Eric D. Simmon

Cyber-Physical-Human Systems: Putting People in the Loop

This article outlines the challenges of understanding how to integrate people into a new generation of cyber-physical-human systems (CPHSs) and proposes a human service capability description model to help.

Designing a Cyber-Physical Cloud Computing Architecture

In this era of interconnectivity, where almost everybody, everything, and anything are networked, cyber-physical systems (CPS), also known as the Internet of Things (IoT), have emerged as vital systems that use information systems to observe and modify the physical world. Despite the proliferation of CPS in our lives, many such systems still use hardwired designs to accomplish a limited set of functions, such as sensing, actuating, or processing data or information. To achieve the vision of a platform for enabling the full potential of CPS that will encourage and drive innovation, CPS designers will need a new architectural design that can help connect everybody, everything, and anything together to achieve both our known and unknown goals. In this article, the authors present such a conceptual design and discuss its essential parts and key characteristics.

Use Case Based Testing to Improve Smart Grid Development

The US Power delivery system is being updated with an intelligent, decision-making network. If designed correctly, this smart grid will ensure that the power grid can meet our needs in the coming century. This paper discusses a strategy for defining the goals, use cases and systems tests so this complex, system of systems, meets the needs of the stakeholders today and in the future.

Environmental Regulations Impose New Product Lifecycle Information Requirements

In a global response to increasing health and environmental concerns, there has been a trend towards governments enacting legislation to encourage sustainable manufacturing where industry creates products that minimize environmental impact. This legislative trend seeks to shift the environmental responsibility of product manufacturing to the finished goods manufacturer. To meet this new responsibility, data relevant to the material composition of a product must flow unimpeded from the raw material producers to the final producers. Unfortunately, existing systems are ill-prepared to handle the new data requirements. For example, the European Union’s (EU) Energy Using Product (EuP) Directive will require that companies provide total energy used during a product’s lifecycle, including manufacturing and transportation energy. To meet these new requirements, new systems must be designed and implemented, or modifications made to existing data management systems. Because every law poses its own unique requirements on industry, it is not always clear what information will need to be collected and stored. This paper seeks to provide industry with a forward-looking view at new data exchange requirements needed within the manufacturing supply chain of the future. It surveys current and forthcoming environmental legislation including EU Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS), China RoHS, California RoHS, EU EuP, and the EU Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals Directive (REACH). The paper identifies the unique data requirements that will need to be incorporated in a products supply chain in order for companies to comply with each law.

Automation Tools Supporting the Development of Information Standards for Complex Systems

As information systems continue to become more complex, the data standards to support them grow in complexity as well. To meet the needs of today’s systems, not only must the standards change, but the standards development process must change as well.

An Overview of the NIST Cloud Computing Program and Reference Architecture

Cloud computing is the next step in the continued evolution of information systems. Cloud computing allows consumers to choose what service they want, how the services will be delivered, and provides usage based. The resource pooling and rapid provisioning of cloud services allow providers to more efficiently supply these resources. This results in the consumers’ needs being better met while at the same time using fewer resources (both physical assets and energy). To achieve these goals a better understanding of the implications of cloud computing along with interoperability, portability, and security standards is needed. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been tasked to help drive adoption of cloud computing by federal agencies through the identification and resolution of high-priority interoperability, portability and security issues.

Expanding Environmental Information Management: Meeting Future Requirements in the Electronics Industry

The environmental impact of product manufacturing, use, and disposal has become a worldwide concern. Laws and regulations designed to protect human health and the environment are being established throughout the global community. In addition to regulatory needs, manufacturing networks have begun to respond to market driven ecoefficiency and sustainability requirements. To optimize manufacturing systems for these requirements, information must flow freely upstream and downstream during a product’s lifecycle. This information includes regulatory compliance information, material content, energy use, and test data among others types of information. To modify systems to effectively manage these data requires an understanding of what information is required. This paper discusses both regulatory and voluntary information needs with a focus on electronics industry efforts for environmental information management and exchange. The information needs are broken down into regulatory information (compliance information, material content, etc.) and voluntary information (lifecycle assessment, cradle to cradle, etc).

Towards Boundary Discovery in Complex Systems

Many of today’s extremely complex systems are cross-domain (covering more than one area of expertise). They require development by multiple stakeholder groups with different goals, each implementing a subset of the functionality required for these system of systems to operate. As these systems become more complex, it becomes more difficult to understand how the subsystems fit together into the whole. This paper investigates leveraging stakeholder use cases (created by different expert groups) by quantifying the similarities between the use case documents and using clustering algorithms to group the use cases together. This provides an idea of how systems and subsystems may be constructed to implement these use cases and help understand system interactions and boundaries.

Improving environmental information handling and data exchange within the electronics industry

Environmental regulations impacting the electronics industry are driving the need for new data management systems to track environmental data including material data. This paper describes efforts to take a holistic approach in managing this information by working with industry standards organizations and applying system design philosophies to the standards development process.

Data Modeling to Support Environmental Information Exchange throughout the Supply Chain

With an ever-increasing awareness of the environmental impact of manufacturing, more and more political organizations (countries, states, and unions) are enacting legislation designed to protect the environment. One category of this restrictive legislation is called Extended Producer Responsibilities (EPR). EPR directives place greater responsibility on manufacturers for the environmental impact of their products. These laws shift the focus from the product’s origin to the product’s final destination and from the process of manufacturing to the product itself. The highest impact of these directives is the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive, finalized by the European Union in 2003. The RoHS directive restricts imports of new electrical and electronic equipment containing lead and five other hazardous substances. For manufacturers to successfully comply with RoHS and similar legislation, they need the ability to exchange material content information. This information would then propagate through the supply chain from the raw material suppliers all the way to the final producer. While a solution could be generated for any single piece of legislation, the problem is that companies will need to successfully deal with potentially dozens of laws and directives. To deal with this problem, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (a US Government Research Laboratory) developed a data model to address the underlying material declaration problem using a software development methodology. This data model was used in the development of IPC’s 1752 Material Declaration standard. IPC’s 1752 standard helps the electronics industry comply with RoHS by providing a data exchange mechanism by which businesses can declare the presence or absence of the restricted materials. While IPC 1752 was created to deal with EU’s RoHS, the data model was designed with the intent that it would be able to support future RoHS-like legislation (China RoHS, California RoHS, etc). Even if different solutions were developed for each piece of Legislation, they can interoperate provided they are based on the same data model. This paper looks at the data model designed for the IPC1752 standard, the methodology that was used to create it, and how it can be adapted to similar RoHS-like laws and directives.