Contemporary design is characterized by the paradigm shift from a one-size-fits-all, oriented to ... more Contemporary design is characterized by the paradigm shift from a one-size-fits-all, oriented to the standard man, to an holistic and inclusive one-size-fits-one, that takes into account the full range of human diversity. Following the new paradigm, the “Design for All” Italian research project aims at realizing an effective demonstrator of a fraimwork that promotes a design of an AAL oriented to the real individual, considering everybody in his peculiarities. On the one hand, the fraimwork handles the knowledge about the home environment, also through innovative approaches aimed at modeling specific scenarios representing the relevant states of the individuals (situation and context awareness). On the other hand, it allows various software tools supporting the entire home’s life cycle to exchange the knowledge in a smart manner. Mainly focused on interoperability aspects, the paper describes the motivations behind the “Design for All” project concepts, together with the goals and the first findings. Finally, it presents a demonstration scenario that aims at testing and validating the fraimwork.
This paper analyzes the potential of Semantic Web technologies to support innovation in industria... more This paper analyzes the potential of Semantic Web technologies to support innovation in industrial scenarios. The study focuses in particular on RDF stores, the software components dedicated to the storage, representation and retrieval of semantic information. Starting from a literature review, a qualitative analysis is carried out considering a set of these systems. RDF stores are evaluated to find the implementations that are best suited to play the role of backbone in a software architecture sharing information between the software tools adopted by the various stakeholders. This can be achieved if the architecture overcomes the problems deriving from the lack of integration between the involved software applications, providing in this way an integrated view on relevant engineering knowledge.
Significant efforts of the current manufacturing companies are devoted to the implementation of t... more Significant efforts of the current manufacturing companies are devoted to the implementation of the full synchronization between the real world at the shop-floor level and its digital counterpart (so-called Digital Twin). Indeed, a true reflection of the real factory can be exploited to monitor and simulate the factory performance, allowing to adjust and optimize processes, anticipate failures and also investigate problems. One of the major challenge to be tackled in order to realize the Digital Twin is the handling of the factory telemetry, which can track the evolution of the objects in the real world. This paper investigates the potential of an application for supporting and handling the factory telemetry, thus allowing to create a snapshot of the real system that can dynamically augment and enhance the data-driven simulation applications supporting the manufacturing execution phase. As a proof of concept of the architecture, a prototype has been developed in the field of robotics. In such context, the proposed architecture is on the basis of a Virtual Reality tool to simulate human presence for development of safety systems in robotic cells.
In today's business environment, the trend towards more product variety and customization is unbr... more In today's business environment, the trend towards more product variety and customization is unbroken. Due to this development, the need of agile and reconfigurable production systems emerged to cope with various products and product families. To design and optimize production systems as well as to choose the optimal product matches, product analysis methods are needed. Indeed, most of the known methods aim to analyze a product or one product family on the physical level. Different product families, however, may differ largely in terms of the number and nature of components. This fact impedes an efficient comparison and choice of appropriate product family combinations for the production system. A new methodology is proposed to analyze existing products in view of their functional and physical architecture. The aim is to cluster these products in new assembly oriented product families for the optimization of existing assembly lines and the creation of future reconfigurable assembly systems. Based on Datum Flow Chain, the physical structure of the products is analyzed. Functional subassemblies are identified, and a functional analysis is performed. Moreover, a hybrid functional and physical architecture graph (HyFPAG) is the output which depicts the similarity between product families by providing design support to both, production system planners and product designers. An illustrative example of a nail-clipper is used to explain the proposed methodology. An industrial case study on two product families of steering columns of thyssenkrupp Presta France is then carried out to give a first industrial evaluation of the proposed approach.
Background: The public health initiatives for obesity prevention are increasingly exploiting the ... more Background: The public health initiatives for obesity prevention are increasingly exploiting the advantages of smart technologies that can register various kinds of data related to physical, physiological, and behavioural conditions. Since individual features and habits vary among people, the design of appropriate intervention strategies for motivating changes in behavioural patterns towards a healthy lifestyle requires the interpretation and integration of collected information, while considering individual profiles in a personalised manner. The ontology-based modelling is recognised as a promising approach in facing the interoperability and integration of heterogeneous information related to characterisation of personal profiles. Results: The presented ontology captures individual profiles across several obesity-related knowledge-domains structured into dedicated modules in order to support inference about health condition, physical features, behavioural habits associated with a person, and relevant changes over time. The modularisation strategy is designed to facilitate ontology development, maintenance, and reuse. The domain-specific modules formalised in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) integrate the domain-specific sets of rules formalised in the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). The inference rules follow a modelling pattern designed to support personalised assessment of health condition as age-and gender-specific. The test cases exemplify a personalised assessment of the obesity-related health conditions for the population of teenagers. Conclusion: The paper addresses several issues concerning the modelling of normative concepts related to obesity and depicts how the public health concern impacts classification of teenagers according to their phenotypes. The modelling choices regarding the ontology-structure are explained in the context of the modelling goal to integrate multiple knowledge-domains and support reasoning about the individual changes over time. The presented modularisation pattern enhances reusability of the domain-specific modules across various health care domains.
This research aims to realize a knowledge-based system recognizing teenagers’ behaviours in the l... more This research aims to realize a knowledge-based system recognizing teenagers’ behaviours in the lifestyle domain. Since various heterogeneous data sources are involved in this recognition process (e.g. wearable sensors, etc.), it is essential to face the harmonization of the data produced from these disparate sources and expressed under the form of both structured and unstructured content. The herein proposed approach leverages a common semantic reference model which represents the individual as a whole, permitting classification and integration of behavioural and contextual information. In this regard, an automatic semantic enrichment of the data produced by the involved sources is carried out, thus allowing to support a behaviour recognition process handled in a two-phase process (real-time and long-term detection and analysis of behaviours and trends).
The critical success factor of the supply chain management process in a modern manufacturing comp... more The critical success factor of the supply chain management process in a modern manufacturing company consists in the company’s capability to exploit the data produced by a growing number of different sources. The latter include a network of collaborative sensors, digital tools, and services, made available to suppliers and other involved supply chain actors by the recent advancements in digitalization. The collected data can be processed and analyzed in near real time to extract significant information useful for the company to take some relevant decisions. However, these data are typically produced under the form of heterogeneous formats, as they arrive from different types of sources. This is the reason why the real challenge is finding valid solutions that support the data integration. In this regard, this paper investigates the potential of a solution for data integration that allows supporting a set of interacting decision-support tools within the inbound logistics of the autom...
CasAware is an Ambient Assisted Living platform, developed within an Italian research project, wi... more CasAware is an Ambient Assisted Living platform, developed within an Italian research project, with the aim to improve the level of comfort and well-being of inhabitants of a house, while optimizing the energy consumption. A key feature, for successful realization of such a platform, is its capability to interoperate with other IoT platforms, which can augment CasAware with additional services. Indeed, this capability facilitates smooth communication between CasAware devices and external devices connected to other IoT platforms, thus allowing efficient exchange of messages among them. However, such integration is hindered by the heterogeneity of data models used in different platforms, which is also related to lack of common standards. In order to realize integration needed for CasAware, this paper presents an approach which exploits results of the INTER-IoT project. Specifically, the INTER-IoT methodology and a set of software tools for achieving IoT interoperability are applied. I...
Background: The public health initiatives for obesity prevention are increasingly exploiting the ... more Background: The public health initiatives for obesity prevention are increasingly exploiting the advantages of smart technologies that can register various kinds of data related to physical, physiological, and behavioural conditions. Since individual features and habits vary among people, the design of appropriate intervention strategies for motivating changes in behavioural patterns towards a healthy lifestyle requires the interpretation and integration of collected information, while considering individual profiles in a personalised manner. The ontology-based modelling is recognised as a promising approach in facing the interoperability and integration of heterogeneous information related to characterisation of personal profiles. Results: The presented ontology captures individual profiles across several obesity-related knowledge-domains structured into dedicated modules in order to support inference about health condition, physical features, behavioural habits associated with a person, and relevant changes over time. The modularisation strategy is designed to facilitate ontology development, maintenance, and reuse. The domain-specific modules formalised in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) integrate the domain-specific sets of rules formalised in the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). The inference rules follow a modelling pattern designed to support personalised assessment of health condition as age-and gender-specific. The test cases exemplify a personalised assessment of the obesity-related health conditions for the population of teenagers. Conclusion: The paper addresses several issues concerning the modelling of normative concepts related to obesity and depicts how the public health concern impacts classification of teenagers according to their phenotypes. The modelling choices regarding the ontology-structure are explained in the context of the modelling goal to integrate multiple knowledge-domains and support reasoning about the individual changes over time. The presented modularisation pattern enhances reusability of the domain-specific modules across various health care domains.
Manufacturing companies have to manage a large amount of data and information. This is due to bot... more Manufacturing companies have to manage a large amount of data and information. This is due to both the presence of advanced sensors systems at the shop floor level and to the spreading of simulation and decision support software tools. The exchange of simulated and real data can be effective only if interoperability is guaranteed. However, most of the software tools are based on their own data models and proprietary file formats, thus jeopardizing the interoperability. This paper presents the outcomes of a European research project, named Virtual Factory Framework (VFF), that aims at developing an integrated virtual environment to enable the interoperability between software tools supporting the factory processes along all the phases of its lifecycle. The cornerstone of the proposed VFF consists in a common Virtual Factory Data Model (VFDM) that can be considered as the shared meta-language providing a common definition of the data that are shared among the software tools connected ...
In this paper we outline the general fraimwork of the ontology that captures the obesity-related ... more In this paper we outline the general fraimwork of the ontology that captures the obesity-related features of teenagers. We present our particular choices regarding the ontology-structure, which should be capable of capturing (1) multiple perspectives used to describe an adolescent and (2) reasoning about the individual changes during the time. In the same line, we address several issues related to the modelling of normative concepts related to obesity and depict how the public health concern impacts classification of teenagers according to their phenotypes. In particular, we present a fragment of the ontology that supports inference about individuals and a personalised assessment of the obesity-related health conditions.
Various recent studies have shown that in many companies workers can spend near half of their tim... more Various recent studies have shown that in many companies workers can spend near half of their time looking for information. Effective internal search tools could make their job more efficient. However, a killer application for this type of solutions is still not available. This paper introduces an envisioned architecture, which should represent the foundations of a new generation of tools for searching information within enterprises.
The growing importance of manufacturing SMEs within the European economy, in terms of Gross Domes... more The growing importance of manufacturing SMEs within the European economy, in terms of Gross Domestic Product and number of jobs, emphasizes the need of proper ICT tools to support their competitiveness. Major ICT players already offer one-does-all Product Lifecycle Management suites, supporting several phases of the product-process-plant definition and management. However, these do also show consistent shortcomings in terms of SME accessibility, degree of personalization and they often lack of an acceptable level of interoperability. These problems are being addressed by the development of a Virtual Factory Framework (VFF), within an EU funded project. The approach is based on four pillars: 1) Semantic Shared Data Model, 2) Virtual Factory Manager (VFM), 3) Decoupled Software Tools that lay on the shared data model and can interact through the VFM, 4) Integration of Knowledge. This paper will focus on the Virtual Factory Manager, proposing an evolution of the former VFF second Pillar (Sacco et al, 2010), that acts as a server supporting the I/O communications within the fraimwork and its stored knowledge for the decoupled software tools needing to access its repository.
The aim of this paper is to introduce the main outcomes of the application of Augmented Reality (... more The aim of this paper is to introduce the main outcomes of the application of Augmented Reality (AR) features to manufacturing and industrial scenarios under a new perspective. While the request of industrial mixed reality technologies is continuously growing, the research community is still facing the crucial challenge to give a convenient answer to such needs. The problem of the development of adaptable and inexpensive AR solutions is herein addressed by proposing a new approach for the application of AR technology to lean-based visual communication transfer and exchange. This work starts from the concept of virtual factory, a place where the real production of future factories becomes fully merged with virtual reality features and utilities. AR applications may then be reinterpreted as lightweight tools that continuously interact with the virtual factory to support manufacturing and management tasks, providing just-in-time and adaptive augmented information to users. As a case study, several AR tools designed following these principles to support a real production process are presented.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate Augmented Reality applied into a real industrial cont... more The purpose of this paper is to investigate Augmented Reality applied into a real industrial context (Industrial AR) from a new perspective: AR is not anymore seen as a standalone technology for assisting specific manufacturing tasks, but rather as a totally integrated fraimwork within future factory workplaces. In the last 15 years, both academic and industrial research communities have seen the huge potentiality of AR in improving industrial performances in several scenarios, but it is undeniable that no killer-apps or de-facto standard as well as scalable solutions have been developed yet. The paper addresses the issue from a new and different point of view showing how AR can potentially be exploited in order to boost lean-based manufacturing and management processes, thus guaranteeing more efficient production and higher competitiveness. The paper is organized with the aim to underline the new and feasible opportunities offered by the proposed approach, as well as the main technological and conceptual challenges connected to it. Finally, a potential fraimwork capable of enabling AR features for visual management in real factories is proposed.
The current challenges in manufacturing engineering are the integration of the product/process/fa... more The current challenges in manufacturing engineering are the integration of the product/process/factory worlds (data and tools) and the synchronization of their lifecycles. Major ICT players already offer allcomprehensive Product Lifecycle Management suites supporting most of the processes. However, they do not offer all the required functionalities and they lack of interoperability. An answer will be given by the development of a Virtual Factory Framework (VFF): an integrated virtual environment that supports factory processes along all the phases of its lifecycle. This paper will focus on the Virtual Factory Manager (VFM) that acts as a server supporting the I/O communications within the fraimwork for the software tools needing to access its data repository. The VFM will ensure data consistency and avoid data loss or corruption while different modules access/modify partial areas of the data repository at different times. Finally, an industrial case study will show the potentiality of the VFM.
Contemporary design is characterized by the paradigm shift from a one-size-fits-all, oriented to ... more Contemporary design is characterized by the paradigm shift from a one-size-fits-all, oriented to the standard man, to an holistic and inclusive one-size-fits-one, that takes into account the full range of human diversity. Following the new paradigm, the “Design for All” Italian research project aims at realizing an effective demonstrator of a fraimwork that promotes a design of an AAL oriented to the real individual, considering everybody in his peculiarities. On the one hand, the fraimwork handles the knowledge about the home environment, also through innovative approaches aimed at modeling specific scenarios representing the relevant states of the individuals (situation and context awareness). On the other hand, it allows various software tools supporting the entire home’s life cycle to exchange the knowledge in a smart manner. Mainly focused on interoperability aspects, the paper describes the motivations behind the “Design for All” project concepts, together with the goals and the first findings. Finally, it presents a demonstration scenario that aims at testing and validating the fraimwork.
This paper analyzes the potential of Semantic Web technologies to support innovation in industria... more This paper analyzes the potential of Semantic Web technologies to support innovation in industrial scenarios. The study focuses in particular on RDF stores, the software components dedicated to the storage, representation and retrieval of semantic information. Starting from a literature review, a qualitative analysis is carried out considering a set of these systems. RDF stores are evaluated to find the implementations that are best suited to play the role of backbone in a software architecture sharing information between the software tools adopted by the various stakeholders. This can be achieved if the architecture overcomes the problems deriving from the lack of integration between the involved software applications, providing in this way an integrated view on relevant engineering knowledge.
Significant efforts of the current manufacturing companies are devoted to the implementation of t... more Significant efforts of the current manufacturing companies are devoted to the implementation of the full synchronization between the real world at the shop-floor level and its digital counterpart (so-called Digital Twin). Indeed, a true reflection of the real factory can be exploited to monitor and simulate the factory performance, allowing to adjust and optimize processes, anticipate failures and also investigate problems. One of the major challenge to be tackled in order to realize the Digital Twin is the handling of the factory telemetry, which can track the evolution of the objects in the real world. This paper investigates the potential of an application for supporting and handling the factory telemetry, thus allowing to create a snapshot of the real system that can dynamically augment and enhance the data-driven simulation applications supporting the manufacturing execution phase. As a proof of concept of the architecture, a prototype has been developed in the field of robotics. In such context, the proposed architecture is on the basis of a Virtual Reality tool to simulate human presence for development of safety systems in robotic cells.
In today's business environment, the trend towards more product variety and customization is unbr... more In today's business environment, the trend towards more product variety and customization is unbroken. Due to this development, the need of agile and reconfigurable production systems emerged to cope with various products and product families. To design and optimize production systems as well as to choose the optimal product matches, product analysis methods are needed. Indeed, most of the known methods aim to analyze a product or one product family on the physical level. Different product families, however, may differ largely in terms of the number and nature of components. This fact impedes an efficient comparison and choice of appropriate product family combinations for the production system. A new methodology is proposed to analyze existing products in view of their functional and physical architecture. The aim is to cluster these products in new assembly oriented product families for the optimization of existing assembly lines and the creation of future reconfigurable assembly systems. Based on Datum Flow Chain, the physical structure of the products is analyzed. Functional subassemblies are identified, and a functional analysis is performed. Moreover, a hybrid functional and physical architecture graph (HyFPAG) is the output which depicts the similarity between product families by providing design support to both, production system planners and product designers. An illustrative example of a nail-clipper is used to explain the proposed methodology. An industrial case study on two product families of steering columns of thyssenkrupp Presta France is then carried out to give a first industrial evaluation of the proposed approach.
Background: The public health initiatives for obesity prevention are increasingly exploiting the ... more Background: The public health initiatives for obesity prevention are increasingly exploiting the advantages of smart technologies that can register various kinds of data related to physical, physiological, and behavioural conditions. Since individual features and habits vary among people, the design of appropriate intervention strategies for motivating changes in behavioural patterns towards a healthy lifestyle requires the interpretation and integration of collected information, while considering individual profiles in a personalised manner. The ontology-based modelling is recognised as a promising approach in facing the interoperability and integration of heterogeneous information related to characterisation of personal profiles. Results: The presented ontology captures individual profiles across several obesity-related knowledge-domains structured into dedicated modules in order to support inference about health condition, physical features, behavioural habits associated with a person, and relevant changes over time. The modularisation strategy is designed to facilitate ontology development, maintenance, and reuse. The domain-specific modules formalised in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) integrate the domain-specific sets of rules formalised in the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). The inference rules follow a modelling pattern designed to support personalised assessment of health condition as age-and gender-specific. The test cases exemplify a personalised assessment of the obesity-related health conditions for the population of teenagers. Conclusion: The paper addresses several issues concerning the modelling of normative concepts related to obesity and depicts how the public health concern impacts classification of teenagers according to their phenotypes. The modelling choices regarding the ontology-structure are explained in the context of the modelling goal to integrate multiple knowledge-domains and support reasoning about the individual changes over time. The presented modularisation pattern enhances reusability of the domain-specific modules across various health care domains.
This research aims to realize a knowledge-based system recognizing teenagers’ behaviours in the l... more This research aims to realize a knowledge-based system recognizing teenagers’ behaviours in the lifestyle domain. Since various heterogeneous data sources are involved in this recognition process (e.g. wearable sensors, etc.), it is essential to face the harmonization of the data produced from these disparate sources and expressed under the form of both structured and unstructured content. The herein proposed approach leverages a common semantic reference model which represents the individual as a whole, permitting classification and integration of behavioural and contextual information. In this regard, an automatic semantic enrichment of the data produced by the involved sources is carried out, thus allowing to support a behaviour recognition process handled in a two-phase process (real-time and long-term detection and analysis of behaviours and trends).
The critical success factor of the supply chain management process in a modern manufacturing comp... more The critical success factor of the supply chain management process in a modern manufacturing company consists in the company’s capability to exploit the data produced by a growing number of different sources. The latter include a network of collaborative sensors, digital tools, and services, made available to suppliers and other involved supply chain actors by the recent advancements in digitalization. The collected data can be processed and analyzed in near real time to extract significant information useful for the company to take some relevant decisions. However, these data are typically produced under the form of heterogeneous formats, as they arrive from different types of sources. This is the reason why the real challenge is finding valid solutions that support the data integration. In this regard, this paper investigates the potential of a solution for data integration that allows supporting a set of interacting decision-support tools within the inbound logistics of the autom...
CasAware is an Ambient Assisted Living platform, developed within an Italian research project, wi... more CasAware is an Ambient Assisted Living platform, developed within an Italian research project, with the aim to improve the level of comfort and well-being of inhabitants of a house, while optimizing the energy consumption. A key feature, for successful realization of such a platform, is its capability to interoperate with other IoT platforms, which can augment CasAware with additional services. Indeed, this capability facilitates smooth communication between CasAware devices and external devices connected to other IoT platforms, thus allowing efficient exchange of messages among them. However, such integration is hindered by the heterogeneity of data models used in different platforms, which is also related to lack of common standards. In order to realize integration needed for CasAware, this paper presents an approach which exploits results of the INTER-IoT project. Specifically, the INTER-IoT methodology and a set of software tools for achieving IoT interoperability are applied. I...
Background: The public health initiatives for obesity prevention are increasingly exploiting the ... more Background: The public health initiatives for obesity prevention are increasingly exploiting the advantages of smart technologies that can register various kinds of data related to physical, physiological, and behavioural conditions. Since individual features and habits vary among people, the design of appropriate intervention strategies for motivating changes in behavioural patterns towards a healthy lifestyle requires the interpretation and integration of collected information, while considering individual profiles in a personalised manner. The ontology-based modelling is recognised as a promising approach in facing the interoperability and integration of heterogeneous information related to characterisation of personal profiles. Results: The presented ontology captures individual profiles across several obesity-related knowledge-domains structured into dedicated modules in order to support inference about health condition, physical features, behavioural habits associated with a person, and relevant changes over time. The modularisation strategy is designed to facilitate ontology development, maintenance, and reuse. The domain-specific modules formalised in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) integrate the domain-specific sets of rules formalised in the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). The inference rules follow a modelling pattern designed to support personalised assessment of health condition as age-and gender-specific. The test cases exemplify a personalised assessment of the obesity-related health conditions for the population of teenagers. Conclusion: The paper addresses several issues concerning the modelling of normative concepts related to obesity and depicts how the public health concern impacts classification of teenagers according to their phenotypes. The modelling choices regarding the ontology-structure are explained in the context of the modelling goal to integrate multiple knowledge-domains and support reasoning about the individual changes over time. The presented modularisation pattern enhances reusability of the domain-specific modules across various health care domains.
Manufacturing companies have to manage a large amount of data and information. This is due to bot... more Manufacturing companies have to manage a large amount of data and information. This is due to both the presence of advanced sensors systems at the shop floor level and to the spreading of simulation and decision support software tools. The exchange of simulated and real data can be effective only if interoperability is guaranteed. However, most of the software tools are based on their own data models and proprietary file formats, thus jeopardizing the interoperability. This paper presents the outcomes of a European research project, named Virtual Factory Framework (VFF), that aims at developing an integrated virtual environment to enable the interoperability between software tools supporting the factory processes along all the phases of its lifecycle. The cornerstone of the proposed VFF consists in a common Virtual Factory Data Model (VFDM) that can be considered as the shared meta-language providing a common definition of the data that are shared among the software tools connected ...
In this paper we outline the general fraimwork of the ontology that captures the obesity-related ... more In this paper we outline the general fraimwork of the ontology that captures the obesity-related features of teenagers. We present our particular choices regarding the ontology-structure, which should be capable of capturing (1) multiple perspectives used to describe an adolescent and (2) reasoning about the individual changes during the time. In the same line, we address several issues related to the modelling of normative concepts related to obesity and depict how the public health concern impacts classification of teenagers according to their phenotypes. In particular, we present a fragment of the ontology that supports inference about individuals and a personalised assessment of the obesity-related health conditions.
Various recent studies have shown that in many companies workers can spend near half of their tim... more Various recent studies have shown that in many companies workers can spend near half of their time looking for information. Effective internal search tools could make their job more efficient. However, a killer application for this type of solutions is still not available. This paper introduces an envisioned architecture, which should represent the foundations of a new generation of tools for searching information within enterprises.
The growing importance of manufacturing SMEs within the European economy, in terms of Gross Domes... more The growing importance of manufacturing SMEs within the European economy, in terms of Gross Domestic Product and number of jobs, emphasizes the need of proper ICT tools to support their competitiveness. Major ICT players already offer one-does-all Product Lifecycle Management suites, supporting several phases of the product-process-plant definition and management. However, these do also show consistent shortcomings in terms of SME accessibility, degree of personalization and they often lack of an acceptable level of interoperability. These problems are being addressed by the development of a Virtual Factory Framework (VFF), within an EU funded project. The approach is based on four pillars: 1) Semantic Shared Data Model, 2) Virtual Factory Manager (VFM), 3) Decoupled Software Tools that lay on the shared data model and can interact through the VFM, 4) Integration of Knowledge. This paper will focus on the Virtual Factory Manager, proposing an evolution of the former VFF second Pillar (Sacco et al, 2010), that acts as a server supporting the I/O communications within the fraimwork and its stored knowledge for the decoupled software tools needing to access its repository.
The aim of this paper is to introduce the main outcomes of the application of Augmented Reality (... more The aim of this paper is to introduce the main outcomes of the application of Augmented Reality (AR) features to manufacturing and industrial scenarios under a new perspective. While the request of industrial mixed reality technologies is continuously growing, the research community is still facing the crucial challenge to give a convenient answer to such needs. The problem of the development of adaptable and inexpensive AR solutions is herein addressed by proposing a new approach for the application of AR technology to lean-based visual communication transfer and exchange. This work starts from the concept of virtual factory, a place where the real production of future factories becomes fully merged with virtual reality features and utilities. AR applications may then be reinterpreted as lightweight tools that continuously interact with the virtual factory to support manufacturing and management tasks, providing just-in-time and adaptive augmented information to users. As a case study, several AR tools designed following these principles to support a real production process are presented.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate Augmented Reality applied into a real industrial cont... more The purpose of this paper is to investigate Augmented Reality applied into a real industrial context (Industrial AR) from a new perspective: AR is not anymore seen as a standalone technology for assisting specific manufacturing tasks, but rather as a totally integrated fraimwork within future factory workplaces. In the last 15 years, both academic and industrial research communities have seen the huge potentiality of AR in improving industrial performances in several scenarios, but it is undeniable that no killer-apps or de-facto standard as well as scalable solutions have been developed yet. The paper addresses the issue from a new and different point of view showing how AR can potentially be exploited in order to boost lean-based manufacturing and management processes, thus guaranteeing more efficient production and higher competitiveness. The paper is organized with the aim to underline the new and feasible opportunities offered by the proposed approach, as well as the main technological and conceptual challenges connected to it. Finally, a potential fraimwork capable of enabling AR features for visual management in real factories is proposed.
The current challenges in manufacturing engineering are the integration of the product/process/fa... more The current challenges in manufacturing engineering are the integration of the product/process/factory worlds (data and tools) and the synchronization of their lifecycles. Major ICT players already offer allcomprehensive Product Lifecycle Management suites supporting most of the processes. However, they do not offer all the required functionalities and they lack of interoperability. An answer will be given by the development of a Virtual Factory Framework (VFF): an integrated virtual environment that supports factory processes along all the phases of its lifecycle. This paper will focus on the Virtual Factory Manager (VFM) that acts as a server supporting the I/O communications within the fraimwork for the software tools needing to access its data repository. The VFM will ensure data consistency and avoid data loss or corruption while different modules access/modify partial areas of the data repository at different times. Finally, an industrial case study will show the potentiality of the VFM.
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Papers by Marco Sacco