Leon Urbas

Individual differences in navigation between sharable content objects—an evaluation study of a learning module prototype

In this article, we report the design and evaluation of a prototype for learning modules compliant to the SCORM standard. This prototype is especially developed for the subject matter of process systems engineering and features a novel process control display for the navigation between Sharable Content Objects. In a controlled field study, N = 18 undergraduate students interacted with the module for a period of 40 minutes. The relations between individual differences in learner characteristics, navigation, and learning outcome were considered. Interaction with the module had a strong positive effect on learning outcome. Individual differences in learning outcome were significantly affected by individual differences in intrinsic motivation, computer experience and navigation behaviour.

Linked Data as Integrating Technology for Industrial Data

In a globalised world the process industry faces great challenges regarding data management. Rising demands for agility and rapid shortening of innovation cycles have lead to project-based collaborations. Highly specialised small and medium enterprises are forming so-called virtual companies to profit from each other. Today, however, industrial data structures are characterised by high heterogeneity. This complicates collaborative work and hinders the flow of data between different stakeholders from various domains. Existing solutions are much too rigid and potentially cumbersome. There still is a broad gap between the need of virtual companies to share data from mixed sources in a controlled way and the available technologies to accomplish this. Our approach to close this gap is the usage of semantic web technologies for representing industrial data in a generic way. Major advantages in comparison to traditional approaches arise from the inherent merging abilities and from the extensibility of Linked Data. Distributed information spaces from different domains can be condensed into an interlinked cloud. Existing data can be integrated either on-the-fly using appropriate adapters or by complete migration. Furthermore, operations from graph theory can be performed on the Linked Data networks to generate aggregated views. This paper discusses a set of proven web technologies for cloud-driven industrial data sharing in virtual companies and presents preliminary results.

Beyond app-chaining: Mobile app orchestration for efficient model driven software generation

Mobile apps are a success story for mobile devices, particularly in the consumer sector. Tailored to a specific task, they offer optimal usability for a defined class of devices. However, todays apps are neither designed to collaborate with complex workflows nor to support these. To overcome this limitation, we developed the concept of Mobile App Orchestration. This pragmatic model driven software generation approach makes it possible to use mobile apps even in complex industrial workflows. We demonstrate the entire development process in a use case and explain solutions and challenges of our approach. An experimental evaluation of a manually conducted orchestration with 11 participants supports our design hypothesis that the proposed approach can deliver usable mobile support systems for Virtual Factories.

Towards context adaptive HMIs in process industries

This paper presents the combination of two distinct model driven HMI engineering approaches. Together they setup a complete toolchain that lays the basis for the model driven (semi)automatic generation of flexible, multi-platform HMIs for process industries. The two approaches are autoHMI which derives a concrete UI design from Computer Aided Engineering Data, and XVCML which allows to generate final UIs for different web implementation paradigms like XHTML or Java on top of OPC UA. This tool integration provides a complete model driven software engineering architecture that cuts down the manual efforts in HMI engineering close to zero. This is a prerequisite to handle the complexity of context adaptive interfaces.

Integrated virtual commissioning an essential activity in the automation engineering process: From virtual commissioning to simulation supported engineering

Production plants within manufacturing and process industries are becoming more and more complex systems. For a safe and demand sufficient production the automation system of a production plant is mission critical. Therefore the correct functioning and engineering of the automation system is essential. Nowadays the use of a virtual commissioning step before deploying the automation software on the real production plant is used more often. Within the virtual commissioning the automation software is tested against a virtual plant model, sufficient to check out the correct functioning of the automation system. Usually virtual commissioning is used as a step at the end of the automation engineering, as proposed by VDI 4499. Within this paper an integrated virtual commissioning is proposed, where the automation software is continuously tested against a virtual plant model during the overall engineering phase. The virtual plant is growing together with the automation software and thus enables simulation supported automation engineering. Benefits of the proposed workflow are that errors can be detected immediately after the implementation and the use of the virtual plant model could be extended to various stages of the engineering workflow.

Open source as enabler for OPC UA in industrial automation

As a standardized communication protocol, OPC UA is the main focal point with regard to information exchange in the ongoing initiative Industrie 4.0. But there are also considerations to use it within the Internet of Things. The fact that currently no open reference implementation can be used in research for free represents a major problem in this context. The authors have the opinion that open source software can stabilize the ongoing theoretical work. Recent efforts to develop an open implementation for OPC UA were not able to meet the requirements of practical and industrial automation technology. This issue is addressed by the open62541 project which is presented in this article including an overview of its application fields and main research issues.

An Innovative Virtual Enterprise Approach to Agile Micro and SME-Based Collaboration Networks

This paper demonstrates a lightweight and highly decentralized collaboration infrastructure approach for virtual enterprises and describes its added-value in the customer-oriented production domain. First, we will describe challenges and key requirements of an exemplary application scenario. Second, we are going to present the reference architecture and will explain the designs of enabling key concepts. Finally we highlight major improvements to the selected domain and the impact in economic, competition and social terms.

autoHMI: a model driven software engineering approach for HMIs in process industries

In process industries the Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) for the Supervisory Control Systems are built at the very end of the planning phase because of the many interdependencies of engineering data. These HMIs consist of a hierarchy of graphical displays that illustrate the chemical process and its automation system. Today, these displays are derived manually from the plants piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&ID) and other sources. We present a model driven software engineering solution to automatically generate the HMI directly from engineering data. At the core of the algorithm there are two models - a concept and task model describing the process and its structure, and an abstract HMI-model describing the interaction space. This article describes the design and structure of these models as well as the chain of transformations that are necessary to generate supervisory control HMIs for the process industries. A case study shows the scope and limitations of this approach.

Triangular fuzzy number representation of relations in Fuzzy Cognitive Maps

In this paper, the conventional Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs), which has already achieved success in many fields, are extended by using triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs). The advantage of FCMs is that they are relatively easy to construct and parameterize and are capable of handling the full range of system feedback structure, including density-dependent effects. However, it is a well-known fact that there are some limitations inherent in FCM, such as lack of adequate capability to handle uncertain information and lack of enough ability to aggregate the information from different sources. Triangular fuzzy numbers which are represented by a triplet has the capacity to represent the uncertain relations between the concepts. In this context, the weight matrix representing the causal relations are enhanced to a fuzzy weight matrix that has TFNs as element. As a result of this improvement, the dynamic reasoning algorithm of the conventional FCM is improved for the use of the proposed novel FCM. The proposed FCM is presented via four simulations and the results are discussed. The results of the simulation study shows how easily the uncertain information can be represented and interpreted by the proposed FCM design methodology.

Integration requirements of package units — A description approach with FDI

Package units are used to supply production plants with components and auxiliary materials or to assemble final products. They usually come with an automation system that has predefined functions and behavior. The integration of package units in a SCADA or DCS involves considerable manual effort. Various aspects of automation - such as faceplates, states of sequencers, or interlocks - are reproduced manually in the control system for the visualization and management of the package unit. We present potentials and limitations of current and prospective technologies (for example, FDI technology [4]) for the simplified integration of package units in a process control system. This paper also proposes and discusses a concept for simplified integration of package units in control systems.