Transformation towards a Smart Maintenance Factory: The Case of a Vessel Maintenance Depot

The conceptualization and framework of smart factories have been intensively studied in previous studies, and the extension to various business areas has been suggested as a future research direction. This paper proposes a method for extending the smart factory concept in the ship building phase to the ship servicing phase through actual examples. In order to expand the study, we identified the differences between manufacturing and maintenance. We proposed a smart transformation procedure, framework, and architecture of a smart maintenance factory. The transformation was a large-scale operation for the entire factory beyond simply applying a single process or specific technology. The transformations were presented through a vessel maintenance depot case and the effects of improvements were discussed.

Transforming Robotic Plans with Timed Automata to Solve Temporal Platform Constraints

Task planning for mobile robots typically uses an abstract planning domain that ignores the low-level details of the specific robot platform. Therefore, executing a plan on an actual robot often requires additional steps to deal with the specifics of the robot platform. Such a platform can be modeled with timed automata and a set of temporal constraints that need to be satisfied during execution. In this paper, we describe how to transform an abstract plan into a platform-specific action sequence that satisfies all platform constraints. The transformation procedure first transforms the plan into a timed automaton, which is then combined with the platform automata while removing all transitions that violate any constraint. We then apply reachability analysis on the resulting automaton. From any solution trace one can obtain the abstract plan extended by additional platform actions such that all platform constraints are satisfied. We describe the transformation procedure in detail and provide an evaluation in two real-world robotics scenarios.

The Creation of Furniture Products from Rice Stubble

The objective of this research was to develop the transformation procedure of rice stubble in the dry season of Thailand. This would be significantly used for the creative building processes of furniture products for earning increased economic value for the people and the communities. Fiber was applied in the transformation procedure for the rice stubble, including the cementing of the formation procedure in the boiling and soaking methods. From the results from using both procedures in this research, it was found that knock-down furniture sheets had the ability to be formed as standard furniture products with JIS A 5908–1994 for the customer groups who had the most level of satisfaction to rice stubble furniture. Therefore, this resulted in a positive result affecting the reduction of the ratio of burning of rice stubble in terms of preparing the area for planting in the next season on a large scale, including decreasing the occurrence of the PM. 2.5 problem in Thailand in every winter season. As a result, this research could be considered as another choice as a proposal to present the solution guidelines for solving the PM. 2.5 problem sustainably.

Study on Generalization of Lefort’s Approach to Critical Crack Length

The critical length aIc of a mode I crack that corresponds to a vanishing of the influence of the notch stress concentration can be approximately expressed by a formula reported by Lefort. This study aimed to generalize his approach to shear mode cracks by finding a criterion for a statistical compatibility of formulae for critical lengths of cracks. It revealed that the Lefort ́s formula describes the critical crack length aIc at which the relative level of the notch effect on the mode I SIF is less than 1%. Based on this criterion, a mathematically similar formula for the critical length aIIIc was found. A part of this study was also a development of a transformation procedure suitable for fitting the obtained SIF data by simple analytical formulae and for clear related illustrative plots of results.