An Effectiveness Modelling Approach for IoT-Based Smart Grids

The smart grid is a new paradigm that enables highly efficient energy production, transport, and consumption along the whole chain from the source to the user. The smart grid is the combination of classical power grid with emerging communication and information technologies. IoT-based smart grid will be one of the largest instantiations of the IoT in the future. The effectiveness of IoT-based smart grid is mainly reflected in observability, real-time analysis, decision-making, and self-healing. A proper effectiveness modeling approach should maintain the reliability and maintainability of IoT-based smart grids. In this chapter, a multi-agent-based approach is proposed to model the architecture of IoT-based smart grids. Based on the agent framework, certain common types of agents are provided to describe the operation and restoration process of smart grids. A case study is demonstrated to model an IoT-based smart grid with restoration, and the interactive process with agents is proposed simultaneously.

The Contribution of Obeya for Business Intelligence

The main objective of the study is to minimize interdepartmental communication, potentiation of fast and efficient decision making, and computerization of data. Using software such as MS Excel® and MS Power BI®, a Power BI® tool was conceived to be capable of incorporating, for the entire company, the dashboards that collect the main KPIs of each department. After the tool was implemented, the company's paradigm shift was noticeable. Quickly, the weekly meeting of the planning team began to take place using the MS Power BI® dashboard. In this way, processes were automated and the important data for the normal functioning of the company became accessible to all departments, thus minimizing interdepartmental communication. The chapter shows an Obeya Digital that was implemented in a company in which all the performance indicators of each department are incorporated. In this way, information becomes accessible to all employees and manual data update processes are minimized.

From the Digital-Twin to the Cyber Physical System Using Integrated Multidisciplinary Simulation

Simulation has been a competitive differentiator for engineering-driven businesses, available at all stages of the development process and lifecycle, used by the various domains within an organization, not necessarily simulation experts. It requires discipline integration, scalability, reduced-order model, and democratization. The concept of digital transformation involves new approaches for data and lifecycle management, the understanding of the digital thread, digital twin, predictive and cognitive capabilities, including improvement of model complexity, integration of physics, increase of knowledge. These trends require bringing the physical and virtual worlds closer together and also the adoption of cyber-physical model at all stages of design, production, and operation. To overcome the drawback of simulation and the need to balance the computational effort with accuracy and efficiency, new modelization strategies are adopted with ML and AI, which use a combination of virtual and physical data for training ROM, with an order of magnitude faster than the multiphysics one.

A General Overview of E-Maintenance and Possible Applications

I4.0 concepts allow a very important approach concerning improving competitiveness of modern industry and services in several domains of economic activity. Maintenance of cyber-physical systems is an important issue that can be crucial for the availability of those systems for developing their activities in a standard way, with respective desired behavior. With the most recent evolution of methodologies and available tools, e-maintenance is a concept that has been evolved in last years, and the use of this approach is of the utmost importance for the competitiveness of companies at several levels. In this chapter, the authors highlight the benefits of using an e-maintenance approach for the success of maintenance of cyber-physical systems, mainly when, on those systems, it is critical to keep and assure the reliability of respective behavior. For this purpose, a robot, as an illustration example, is used, and some conclusions are obtained concerning this global overview and proposed approach.

Integration of Cutting-Edge Interoperability Approaches in Cyber-Physical Production Systems and Industry 4.0

Interoperability in smart manufacturing refers to how interconnected cyber-physical components exchange information and interact. This is still an exploratory topic, and despite the increasing number of applications, many challenges remain open. This chapter presents an integrative framework to understand common practices, concepts, and technologies used in trending research to achieve interoperability in production systems. The chapter starts with the question of what interoperability is and provides an alternative answer based on influential works in the field, followed by the presentation of important reference models and their relation to smart manufacturing. It continues by discussing different types of interoperability, data formats, and common ontologies necessary for the integration of heterogeneous systems and the contribution of emerging technologies in achieving interoperability. This chapter ends with a discussion of a recent use case and final remarks.

Graphical-Based Authentication System and Its Applications

Authentication systems are the protective barrier of any software. They make sure that the right people enter the system and access the right information. As per available literature, there are basically three authentication techniques. This research study is based on the knowledge-based authentication, since it is the most widely accepted technique for securing resources from unauthorized access. As an initial step, the existing knowledge-based authentication system has been studied for its highlights, comparative facts, advantages, and disadvantages. For acceptance of any secure system, the usability aspect is the first step in the authentication process. The various usability evaluation parameters of the existing systems and an approach towards developing a modified usable authentication system have been briefly discussed. An initial lab study for the proposed system was conducted to analyze the comparative results. The future scope of other dimensions, namely randomness and security, as well as a thorough investigation, has been highlighted as the research work's concluding remark.

Challenges and Applications of Cyber Physical Systems

Cyber physical systems integrate actuators or sensors with networking technologies. Latest innovations in the area lead to cyber social systems or cyber physical social systems. Industry 4.0 amalgamates all major technologies including internet of things, big data, cloud computing, and smart systems under CPS. Cyber physical systems comprise of physical layer devices connected to the internet. It has vast applications in the areas like manufacturing, healthcare, energy, automation, robotics, smart building, meteorology, and transportation. Cyber and physical components interaction, training and adaptation ability, interoperability using IoT devices, information security using firewalls and cryptosystems, system robustness, and intervention of human inside and out of the loop are the major focusing areas in any CPS. In this chapter, application areas and challenges faced by cyber physical systems are discussed in detail.

Health Index Development for Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Element Bearing

Condition monitoring (CM) is the process that assesses the health of equipment/systems at regular intervals or continuously and exposes incipient faults if any. Bearing failure is one of the foremost causes of breakdown in rotating machine, resulting in costly systems downtime. This chapter presents an application of health index (HI) for fault diagnosis of rolling element bearing (REB) which has been successfully used in diverse fields such as image processing, prognostic health management (PHM), and involves integration of mathematical and statistical concepts. There is hardly any effort done in developing HIs using different aspects of wavelet transform (WT) for fault diagnosis of REB. A comparison of the performances of the identified approaches has been made to choose the best one for REB fault diagnosis.

Development of Tangible Interfaces for Cognitive Development

This chapter presents the development of a low-cost tangible interface to enhance children's learning through collaborative storytelling, using a set of movable blocks, with a high degree of autonomy and the ability to exchange information with each other. Taking into account the context of the existing game model and on the basis of which this study was developed, the function of these removable blocks is to allow children to create and recreate their own narratives in permanent interaction by manipulating the physical blocks, which trigger the associated virtual representations (characters, e.g., animals, objects, locations, or others). It is expected that children will be able to project these representations on a screen through the activation and manipulation of the physical blocks by adding, removing, moving the blocks while interacting with each other and creating narratives. The authors have attempted to apply a method that could present a new approach to the educational gaming industry.

Intelligent Traffic Signal Monitoring System Using Image Processing

This project aims at making an intelligent traffic signal monitoring system that makes decisions based on real-time traffic situations. The choices will be such that the traditional red, green, or amber lighting scheme is focused on the actual number of cars on the road and the arrival of emergency services rather than using pure timing circuits to control car traffic by using what the traffic appears like via smart cameras to capture real-time traffic movement pictures of each direction. The control system will modify the traffic light control parameters dynamically in various directions due to changes in traffic flow, thus increasing the traffic intersection efficiency and ensuring improved traffic management. This work involves performing a traffic management study of the city.