Arun N. Nambiar

Expert system for student advising using JESS

Student advising is one of the many critical service responsibilities that faculty have in academia. Often times, however, students have very similar questions about which courses to take, the sequence of courses, and deadlines. If programs have a striated system of student standings, this further confounds the students as they may not be eligible to take certain courses due to their current status in the program. Faculty also tend to be pressed for time with research, teaching and other committee responsibilities. This results in increased frustrations for both students and faculty alike. Expert systems are software applications that respond to use queries by analyzing data captured in knowledge systems. JESS is a Java-based rule engine and scripting environment that allows the development of such an expert system. In this work, we develop an expert system using JESS that allows students to seek quick responses to their queries regarding their plan of study and progress in the program. This expert system separates the rules from the execution thus enabling users to customize or extend the system by changing or updating the XML file that stores the rules.

Agile manufacturing: A taxonomic framework for research

In todays world of increased global competition, companies have to respond quickly to customer demands by introducing products the customer wants at lowest possible prices in the shortest possible time. Lean principles enable companies to streamline their operations by eliminating wastes. Mass customization principles enable companies to introduce customized products at costs comparable to mass production. Agility integrates lean principles and mass customization and provides the necessary framework to implement mass customization. In this work, we take a look at the current state of art in research in the area of agile manufacturing and propose a taxonomic framework for the literature in this area. We conclude by presenting potential directions for future work in this area.

Traceability in agri-food sector using RFID

Traceability is an integral requirement in the agri-food sector especially due to the perishable nature of food and the potential for health risks through transmission of bacteria. There are various traceability systems that allow companies to keep track of their products both upstream and downstream. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one such technology that facilitates easy and automatic data collection. With the proliferation of traceability systems using different technologies, it becomes imperative for these systems to be able to interact with one another and be integrated into the companys existing information infrastructure. This work aims to review the current research in this field with special emphasis on RFID systems. We also seek to identify future areas of research in this field.

Data exchange among different modules in a manufacturing or service framework

With the advancements in information technology and the growing importance of concurrent design and development in both manufacturing and service industries, it becomes necessary for more and more diverse applications to interact with one another and function in a cohesive manner in order to satisfy the ever-changing customer requirements. Increased interaction among applications engenders a data-exchange problem. The increasing popularity of distributed and service-oriented computing only compounds this problem. The different service providers have to be able to read and interpret data from other service providers. Moreover, some of the software applications predate the recent developments in data exchange standards like XML, EXPRESS among others. A novel approach is proposed to solve this data exchange problem. A region is defined to cover a section of the data source that contains data with a particular structure. Tools can be applied to a region to split it into sub-regions which may or may not be of the same structure. Tools are parameterised by the syntactic elements that define how structures are to be parsed. This simple idea of parsing data sources by defining a series of hierarchical structured regions has been successfully applied to many existing legacy codes in the engineering domain. It also lends itself to the development of a powerful Graphical User Interface (GUI) front-end to easily define the regions. The presentation will develop the theory behind this novel approach and show examples of its application.