Service Interface Translation. An Interoperability Approach

Interoperability plays an important role in Industry 4.0. Interoperability in the engineering process allows the automation of the engineering phase, reducing the human effort involved and the associated engineering costs. It improves the quality of the engineering process and its overall efficiency. Nevertheless, the diversity of available standards, devices, and systems leads to great levels of heterogeneity and makes it difficult to achieve the aforementioned interoperability. As the lack of interoperability increases, a generic solution to the problem is increasingly demanded by the industry. This paper approaches the interoperability problem from a service interface perspective. A novel approach is presented to address service interface heterogeneity. The proposed solution is based on service interface translation, which is achieved via the generation of service interfaces. A new system, the consumer interface generator system, has been designed and implemented to generate interface instances to solve the interoperability mismatches between service consumers and providers at runtime. In this paper, the autonomous consumer interface generation process, the system architecture, and the generated interface instance are described. The proposed approach has been validated through practical experimentation, including the implementation of a system prototype and a testbed.

Landslide costs on the national road network of Laos

Compared to most other countries in south and southeast Asia, Laos has a low road network density and low traffic volumes. Much of the road network is located in mountainous terrain where landslides cause regular engineering damage and blockage to traffic. The wet season of 2018 was particularly severe, and triggered many landslides that blocked roads for hours, and days in some cases. The cost of clearing these landslides amounted to an average of almost US$ 5,000 per km. Because of the relatively low traffic volumes that use the mountain road network, traffic costs due to road blockage delays were generally significantly lower per kilometre than engineering costs. Nevertheless, economic analysis demonstrates that investments in landslide stabilisation measures amounting to an average of US$ 50,000 for landslides above the road and US$ 120,000 for those below the road are economically justified if, without these measures, long and frequent delays would ensue. In certain cases, investments much higher than these can be justified. A priority list for landslide stabilisation is developed and outline cost estimates are prepared. Recommendations are made for enhanced landslide management and roadside slope improvement, and a comparison is made between the situation in Laos with that in Vietnam, Bhutan, Nepal and the Philippines. It is concluded that the imperative for investment is even greater in these countries, and especially in Nepal and the Philippines on account of the higher incidence of landslide hazards and greater volumes of road traffic.

Smart City Solution Engineering

Many smart city applications have been proposed and demonstrated over the years; however, moving to large-scale deployment is still scarce. A contributing factor to this scarcity is the lack of well-established engineering methodologies for large-scale smart city applications. This paper addresses engineering methodologies and tools for large-scale smart city application engineering, implementation, deployment, and evolution. A model-based engineering approach based on IoT, SOA, and SysML is proposed and applied to a smart streetlight application. Engineering considerations for streetlight area enlargement and updated technology generations with additional capabilities are discussed. The proposed model-based engineering approach provides considerable scaling simplifications and opportunities for considerable savings on engineering costs. The model-based engineering approach also provides good documentation that enables technology evolution specifications that support both maintenance and emerging behaviours.

The Blood in the Feud

This chapter focuses on the staple form of violence in the sagas: feud. Feud was medieval Iceland’s most important organizing metaphor, at whose core lay individuated enforcement of the social contract through tit-for-tat reciprocity. The chapter examines two paradigmatic feuding episodes, one from the Family Sagas (Þorsteins þáttr stangarhǫggs), the other from the Contemporary Sagas (Íslendinga saga’s account of events centred around Sæmundr Jónsson, c.1215–22). Interlacing these case studies sheds light on how textual strategies converge and diverge across the two genres (and in other, related genres, such as Iceland’s law code, Grágás). Accident is central to both episodes, as is the violent response to it, underscoring the intimate involvement of violence with risk. When misfortune struck, Icelanders faced, first, uncertainty about how to understand what had just happened. Their choices tended to read the past as violent. Second, they needed to decide what do to next. Again, their inclination was towards responding violently. Finally, hard times provided opportunities for social engineering: costs and burdens had to be shared, avoided, or redirected among allies and onto adversaries. Feud, whose logic was well established and widely embraced, proved a versatile solution for channelling such social risks and opportunities, whether through opting into elective affinities (redefining one’s own group boundaries) or by enforcing passive solidarity on others. Icelanders distinguished drengir, ‘gentlemen’, from ójafnaðarmenn, ‘bullies’, by the skill with which they did or did not make their feuding claims seem plausible

Natural solutions versus technical solutions

‘Building with Nature’ solutions seem like a logical alternative to technical solutions. Working with nature instead of against it might save civil engineering costs. But will it also generate additional civil engineering benefits? Typical engineering benefits are related to flood prevention, transportation and sand mining. Both technical and natural solutions can produce these benefits. Natural solutions, however, may produce additional ecosystem benefits. These are rarely accounted for in investment decisions about engineering projects. This is not surprising as there are no rules stating that and how these benefits should be calculated. The Netherlands is the first country in Europe to install a national guideline for monetising ecosystem benefits within cost-benefit analyses in the public sector. This article shows how this guideline provides a systematic approach to prevent both over- and under-estimations of ecosystem benefits. The key to this approach is to make a distinction between goods and services that directly generate welfare while linking those to conditional functions that indirectly generate welfare. This approach is applied to flood defence in the Scheldt estuary in Belgium. It resulted in benefit estimates that were large enough to compensate for the extra cost of natural solutions. Taking ecosystem benefits into account influenced the flood protection decision of the national government: the natural ‘inundation areas’-solution was preferred to the technical solution of ‘dyke heightening’.

Sandy land structural consolidation engineering drive modern agricultural development in China’s Mu Us Sandy Land

<p>Sandification has become a major obstacle to China’s regional farmland protection, economic development and ecological civilization construction. Sandy land consolidation technologies and sustainable utilization modes will provide farmland for modern agricultural development. We introduced structural consolidation theory to sandy land rehabilitation from the aspects of soil body building, soil layer reconstruction and soil quality improvement. Filed experiments were conducted in Mu Us Sand Land to explore the effects of dry mixtures of guest material (red clay and loess) and sand at four volume ratios (1:1, 1:2, 1:3 and 1:5) on crop yield, soil properties and maize root growth. Red clay treatments had higher sandy land structural consolidation engineering costs and crop yields than loess treatments. Red clay and loess had significant promotion of maize and soybean yields at volume ratios of 1:3. The maximum potato yield is 42501 kg ha<sup>-1</sup> and 37332 kg ha<sup>-1</sup> in red clay treatment at volume ratio of 1:5 and in loess treatment at volume ratio of 1:5, respectively. Red clay and loess significantly increased clay and silt ratio and regulated the soil total nitrogen concentration and soil organic matter content during the critical growth stage of maize. Lowest root biomass in surface soil and lowest surface/subsoil root biomass ratio mediated maize growth in red clay treatment at volume ratio of 1:3. Red clay can be used to consolidate sandy land and develop modern agriculture in the long-term according to the engineering costs and crop yields. Enhanced land productivity, increased land transfer rent and extra wage income provide a stainable and stable increase in households’ income for escaping from poverty. Spatial overlap between red clay with sandy land makes red clay as a new available material for sand land consolidation and utilization from China to global scale. China’s sandy land structural consolidation engineering and sustainable utilization practices will contribute prescriptions to global desertification fighting and rural poverty alleviation. Regional water resource carrying capacity evaluation should be emphasized before sandy land structural consolidation engineering popularization.</p>

Integration and Verification Approach of ISTSat-1 CubeSat

Large-scale space projects rely on a thorough Assembly, Integration, and Verification (AIV) process to provide the upmost reliability to spacecraft. While this has not traditionally been the case with CubeSats, their increasing role in space science and technology has led to new verification approaches, including in educational CubeSats. This work describes the integration and verification approach for ISTSat-1, which is an educational CubeSat from the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal that partially discards the typical stage-gate approach to spacecraft development in favor of a more iterative approach, allowing for the system-level verification of unfinished prototypes. Early verification included software functional testing on a flatsat model, thermal vacuum and vibration testing on a battery model, ionizing radiation testing on the on-board computer, and non-ionizing radiation (EMC) testing on all subsystems. The testing of functional prototypes at an early development stage led to uncovering system-level errors that would typically require hardware redesign at a later project stage. The team considers the approach to be useful for educational projects that employ a small, co-located team with low non-recurring engineering costs.

Towards automated engineering and validation of cyber-physical energy systems

The massive deployment of distributed generators from renewable sources in recent years has led to a fundamental paradigm change in terms of planning and operation of the electric power system. The usage of advanced automation and information and communication technology is a key element to handle these new challenges and to turn the traditional power system into a smart grid. The implementation of such complex systems solutions is associated with increasing development complexity resulting in increased engineering costs. The traditional engineering methods used for power system automation were not intended to be used for applications of this scale and complexity. However, the usage of proper methods, automation architectures, and corresponding tools holds huge optimization potential for the engineering process. Therefore, this work presents a model-based engineering and validation support system, covering the overall engineering process for smart grid applications.

Testing of the MTConnect–OPC UA Companion Specification

Smart Manufacturing (SM) is the future of the manufacturing industry. Seamless, accurate, and fast connection and communications among devices are critical for SM. By leveraging information technologies, devices can dynamically communicate with each other to increase factory production, while decreasing engineering costs. MTConnect and Open Platform Communications - Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) standards facilitate such communication. MTConnect is a manufacturing interoperability standard that provides a semantic vocabulary for manufacturing equipment to provide structured contextualized data with no proprietary format. The OPC-UA is a platform-independent standard through which various systems and devices can communicate by sending messages between clients and servers over various networks. OPC-UA enables syntactic interoperability between clients and servers. The MTConnect - OPC-UA Companion Specification integrates the two standards to provide manufacturers more efficient and powerful interoperability capabilities. In this paper, we report the test of version 1.02 of this companion specification. This specification sets a standard means of communication between MTConnect devices and OPC-UA Clients/Servers based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) structures. To test the standard, the following components have been developed: an OPC-UA Server, an OPC-UA Client, a probe that translates data structures in MTConnect XML format to MTConnect OPC-UA Companion XML format that can be recognized by the server, a MTConnect XML data parser, and a MTConnect device simulator. The activities of the standard testing include passing varying data structures and objects through the server and confirming the information is received accurately by the client. The findings of the standard testing will be provided to the standard developing organizations for improving the future versions of the standard.

Review on Building-Integrated Photovoltaics Electrical System Requirements and Module-Integrated Converter Recommendations

Since building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) modules are typically installed during, not after, the construction phase, BIPVs have a profound impact compared to conventional building-applied photovoltaics on the electrical installation and construction planning of a building. As the cost of BIPV modules decreases over time, the impact of electrical system architecture and converters will become more prevalent in the overall cost of the system. This manuscript provides an overview of potential BIPV electrical architectures. System-level criteria for BIPV installations are established, thus providing a reference framework to compare electrical architectures. To achieve modularity and to minimize engineering costs, module-level DC/DC converters preinstalled in the BIPV module turned out to be the best solution. The second part of this paper establishes converter-level requirements, derived and related to the BIPV system. These include measures to increase the converter fault tolerance for extended availability and to ensure essential safety features.