A Bi-Cylindrical Lens for a DRGH Antenna
Pieter Roodt, Johann Wilhelm Odendaal, Johan Joubert
et al.
Broadband double-ridged guide horn (DRGH) antennas are extensively used in antenna measurement and electromagnetic compatibility and interference testing, especially the 1–18 GHz DRGH antenna, which is widely accepted as a standard for this band. Increasing the gain of the DRGH will result in higher field strengths for EMI testing and increased sensitivity in antenna testing facilities. In this paper, a complete wideband near-field E- and H-plane phase center analysis is performed with CST, at observation points over a region inside the flared section and also outside the aperture of the DRGH. A new plano-convex intersecting bi-cylindrical lens was designed using the two discrete phase centers corresponding to the statistical mode of samples from the population of phase centers obtained from the simulated phase distributions. This new lens is a practical implementation with both convex surfaces on the inside and a planar surface on the outside of the DRGH. This makes manufacturing and mounting the lens much easier without significantly increasing the size of the DRGH antenna. The bi-cylindrical lens significantly increases the boresight gain of the DRGH antenna, while simultaneously reducing the variation in 3 dB beamwidth over most of the operating band.
Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering, Cellular telephone services industry. Wireless telephone industry
Use Cases for Terahertz Communications: An Industrial Perspective
Tommaso Zugno, Cristina Ciochina, Sharad Sambhwani
et al.
Thanks to the vast amount of available resources and unique propagation properties, terahertz (THz) frequency bands are viewed as a key enabler for achieving ultrahigh communication performance and precise sensing capabilities in future wireless systems. Recently, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) initiated an Industry Specification Group (ISG) on THz which aims at establishing the technical foundation for subsequent standardization of this technology, which is pivotal for its successful integration into future networks. Starting from the work recently finalized within this group, this paper provides an industrial perspective on potential use cases and frequency bands of interest for THz communication systems. We first identify promising frequency bands in the 100 GHz - 1 THz range, offering over 500 GHz of available spectrum that can be exploited to unlock the full potential of THz communications. Then, we present key use cases and application areas for THz communications, emphasizing the role of this technology and its advantages over other frequency bands. We discuss their target requirements and show that some applications demand for multi-Tbps data rates, latency below 0.5 ms, and sensing accuracy down to 0.5 cm. Additionally, we identify the main deployment scenarios and outline other enabling technologies crucial for overcoming the challenges faced by THz system. Finally, we summarize the past and ongoing standardization efforts focusing on THz communications, while also providing an outlook towards the inclusion of this technology as an integral part of the future sixth generation (6G) and beyond communication networks.
The SemIoE Ontology: A Semantic Model Solution for an IoE-based Industry
Marco Arazzi, Antonino Nocera, Emanuele Storti
Recently, the Industry 5.0 is gaining attention as a novel paradigm, defining the next concrete steps toward more and more intelligent, green-aware and user-centric digital systems. In an era in which smart devices typically adopted in the industry domain are more and more sophisticated and autonomous, the Internet of Things and its evolution, known as the Internet of Everything (IoE, for short), involving also people, robots, processes and data in the network, represent the main driver to allow industries to put the experiences and needs of human beings at the center of their ecosystems. However, due to the extreme heterogeneity of the involved entities, their intrinsic need and capability to cooperate, and the aim to adapt to a dynamic user-centric context, special attention is required for the integration and processing of the data produced by such an IoE. This is the objective of the present paper, in which we propose a novel semantic model that formalizes the fundamental actors, elements and information of an IoE, along with their relationships. In our design, we focus on state-of-the-art design principles, in particular reuse, and abstraction, to build ``SemIoE'', a lightweight ontology inheriting and extending concepts from well-known and consolidated reference ontologies. The defined semantic layer represents a core data model that can be extended to embrace any modern industrial scenario. It represents the base of an IoE Knowledge Graph, on top of which, as an additional contribution, we analyze and define some essential services for an IoE-based industry.
Quantitative Study of Load Stability of Quadrotor Based on Lyapunov Exponents
Tiantian Dong, Yonghong Zhang, Yunping Liu
et al.
This paper addresses the issue of dynamic instability in quadrotor caused by changes in load mass during flight. To tackle this problem, the Lyapunov exponent method is adopted to study the dynamics and motion stability of the system. This approach resolves the challenge of constructing system eigenvalues due to the nonlinearity and high order of the quadrotor. To enhance the reliability of stability analysis, a quantitative relationship between system dynamics parameters and motion stability is established by combining the dynamic model with the Lyapunov exponent method. This approach compensates for inaccuracies in theoretical modeling analysis caused by factors such as load mass changes. The experiments demonstrate that changing the wheelbase and load mass improves flight motion stability, ensuring the reliability of the quadrotor flight system. Overall, this paper provides an in-depth analysis of the motion stability of a quadrotor and proposes a reliable method for stability analysis that accounts for changes in load mass during flight.
Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering, Cellular telephone services industry. Wireless telephone industry
Retracted: Optimization of Self-Media Film and Television Content Production and Dissemination Paths under the Background of Artificial Intelligence
International Journal of Antennas and Propagation
Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering, Cellular telephone services industry. Wireless telephone industry
Integrating Battery-Less Energy Harvesting Devices in Multi-hop Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks
Dries Van Leemput, Jeroen Hoebeke, Eli De Poorter
Industrial wireless sensor networks enable real-time data collection, analysis, and control by interconnecting diverse industrial devices. In these industrial settings, power outlets are not always available, and reliance on battery power can be impractical due to the need for frequent battery replacement or stringent safety regulations. Battery-less energy harvesters present a suitable alternative for powering these devices. However, these energy harvesters, equipped with supercapacitors instead of batteries, suffer from intermittent on-off behavior due to their limited energy storage capacity. As a result, they struggle with extended or frequent energy-consuming phases of multi-hop network formation, such as network joining and synchronization. To address these challenges, our work proposes three strategies for integrating battery-less energy harvesting devices into industrial multi-hop wireless sensor networks. In contrast to other works, our work prioritizes the mitigation of intermittency-related issues, rather than focusing solely on average energy consumption, as is typically the case with battery-powered devices. For each of the proposed strategies, we provide an in-depth discussion of their suitability based on several critical factors, including the type of energy source, storage capacity, device mobility, latency, and reliability.
Future Industrial Applications: Exploring LPWAN-Driven IoT Protocols
Mahbubul Islam, Hossain Md. Mubashshir Jamil, Samiul Ahsan Pranto
et al.
The Internet of Things (IoT) will bring about the next industrial revolution in Industry 4.0. The communication aspect of IoT devices is one of the most critical factors in choosing the suitable device for the suitable usage. So far, the IoT physical layer communication challenges have been met with various communications protocols that provide varying strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, most of them are wireless protocols due to the sheer number of device requirements for IoT. This paper summarizes the network architectures of some of the most popular IoT wireless communications protocols. It also presents a comparative analysis of critical features, including power consumption, coverage, data rate, security, cost, and Quality of Service (QoS). This comparative study shows that Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) based IoT protocols (LoRa, Sigfox, NB-IoT, LTE-M ) are more suitable for future industrial applications because of their energy efficiency, high coverage, and cost efficiency. In addition, the study also presents an industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) application perspective on the suitability of LPWAN protocols in a particular scenario and addresses some open issues that need to be researched. Thus, this study can assist in deciding the most suitable protocol for an industrial and production field.
Pragmatism in industrial modelling, applied to "ladle lifetime in the steel industry"
Stein Tore Johansen, Bjørn Tore Løvfall, Tamara Rodriguez Duran
et al.
A methodology for building pragmatic physics based models (Zoric et al., 2015b) is here adapted to a use-case in the steel industry. The challenge is to predict the erosion of steel ladle linings, such that the model can support operators to decide if the lade lining can be used one more time or not. If the ladle has too thin lining 140 tons of hot liquid steel may escape out of the ladle, with huge consequences for workers and plant. The development was done with a very small core team (two developers), which is typical for many industrial developments. The adopted workflow for the development, challenges that were faced, and some model results are presented. One key learning is that development of models should allow time for maturing the process understanding, and time should be given for many iterations by "questions-responses and actions" at the various levels in the model development. The good interactions between development team and industry case owner is an important success factor. In this case the results of using the PPBM (Pragmatism in physics-based modelling) were good thanks to very successful interaction between development team and industry case owner. Combining or extending the model with use of ML methods and cognition-related methods, such as knowledge graphs and self-adaptive algorithms is discussed.
Multi-Use Trust in Crowdsourced IoT Services
Mohammed Bahutair, Athman Bouguettaya, Azadeh Ghari Neiat
We introduce the concept of adaptive trust in crowdsourced IoT services. It is a customized fine-grained trust tailored for specific IoT consumers. Usage patterns of IoT consumers are exploited to provide an accurate trust value for service providers. A novel adaptive trust management framework is proposed to assess the dynamic trust of IoT services. The framework leverages a novel detection algorithm to obtain trust indicators that are likely to influence the trust level of a specific IoT service type. Detected trust indicators are then used to build service-to-indicator model to evaluate a service's trust at each indicator. Similarly, a usage-to-indicator model is built to obtain the importance of each trust indicator for a particular usage scenario. The per-indicator trust and the importance of each trust indicator are utilized to obtain an overall value of a given service for a specific consumer. We conduct a set of experiments on a real dataset to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Factors Hindering the Adoption of DevOps in the Saudi Software Industry
Mamdouh Alenezi
DevOps has gained high importance in the global software industry due to the ease of software development, testing and deployment it provides. However, the Saudi software industry has not been able to adopt DevOps at a great pace due to various factors. This study, thus, aimed to examine different factors that hindered the adoption of DevOps in the Saudi software industry. Also, recommendations are provided at the end for Saudi Arabia to enhance the adoption of DevOps in its software industry. To accomplish the aims, this study used a literature review and interviews to gather data and examine it to produce the findings. The findings of the study highlight lack of support from organizational management and lack of laws as the major factors for the adoption of DevOps in the Saudi software industry.
Service-Based Wireless Energy Crowdsourcing
Amani Abusafia, Abdallah Lakhdari, Athman Bouguettaya
We propose a novel service-based ecosystem to crowdsource wireless energy to charge IoT devices. We leverage the service paradigm to abstract wireless energy crowdsourcing from nearby IoT devices as energy services. The proposed energy services ecosystem offers convenient, ubiquitous, and cost-effective power access to charge IoT devices. We discuss the impact of a crowdsourced wireless energy services ecosystem, the building components of the ecosystem, the energy services composition framework, the challenges, and proposed solutions.
Suivi de la dynamique de l’occupation du sol en République de Guinée par imagerie satellitaire Spot
Gabriel Jaffrain, Arthur Leroux, An Vo Quang
et al.
Comment concilier un développement agricole durable avec la lutte contre le changement climatique et la préservation de la biodiversité ? Pour relever un tel défi, les décideurs politiques, techniques et socio-économiques ont désormais accès à des informations environnementales précises et précieuses. Il s’agit notamment des images satellitaires et des données environnementales produites à partir de ces images. En Guinée, pour mener à bien les politiques publiques de gestion durable des territoires et des ressources naturelles, le gouvernement doit être en mesure de disposer d’informations fiables, cohérentes, précises et aussi actualisées que possible sur l’état et la dynamique de son territoire (artificialisation des sols, extension agricole, déforestation, extraction minière…) et sur l’évolution de certains éléments de la biosphère (forêts, savanes, zones humides, mangroves...). A cet effet, le ministère de l’Agriculture guinéen s’est appuyé sur l’expertise technique française pour élaborer un zonage agroécologique à l’échelle du pays, visant à identifier et quantifier les zones agricoles actuelles, à évaluer le potentiel agricole et obtenir une cartographie de l’occupation du sol et de sa dynamique sur une période de 10 ans (2005-2015). Ce projet a été réalisé sur deux ans dans un cadre partenarial entre une équipe d’experts thématiciens français et une équipe de techniciens et experts guinéens., pour assurer un transfert complet de compétences sur l’ensemble des activités du projet. Cette collaboration a permis la réalisation d’une couche d’occupation du sol et la mise en place d’applications pertinentes dans le domaine de l’agriculture et de l’environnement afin de fournir des outils d’aide à la décision aux multiples acteurs guinéens.
Instruments and machines, Applied optics. Photonics
Timeliness Through Telephones: Approximating Information Freshness in Vector Clock Models
Da Qi Chen, Lin An, Aidin Niaparast
et al.
We consider an information dissemination problem where the root of an undirected graph constantly updates its information. The goal is to keep every other node in the graph about the root as freshly informed as possible. Our synchronous information spreading model uses telephone calls at each time step, in which any node can call at most one neighbor, thus forming a matching over which information is transmitted at each step. We introduce two problems in minimizing two natural objectives (Maximum and Average) of the latency of the root's information at all nodes in the network. After deriving a simple reduction from the maximum rooted latency problem to the well-studied minimum broadcast time problem, we focus on the average rooted latency version. We introduce a natural problem of finding a finite schedule that minimizes the average broadcast time from a root. We show that any average rooted latency induces a solution to this average broadcast problem within a constant factor and conversely, this average broadcast time is within a logarithmic factor of the average rooted latency. Then, by approximating the average broadcast time problem via rounding a time-indexed linear programming relaxation, we obtain a logarithmic approximation to the average latency problem. Surprisingly, we show that using the average broadcast time for average rooted latency introduces this necessary logarithmic factor overhead even in trees. We overcome this hurdle and give a 40-approximation for trees. For this, we design an algorithm to find near-optimal locally-periodic schedules in trees where each vertex receives information from its parent in regular intervals. On the other side, we show how such well-behaved schedules approximate the optimal schedule within a constant factor.
RASAECO: Requirements Analysis of Software for the AECO Industry
Marko Ristin, Dag Fjeld Edvardsen, Hans Wernher van de Venn
Digitalization is forging its path in the architecture, construction, engineering, operation (AECO) industry. This trend demands not only solutions for data governance but also sophisticated cyber-physical systems with a high variety of stakeholder background and very complex requirements. Existing approaches to general requirements engineering ignore the context of the AECO industry. This makes it harder for the software engineers usually lacking the knowledge of the industry context to elicit, analyze and structure the requirements and to effectively communicate with AECO professionals. To live up to that task, we present an approach and a tool for collecting AECO-specific software requirements with the aim to foster reuse and leverage domain knowledge. We introduce a common scenario space, propose a novel choice of an ubiquitous language well-suited for this particular industry and develop a systematic way to refine the scenario ontologies based on the exploration of the scenario space. The viability of our approach is demonstrated on an ontology of 20 practical scenarios from a large project aiming to develop a digital twin of a construction site.
Assessing the Needs of the Quantum Industry
Ciaran Hughes, Doug Finke, Dan-Adrian German
et al.
Quantum information science and technology (QIST) has progressed significantly in the last decade, such that it is no longer solely in the domain of research labs, but is now beginning to be developed for, and applied in, industrial applications and products. With the emergence of this new quantum industry, a new workforce trained in QIST skills and knowledge is needed. To help support education and training of this workforce, universities and colleges require knowledge of the type of jobs available for their students and what skills and degrees are most relevant for those new jobs. Additionally, students need to know how to tailor their degrees to best align with the current needs of the quantum industry. We report on the results from a survey of 57 companies in the quantum industry, with the goal of elucidating the jobs, skills, and degrees that are relevant for this new workforce. We find a range of job opportunities from highly specific jobs, such as quantum algorithm developer and error correction scientist, to broader jobs categories within the business, software, and hardware sectors. These broader jobs require a range of skills, most of which are not quantum related. Further, except for the highly specific jobs, companies that responded to the survey are looking for a range of degree levels to fill these new positions, from bachelors to masters to PhDs. With this knowledge, students, instructors, and university administrators can make informed decisions about how to address the challenge of increasing the future quantum workforce.
en
physics.ed-ph, quant-ph
A Secure Fog Based Architecture for Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0
Jayasree Sengupta, Sushmita Ruj, Sipra Das Bit
The advent of Industrial IoT (IIoT) along with Cloud computing has brought a huge paradigm shift in manufacturing industries resulting in yet another industrial revolution, Industry 4.0. Huge amounts of delay-sensitive data of diverse nature are being generated which needs to be locally processed and secured due to its sensitivity. But, the low-end IoT devices are unable to handle huge computational overheads. Also, the semi-trusted nature of Cloud introduces several security concerns. To address these issues, this work proposes a secure Fog-based IIoT architecture by suitably plugging a number of security features into it and by offloading some of the tasks judiciously to fog nodes. These features secure the system alongside reducing the trust and burden on the cloud and resource-constrained devices respectively. We validate our proposed architecture through both theoretical overhead analysis and practical experimentation including simulation study and testbed implementation.
The impact of Industry 4.0 technologies on production and supply chains
Davood Qorbani, Stefan Groesser
This paper sheds light on the current development in major industrialized countries (such as Germany, Japan, and Switzerland): the trend towards highly-integrated and autonomous production systems. The question is how such a transition of a production infrastructure can take place most efficiently. This research uses the system dynamics method to address this complex transition process from a legacy production system to a modern and highly integrated production system (an Industry 4.0 system). The findings mainly relate to the identification of system structures that are relevant for an Industry 4.0 perspective. Our research is the first in its kind which presents a causal model that addresses the transition to Industry 4.0.
Implementing the Cognition Level for Industry 4.0 by integrating Augmented Reality and Manufacturing Execution Systems
Alfonso Di Pace, Giuseppe Fenza, Mariacristina Gallo
et al.
In the current industrial practices, the exponential growth in terms of availability and affordability of sensors, data acquisition systems, and computer networks forces factories to move toward implementing high integrating Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) with production, logistics, and services. This transforms today's factories into Industry 4.0 factories with significant economic potential. Industry 4.0, also known as the fourth Industrial Revolution, levers on the integration of cyber technologies, the Internet of Things, and Services. This paper proposes an Augmented Reality (AR)-based system that creates a Cognition Level that integrates existent Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) to CPS. The idea is to highlight the opportunities offered by AR technologies to CPS by describing an application scenario. The system, analyzed in a real factory, shows its capacity to integrate physical and digital worlds strongly. Furthermore, the conducted survey (based on the Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique method) reveals significant advantages in terms of production monitoring, progress, and workers' Situation Awareness in general.
Model-Free Control as a Service in the Industrial Internet of Things: Packet loss and latency issues via preliminary experiments
Cédric Join, Michel Fliess, Frédéric Chaxel
Model-Free Control (MFC), which is easy to implement both from software and hardware viewpoints, permits the introduction of a high level control synthesis for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the Industry 4.0. The choice of the User Diagram Protocol (UDP) as the Internet Protocol permits to neglect the latency. In spite of most severe packet losses, convincing computer simulations and laboratory experiments show that MFC exhibits a good Quality of Service (QoS) and behaves better than a classic PI regulator.
Application of Data Stream Processing Technologies in Industry 4.0 -- What is Missing?
Guenter Hesse, Werner Sinzig, Christoph Matthies
et al.
Industry 4.0 is becoming more and more important for manufacturers as the developments in the area of Internet of Things advance. Another technology gaining more attention is data stream processing systems. Although such streaming frameworks seem to be a natural fit for Industry 4.0 scenarios, their application in this context is still low. The contributions in this paper are threefold. Firstly, we present industry findings that we derived from site inspections with a focus on Industry 4.0. Moreover, our view on Industry 4.0 and important related aspects is elaborated. As a third contribution, we illustrate our opinion on why data stream processing technologies could act as an enabler for Industry 4.0 and point out possible obstacles on this way.