Mapping Apple Orchards in the municipality of São Joaquim (Santa Catarina, Brazil) using Sentinel-2 data

This study carried out a mapping procedure focusing on apple orchards considering the planted area, spatial location, altitude range, slope interval, and presence of anti-hail nets in the city of São Joaquim (Southern Santa Catarina Plateau, Brazil). Spectral images from the Sentinel-2 orbital platform acquired in August 2018 and an enhanced digital elevation model from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) were used. In a GIS application configured with the SIRGAS 2000,4 reference system and UTM cartographic projection, Sentinel-2 constellation images and digital elevation models from the SRTM mission and more recently refined with sensor data Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) were added. All images were resampled to a spatial resolution of 10m. The results were validated based on high spatial resolution images available from Google Earth. The results show that São Joaquim has a planted area of 7,974.80 ha, and only 12% use an anti-hail coverage system. The majority of the orchards range from one to five ha and belong to small producers. More than 50% of the orchards are between 1,200 and 1,400 m in altitude, with 45% of orchards located in areas with slopes between 8 to 20%. Interestingly, most of the orchards are concentrated in a radius of up to 20km from the urban center of São Joaquim, where industries and cooperatives are located for packaging, processing, and logistics. This study demonstrated that orbital data from Sentinel-2 can effectively quantify the distribution of apple orchards, being a viable and effective alternative for collecting information for agricultural monitoring. In this way, it enables efficient planning of apple production, such as technical assistance, marketing with producers, and production flow.

An Efficient Approach for Uncertain Event Detection in RFID Complex Event Processing

The globalization of manufacturing has increased the risk of counterfeiting as the demand grows, the production flow increases, and the availability expands. The intensifying counterfeit issues causing a worriment to companies and putting lives at risk. Companies have ploughed a large amount of money into defensive measures, but their efforts have not slowed counterfeiters. In such complex manufacturing processes, decision-making and real-time reactions to uncertain situations throughout the production process are one way to exploit the challenges. Detecting uncertain conditions such as counterfeit and missing items in the manufacturing environment requires a specialized set of technologies to deal with a flow of continuously created data. In this paper, we propose an uncertain detection algorithm (UDA), an approach to detect uncertain events such as counterfeit and missing items in the RFID distributed system for a manufacturing environment. The proposed method is based on the hashing and thread pool technique to solve high memory consumption, long processing time and low event throughput in the current detection approaches. The experimental results show that the execution time of the proposed method is averagely reduced 22% in different tests, and our proposed method has better performance in processing time based on RFID event streams.

Resilience Control Room Operator During Pandemic Covid-19

The control room acts as a central nervous system facility. This is where important decisions, using complex systems, are made every day. The actions of control room operators have a direct impact on uptime, production yields, quality, and industrial plant safety. In addition, long working hours per shift result in fatigue, irregularity of circadian rhythms and sleep cycles, and decreased cognitive performance at the end of day and night shifts. Fatigue causes decreased alertness, attention span, poor memory, and concentration and affect other mental factors. ADNOC Gas Processing established Fatigue Risk Management Taskforce (FRMT) to adapt practices to the specific conditions and create a safer working environment, leading to happier and healthier employees and an overall community. In industries that run continuous and heavy-duty plants such as Oil, gas, and petrochemical, shift work ensures production flow. After the outbreak of Covid-19, business needs to adapt quickly so that their activities can run. The finding suggests that the workers' cognitive performance is reduced, shown by the increase of triggered alarm by the average of 14.39% higher than before the outbreak of Covid-19. However, with the ability to adapt and implement control and monitoring measures, the number of alarm rate gradually decreased. The study framework was proven to be a valuable tool that decision-makers can use, especially to measure the performance of control room workers and their psychological fatigue affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Evaluation of a hydrocyclone system and ceramic membrane for oily water treatment purposes

The management of produced water is a huge challenge for oil companies, as environmental agencies use increasingly strict laws and require a primary treatment for the disposal of waste. The conventional methods used in the treatment of oily water, cannot satisfactorily remove the environmental laws. A system is presented, with a hydrocyclone built within LABDES/UFCG, tested and characterized with oily waters with different levels of oil concentrations, in order to study its efficiency. It was observed that for different oil concentrations in the hydrocyclone feed stream of (100 to 2000) mg L-1, total oil and grease, reached an efficiency above 85%. The set of ceramic membranes, MR01-10 and MR02-20, with porosities of 43% and 52%, were used in the assembly of two types of systems, SMC-DE and SMC-FC. SMC-FC showed a removal rate above 80% for an average production of 165 L h-1 m-2. However, SMC-DE proved to be more efficient in relation to TOG, above 98%, but less efficient in relation to the permeate production flow, 63.3 L h-1.m-2. The hydrocyclone system with cross-flow ceramic membrane (SH-MC/FC) was chosen to study the reduction of oil in oily water, for a concentration range of (200 to 2000) mg L-1, which presented a removal rate above 95%.

A heijunka study for the production of standard parts included in a customized finished product

Efficient order execution plays a crucial role in the activity of every company. In production planning it is important to find a balance between the fluctuations of orders and stability of production flow regarding the company. One of the methods of achieving this goal is heijunka (production leveling). This paper presents a study of choosing the best variant of the production planning and control system for the production of standard parts. Three variants are investigated regarding delays in order delivery. The analysis of variants was conducted using a simulation method. The method of choosing the best variant for the production system being investigated is also proposed. The results show that the best variant is a mix of production leveling and production "for stock".

A Systematic Modelling Procedure to Design Agent-Oriented Control to Coalition of Capabilities—In the Context of I4.0 as Virtual Assets (AAS)

Manufacturing systems need to meet Industry 4.0 (I4.0) guidelines to deal with uncertainty in scenarios of turbulent demand for products. The engineering concepts to define the service’s resources to manufacture the products will be more flexible, ensuring the possibility of re-planning in operation. These can follow the engineering paradigm based on capabilities. The virtualization of industry components and assets achieves the RAMI 4.0 guidelines and (I4.0C), which describes the Asset Administration Shell (AAS). However, AAS are passive components that provide information about I4.0 assets. The proposal of specific paradigms is exposed for managing these components, as is the case of multi-agent systems (MAS) that attribute intelligence to objects. The implementation of resource coalitions with evolutionary architectures (EAS) applies cooperation and capabilities’ association. Therefore, this work focuses on designing a method for modeling the asset administration shell (AAS) as virtual elements orchestrating intelligent agents (MAS) that attribute cooperation and negotiation through contracts to coalitions based on the engineering capabilities concept. The systematic method suggested in this work is partitioned for the composition of objects, AAS elements, and activities that guarantee the relationship between entities. Finally, Production Flow Schema (PFS) refinements are applied to generate the final Petri net models (PN) and validate them with Snoopy simulations. The results achieved demonstrate the validation of the procedure, eliminating interlocking and enabling liveliness to integrate elements’ behavior.

A Systematic Modelling Procedure to Design Agent-Oriented Control to Coalition of Capabilities - In the Context of I4.0 as Virtual Assets (AAS)

Manufacturing systems need to meet I4.0 guidelines to deal with uncertainty in scenarios of turbulent demand for products. The engineering concepts to define the service’s resources to manufacture the products will be more flexible, ensuring the possibility of re-planning in operation. These can follow the engineering paradigm based on capabilities. The virtualization of industry components and assets achieves the RAMI 4.0 guidelines and (I4.0C), which describes the Asset Administration Shell (AAS). However, AAS are passive components that provide information about I4.0 assets. The proposal of specific paradigms is exposed for managing these components, as is the case of multi-agent systems (MAS) that attribute intelligence to objects. The implementation of resource coalitions with evolutionary architectures (EAS) applies cooperation and capabilities’ association. Therefore, this work focuses on designing a method for modeling the asset administration shell (AAS) as virtual elements orchestrating intelligent agents (MAS) that attribute cooperation and negotiation through contracts to coalitions based on the engineering capabilities concept. The systematic method suggested in this work is partitioned for the composition of objects, AAS elements, and activities that guarantee the relationship between entities. Finally, Production Flow Schema (PFS) refinements are applied to generate the final Petri net models (PN) and validate them with Snoopy simulations. The results achieved demonstrate the validation of the procedure, eliminating interlocking and enabling liveliness to integrate elements behavior.

A Systematic Modelling Procedure to Design Agent-Oriented Control to Coalition of Capabilities - In the Context of I4.0 as Virtual Assets (AAS)

Manufacturing systems need to meet I4.0 guidelines to deal with uncertainty in scenarios of turbulent demand for products. The engineering concepts to define the service’s resources to manufacture the products will be more flexible, ensuring the possibility of re-planning in operation. These can follow the engineering paradigm based on capabilities. The virtualization of industry components and assets achieves the RAMI 4.0 guidelines and (I4.0C), which describes the Asset Administration Shell (AAS). However, AAS are passive components that provide information about I4.0 assets. The proposal of specific paradigms is exposed for managing these components, as is the case of multi-agent systems (MAS) that attribute intelligence to objects. The implementation of resource coalitions with evolutionary architectures (EAS) applies cooperation and capabilities’ association. Therefore, this work focuses on designing a method for modeling the asset administration shell (AAS) as virtual elements orchestrating intelligent agents (MAS) that attribute cooperation and negotiation through contracts to coalitions based on the engineering capabilities concept. The systematic method suggested in this work is partitioned for the composition of objects, AAS elements, and activities that guarantee the relationship between entities. Finally, Production Flow Schema (PFS) refinements are applied to generate the final Petri net models (PN) and validate them with Snoopy simulations. The results achieved demonstrate the validation of the procedure, eliminating interlocking and enabling liveliness to integrate elements behavior.

Multi-functional oilfield production chemicals: maleic-based polymers for gas hydrate and corrosion inhibition

Several chemical problems can occur during the production of oil and gas through flow lines. This includes corrosion, scale deposition and gas hydrate plugging. Three separate chemicals may be needed to treat these issues. Kinetic hydrate inhibitors (KHIs) are used in cold oil or natural gas production flow lines to prevent the formation and plugging of the line with gas hydrates. They are often injected concomitantly with other production chemicals such as corrosion and scale inhibitors. KHIs are specific low molecular weight water-soluble polymers with amphiphilic groups formulated with synergists and solvents. However, many corrosion inhibitors (CIs) are antagonistic to the KHI polymer, severely reducing the KHI performance. It would be preferable and economic if the KHI also could act as a CI. We have explored the use of maleic-based copolymers as KHIs as well as their use as film-forming CIs. KHIs were tested using a natural gas mixture in high pressure rocking cells using the slow constant cooling test method. A terpolymer from reaction of vinyl acetate:maleic anhydride copolymer with cyclohexy lamine and 3,3-di-n-butylaminopropylamine (VA:MA-60% cHex-40% DBAPA), gave excellent performance as a KHI, better than the commercially available poly(N-vinyl caprolactam) (PVCap). CO2 corrosion inhibition was measured by Linear Polarization Resistance (LPR) in a 1 litre CO2 bubble test equipment using C1018 steel coupons. The new terpolymer gave good CO2 corrosion inhibition in 3.6 wt% brine, significantly better than PVCap, but not as good as a commercial imidazoline-based surfactant corrosion inhibitor. The terpolymer also showed good corrosion inhibition efficiency at high salinity conditions, (density 1.12 g/cm3). VA:MA-60% cHex-40% DBAPA shifted the open-circuit potential to more positive values and significantly decreased the corrosion rate.