Hamada H. Ghenniwa

A review of internet-based product information sharing and visualization

Internet-based product information sharing and visualization is the foundation for collaborative product design and manufacturing. This paper reviews the state of the art in this area with a case study to illustrate the emerging technologies for visualizing and sharing product information among designers, production engineers and managers, purchasing and marketing staff, suppliers, and customers. It then discusses the current research challenges and opportunities.

WebBlow: a Web/agent-based multidisciplinary design optimization environment

This paper presents some results of our recent work on the development of a distributed multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) environment (called WebBlow) using a number of enabling technologies including software agents, Internet/Web, and XML. The objective is to provide a powerful solution for project managers and designers working on multiple design projects to share product information and knowledge, and to ensure the system security and mitigate the difficulties with firewalls. Software agents encapsulate the functionalities of the system, such as process simulation, performance simulation, and design optimization. XML is used for data management at the server side as well as for message exchanges among software agents. A prototype environment is presented for blow molded automotive parts design.

Localization in cooperative Wireless Sensor Networks: A review

Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks has become a significant research challenge, attracting many researchers in the past decade. This paper provides a review of basic techniques and the state-of-the-art approaches for wireless sensors localization. The challenges and future research opportunities are discussed in relation to the design of the collaborative workspaces based on cooperative wireless sensor networks.

Agent‐Based Web Services Framework and Development Environment

The current Web services technologies have not exploited sufficient semantics and approaches to dynamic service‐oriented operations in open environments. This paper argues that such operations can be realized through agent‐oriented interaction approaches. The key challenge is to develop an integration framework for the two paradigms, agent‐ and service‐oriented, in a way that capitalizes on their individual strengths. This paper proposes the notion of agent‐based Web services (AWS). We address several critical issues, including the appropriate architectural framework and the structure of its main elements (agent‐based Web services), their meta‐model, supporting technologies, integration method, and implementation approach. An integrated development environment for this framework called SOAStudio has been developed and tested by implementing a case study of a reverse auction e‐marketplace.

Performance Evaluation of NS-2 Simulator for Wireless Sensor Networks

Simulation for wireless sensor networks has become a challenging exercise due to the hardware design, energy constraints, and deployment of large number of nodes. NS-2 has been widely used in network simulations but does not perform well for wireless sensor networks. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the NS-2 simulator based on performance evaluation of simulation results, and proposes some improvements needed in NS-2 to cope up with wireless sensor network simulations.

Real time distributed shop floor scheduling using an agent-based service-oriented architecture

This paper proposes a distributed manufacturing scheduling framework at the shop floor level. The shop floor is modeled as a collection of multiple workcells. Each of which is modeled as a flexible manufacturing system. The framework consists of a distributed shop floor control structure, dynamic distributed scheduling algorithms, multi-agent system modeling of workcells, and service oriented integration of the shop floor. At the workcell level, a designated scheduler allocates jobs to resources and deals with any dynamic events locally, if possible. Otherwise, it collaborates with the other peer schedulers of workcells. Workcells are modeled as multi-agent systems. Local dynamic scheduling is achieved by the cooperation of the scheduler agent, the real time control agent and resource agents. Distributed scheduling is conducted through Web services facilitated by the service oriented shop floor integration. The proposed distributed control structure, dynamic distributed scheduling mechanisms and the system integration have been implemented using an agent-based service-oriented approach and validated through a case study.

Interaction Devices For Coordinating Cooperative Distributed Systems

Interaction Devices For Coordinating Cooperative Distributed Systems Hamada Ghenniwa a & Mohamed Kamel b a Cooperative Distributed Systems Engineering Group Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering , The University of Western Ontario , London , ON N6G 1H1 , Canada b Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Lab. Department of Systems Design Engineering , University of Waterloo , Waterloo , Ontario N2L 3G1 , Canada Published online: 01 Mar 2013.

Personal assistant agents for collaborative design environments

Intelligent software agents have been recognized as a promising approach for the development of collaborative engineering environments. This paper presents our recent work on developing personal assistant agents to support users working within collaborative design environments (CDE). It describes a cognitive user model as a composition of the users interest and behavior models. An intelligent assistance architecture is proposed to integrate these models with other environment models as well as inference, knowledge update and collaboration components. All these models and components collectively enable personal assistant agents to effectively work with the corresponding users to achieve their goals in a collaborative environment. The proposed user model is implemented in a coordinated, intelligent, rational agent (CIR-Agent) model on a FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents)-compliant platform. Two case studies have been carried out to demonstrate the proposed agent-based intelligent assistance approach.

An architecture for cooperative information systems

With the fast growth of the information space in the Internet and large-scale Intranet computing environments, a new design paradigm is required for information systems. In such environments, the amount, the dynamic, the heterogeneity and the distributed nature of the information make it difficult for a user to locate and retrieve the desired information. Moreover, these computing environments are open environments, where the information resources may join or disjoin at anytime. To this end, this paper proposes a multi-agent multi-tier architecture. These agents are autonomous and goal driven agents that cooperatively assist different users to locate and retrieve information from distributed resources. The system architecture comprises of three tiers. At the front end, User Agents interact with the users to fulfill their interests and preferences. At the back end, Resource Agents access and capture the content and changes of the information resources. At the middle tier, Broker Agents facilitate cooperation among the agents. A prototype of this system is implemented to demonstrate how the agents can transparently cooperate to locate and retrieve information from dynamic and distributed information resources.

Implementing collaborative manufacturing with intelligent Web services

Collaborative manufacturing is a new paradigm for the 21st century manufacturing. This paper proposes a service oriented integration framework based on emerging technologies including software agents and Web services. A software prototype system has been implemented to demonstrate how the proposed service oriented integration framework could be used to establish a dynamic collaborative environment for inter-enterprise collaboration.