪系统发生了划时代的飞跃，在制造业上的应用更加广泛。本文以一间显像管厂为例，详细介绍了跟踪系统在制造业上的应用。