IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics

1. "A Novel Approach Toward Integration of Rules Into Business Processes Using An Agent-Oriented Framework"

Abstract - Every action a business process performs must be explicitly anticipated, designed for, and implemented by business professionals. The business process is dependent upon business rules (BRs) to achieve its objectives, which also involve pre- and post-conditions in the business process (BP). Most of the current techniques implement these rules directly into BPs. This will result in the BP becoming even more complicated and harder to customize. Most BRs (and laws) are buried in data warehouses as raw data. Incorporating the BRs into any BP is very complex, in terms of customization, reuse, and system integration. To overcome this problem, we propose and implement an agent-oriented framework. Using this framework, we can make the process of incorporating BR into BP less complex. The agent creates a bridge between components of the business structure, the BRs, and the BP. The BP consists of activities and sub-activities. The agent is able to communicate with BP and BRs to execute a BP. The agent can also communicate with other agents and have control over their own internal states and behavior. In this paper, we propose and implement a simple case study to execute a BP dependent upon BRs. The case study shows how the agent will synchronize, integrate, and deploy the BP.

Abstract - Customer service support is an important operation for most multinational manufacturing companies. With the advancement of internet technologies, customer services nowadays are supported through web-based systems. More recently, rapid development of the semantic web and semantic web services has prompted us to develop a semantic help-desk for supporting customer services over the semantic web environment, which is presented in this paper. In particular, a fuzzy formal concept analysis (FCA)-based approach is developed for automatic generation of fuzzy machine service ontology that can deal with uncertain information. The proposed automatic fuzzy ontology generation technique consists of the following steps: fuzzy formal concept analysis, fuzzy conceptual clustering, and ontology generation. As such, the supporting machine services provided by the proposed system will potentially improve customer satisfaction in terms of reducing machine down time and increasing productivity. In this paper, an experiment has also been conducted for performance evaluation. The experimental result shows that the proposed approach has attained good performance in terms of both accuracy and efficiency when the queries are associated with appropriate membership values, and a suitable confident threshold is set.

Abstract - Optimal control and management of power systems require extensive analyses of phenomena that can compromise their operation in order to evaluate their impact on the security and reliability levels of the electrical networks. For complex networks, this process, known as power systems contingencies analysis, requires large computational efforts, whereas computation times should be less than a few minutes for the information to be useful.
Even though many architectures based on conventional parallel and distributed systems have been widely proposed in the literature, they are characterized by low extensibility, reusability, and scalability, and so, they require a sensible hardware upgrade when more computational resources are necessary. This event is not infrequent in power systems where the constant growth of the electrical network complexity and the need for larger security and reliability levels of the plant infrastructures lead to the need of more detailed contingency analysis in shorter times.
To address this problem, this paper proposes a pervasive grid approach to define a user-friendly software infrastructure for data acquisition from electrical networks and for data processing in order to simulate possible contingencies in a real electrical network. The grid infrastructure adopts a brokering service, based on an economy-driven model, to satisfy the quality of service constraints specified by the user (i.e., a time deadline to simulate the contingencies). This paper also discusses the deployment of the infrastructure on a network of heterogeneous clusters and PCs to compute the contingency analysis of a realistic electrical network. The experimental results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution and the potential role of grid computing in supporting intensive computations in power systems.

4. "Combustion Efficiency Optimization and Virtual Testing: A Data-Mining Approach"

Abstract - In this paper, a data-mining approach is applied to optimize combustion efficiency of a coal-fired boiler. The combustion process is complex, nonlinear, and nonstationary. A virtual testing procedure is developed to validate the results produced by the optimization methods. The developed procedure quantifies improvements in the combustion efficiency without performing live testing, which is expensive and time consuming. The ideas introduced in this paper are illustrated with an industrial case study.

5. "Applying and Adapting the IEC 61346 Standard to Industrial Automation Applications"

Abstract - The IEC 61346 standard describes a reference designation system for identifying the objects and structuring the information of virtually any kind of technical system. The generality of the standard leads in some cases to a slightly loose definition of its concepts, which can hamper its applicability to a concrete domain. Our aim is to make the IEC 61346 standard suitable for the construction of reference designations of industrial plants. Therefore, we impose some constraints to the standard and define the process to follow in order to apply it to industrial automation applications. The removal of ambiguities should also facilitate the interoperability of computer implementations of the standard coming from different vendors. Finally, we show as well how to combine IEC 61346 to existing standards on enterprise-control system integration.

Abstract - The time-triggered approach is a well-suited approach for building distributed hard real-time systems. Since many applications of transducer networks have real-time requirements, a time-triggered communication interface for smart transducers is desirable; however, such a time-triggered interface must still support features for monitoring, maintenance, plug-and-play, etc. The approach of the Object Management Group (OMG) Smart Transducer Interface consists of clusters of time-triggered smart transducer nodes that contain special interfaces supporting configuration, diagnostics, and maintenance, without affecting the deterministic real-time communication. This paper discusses the applicability of the time-triggered approach for smart transducer networks and presents a case study application of a time-triggered smart transducer network.

7. "Application of Neural Networks in Optical Inspection and Classification of Solder Joints in Surface Mount Technology"

Abstract - The defect detection on manufactures is extremely important in the optimization of industrial processes; particularly, the visual inspection plays a fundamental role. The visual inspection is often carried out by a human expert. However, new technology features have made this inspection unreliable. For this reason, many researchers have been engaged to develop automatic analysis processes of manufactures and automatic optical inspections in the industrial production of printed circuit boards. Among the defects that could arise in this industrial process, those of the solder joints are very important, because they can lead to an incorrect functioning of the board; moreover, the amount of the solder paste can give some information on the quality of the industrial process.
In this paper, a neural network-based automatic optical inspection system for the diagnosis of solder joint defects on printed circuit boards assembled in surface mounting technology is presented. The diagnosis is handled as a pattern recognition problem with a neural network approach. Five types of solder joints have been classified in respect to the amount of solder paste in order to perform the diagnosis with a high recognition rate and a detailed classification able to give information on the quality of the manufacturing process.
The images of the boards under test are acquired and then preprocessed to extract the region of interest for the diagnosis. Three types of feature vectors are evaluated from each region of interest, which are the images of the solder joints under test, by exploiting the properties of the wavelet transform and the geometrical characteristics of the preprocessed images. The performances of three different classifiers which are a multilayer perceptron, a linear vector quantization, and a -nearest neighbor classifier are compared. The -fold cross-validation has been exploited to select the best architecture for the neural classifiers, while a number of experiments have been devoted to estimating the best value of in the -NN. The results have proved that the MLP network fed with the GW-features has the best recognition rate. This approach allows to carry out the diagnosis burden on image processing, feature extraction, and classification algorithms, reducing the cost and the complexity of the acquisition system. In fact, the experimental results suggest that the reason for the high recognition rate in the solder joint classification is due to the proper preprocessing steps.

Copyright (c)1999-2008 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE. For information on obtaining permission, send a blank email message to . By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.

IEEE Industrial Electronics Society

IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics

Volume 2, Number 3, August 2006

Access this issue at IEEEXplorer

Regular Issue Paper(S)