Informatique Et Ingénierie

A significant portion of the effort and cost of developing distributed applications goes into their customization to some supporting middleware platform. Unfortunately, this investment is quickly called into question because of the rather frequent release of new middleware and the ...

Abstract. In this last decade component technology has known a fast expansion, initially with EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans), and more recently with .NET. Many companies would probably not hesitate to embrace the new technological wave of .NET components if they could ...

Résumé Dans cette dernière décennie, la technologie des composants a connu une expansion rapide, initialement avec (Entreprise JavaBeans (EJB), et plus récemment avec la technologie des composants .NET. Beaucoup de compagnies n'hésiteraient ...

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL, VOL. 38, NO. 1, JANUARY 1993 ... -,“Stochastic multivariable control: A polynomial equations approach,” IEEE Tram. Automat. Contr., vol. 25, pp. 913-919, Oct. 1980. -, “New results in state estimation and regulation,” Automat- ...

Over several decades, control theory has developed its own set of more or less formal modelling techniques designed to automatically control the dynamic behaviour of complicated manufacturing systems and processes. The emerging Internet society is addressing new enterprise control and management integration (ECMI) challenges for agile business to manufacturing (B2M) purposes which enlarge the traditional setting of Automation Engineering to the systems engineering (SE) approach. In order to cope with the increasing complexity of integrating intelligence/information-intensive manufacturing automation within the networked manufacturing enterprise, Automation Engineering should be integrated into the systems engineering approach to achieve a holistic approach that treats in fine the technical operational manufacturing system emerging from the deployment of an ad hoc combination of formal and informal partial models. This paper emphasises that a Holonic Manufacturing Execution System Engineering (HMESE) approach should be a relevant B2M SE approach along with other relevant scientific, industrial and educational areas dealing with information and intelligence control and management issues in agile automation.

The area of intelligent systems has generated a considerable amount of interest—occasionally verging on controversy—within both the research community and the industrial sector. This paper aims to present a unified framework for integrating the methods and techniques related to intelligent systems in the context of design and control of modern manufacturing systems. Particular emphasis is placed on the methodologies relevant to distributed processing over the Internet. Following presentation of a spectrum of intelligent techniques, a framework for integrated analysis of these techniques at different levels in the context of intelligent manufacturing systems is discussed. Integration of methods of artificial intelligence is investigated primarily along two dimensions: the manufacturing product life-cycle dimension, and the organizational complexity dimension. It is shown that at different stages of the product life-cycle, different intelligent and knowledge-oriented techniques are used, mainly because of the varied levels of complexity associated with those stages. Distribution of the system architecture or system control is the most important factor in terms of demanding the use of the most up-to-date distributed intelligence technologies. A tool set for web-enabled design of distributed intelligent systems is presented. Finally, the issue of intelligence control is addressed. It is argued that the dominant criterion according to which the level of intelligence is selected in technological tasks is the required precision of the resulting operation, related to the degree of generalization required by the particular task. The control of knowledge in higher-level tasks has to be executed with a strong involvement of the human component in the feedback loop. In order to facilitate the human intervention, there is a need for readily available, user-transparent computing and telecommunications infrastructure. In its final part, the paper discusses currently emerging ubiquitous systems, which combine this type of infrastructure with new intelligent control systems based on a multi-sensory perception of the state of the controlled process and its environment to give us tools to manage information in a way that would be most natural and easy for the human operator.

This paper presents a logistics framework to cope with the problem of planning and control of production flows processed on a set of work cells distributed among component firms of a virtual enterprise (VE). The constraints theory framework is employed to study constraint-based production flow coordination rules. The article discusses relationships linking structural parameters (e.g. buffer capacity, machine tool efficiency, and automated storage/retrieval systems) of VE components with material flow control guaranteeing efficient completion of work orders, and specified by such parameters as batch delivery periods, work-in-process (WIP) and make-span. The results are summarized in the form of a performance evaluation scheme. Examples using a software package that implements the proposed flow coordination methodology are provided.

... In modern manufacturing systems such as Flexible Man-ufacturing Systems (FMS) and Flexible Assembly Systems (FAS), a number of different types of parts are processed simultaneously by sets of robots and workstations linked by a transportation network [8]. Many typical ...

This paper describes a fast algorithm to compute local axial moments used for the detection of objects of interest in images. The basic idea is grounded on the elimination of redundant operations while computing axial moments for two neighboring angles of orientation. The main result is that the complexity of recursive computation of axial moments becomes independent of the total number of computed moments in a given point, i.e. it is of the order O(N) where N is the data size. This result is of great importance in computer vision since many feature extraction methods are based on the computation of axial moments. The experimental results confirm the time complexity and accuracy predicted by the theoretical analysis

A skeletonization algorithm suitable for the skeletonization of sparse shapes is described. It is based on self-organizing maps (SOM)-a class of neural networks with unsupervised learning. The so-called structured SOM with local shape attributes such as scale and connectivity of vertices are used to determine the object shape in the form of piecewise linear skeletons. The location of each vertex of piecewise linear generating lines on the image plane corresponds to the position of a particular SOM unit. This method makes it possible to extract the object skeletons and to reconstruct the planar shape of sparse objects based on the topological constraints of generating lines and estimation of scales.

ABSTRACT We deal with the problem of time-efficient extraction of structural features in a large class of structural texture images. The proposed approach of multiscale morphological texture modeling describes explicitly and concisely both shape and intensity parameters in the structural texture model. The modeling is based on a morphological skeletal representation of structural texture cells as objects of interest and the genomic growth of a texture region starting from a seed cell. This representation offers the advantage of concise description of texture cells as compared to the existing edge-based or contour-based approaches. A computationally efficient estimation of the structural texture parameters for texture segmentation tasks is proposed. The model parameter estimation and subsequent feature extraction rely on cell localization and scale-based locally adaptive binarization of the localized cells using isotropic matched filtering. The multiscale isotropic matched filter (MIMF) provides a scale- and orientation-invariant detection of structural cells regarded as multiple objects of interest in texture regions. Results of experiments pertaining to the parameter estimation from synthetic and real texture images as well as the segmentation of texture regions based on structural features are also provided. (C) 2006 SPIE and IS&T.

In this paper we describe the steps taken to solve electrothermal problems in distributed configurations. For that purpose, we computed the 3D temperature distribution in a dry type transformer by solving the Poisson equation with source terms specific to the topology under scope, that is, heat generation by Joule losses and eddy currents, as well as natural cooling on the